The Glade 4.0

So I have a DVD (of a service where I sang a solo). I need to rip the video from DVD, chop it down to just the solo, and remove a buzzing noise if possible. Any idea what software I should use to do this? I don't suppose there are any free options...

I haven't done this in a while, but last time I did, i think I used Handbrake to rip the video.

Not sure what you would use for audio noise reduction.

I suggest MPEG Streamclip as a ripper. Set it to NTSC DV for best results, and take your quality all the way to 100%. I lubs Handbrake for making digital copies of my movies, but it doesn't rip to a straight 'edit' format (though MPEG Streamclip doesn't thwart copy protection, so there's room for all at this table).

There are several nice pro-level software solutions out there for audio and video editing...but I'm not sure what a non-pro solution would be (I personally would opt for Adobe Soundbooth to clean up the audio, and Final Cut Pro [or Adobe Premiere, for those not fortunate enough to have access to FCP] for editing the video, but all three are pricey, pro-level solutions. iMovie/Windows Movie Maker (or whatever it's called)?

Lightworks is starting to look really promising. It's going to be coming out of beta in just a couple weeks, but it's an open beta so you can go ahead and have a look at it now. The standard version is freeware (and *might* eventually get released open source). The $60 pro version has the same feature set; it just adds license-encumbered codecs needed for certain professional cameras (as I understand it).

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Oh, I almost forgot:

If you want to try Lightworks, you really need to have these two things installed:
Matrox VFW (Video For Windows) codecs
Apple Quicktime / QT Lite (codecs only)

Without these, it won't be able to import anything. Between the two of them, you'll have pretty decent codec coverage. Certainly you can import H.264 MP4s, anyway. If you have something that it can't import, Freemake Video Converter can probably transcode it for you. This is also handy for ripping the audio track to, say, MP3 so you can clean it up with Audacity.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I spent quite a bit of time playing around with Lightworks yesterday and have some more solid impressions.

The core functionality is pretty strong. Lightworks is not a motion graphics program like After Effects, nor is it trying to be. It focuses fairly strictly on being an NLE and nothing else. Nevertheless, it does provide a pretty solid collection of standard editing, transitioning, and compositing effects: various wipes and fades, tone and gamma corrections, chroma and luma keying, image keying, multiple blur effects, etc. If you can figure out how the "video routing" aspect of the effect engine works, you combine them in pretty powerful ways. For instance, you can combine the "basic shape" effect and the mosaic filter using the masked blend effect to create a mosaic'ed region. This particular example is actually bundled together into a preset called "Obscure (mosaic)", but you can plug input and outputs together pretty much any way you see fit to get custom effects. All of the effect parameters support keyframing as well, so you can do things like make the basic shape (ex. an ellipse) move around and change size to keep someone's face obscured as they move around in the video.

Admittedly, certain aspects of the editing interface are little twitchy. So is the keyframing interface. Their terminology and some of the UI conventions are rather unique among NLEs, but that's not necessarily "bad", just "different". It's also slightly unstable at this point. I averaged about one crash an hour. Fortunately its internal journaling seems to be very solid. When it does crash, you never lose anything beyond the few seconds it takes to restart the program and reopen your project. It seems to remember literally everything right down to which dialogues you had open, and where. Mostly crashes seemed to happen when I got a little too trigger-happy with the undo/redo buttons, FWIW.

The other big annoyance is exporting your material. It's in a catch-22 right now. They haven't gone open source yet, so they can't use any of the open source encoding libraries that have "copyleft". At the same time, it hasn't gone commercial, either, so they can't afford to include license-encumbered encoders. At least for now, I've found that your best option with Lightworks is just to export to an AVI container with uncompressed YUV video and raw PCM audio. Bring that in to some other tool for encoding and stick to using Lightworks strictly as an editor. I've also seen framerates bug out if you export with the "straight transfer" option, even though my project was 24fps, all the source clips were 24 fps (well, 23.976 technically) and I was exporting to 24fps. For some reason it kept dumping a screwy 11.989 fps stream. Nothing in this project used interlaced fields, either - it was all 1080p. So I'm not really sure how it arrived at that screwiness. In any case, changing the "speed" option from "Straight Transfer" to "Pulled-down Transfer" straightened it out, but that shouldn't have been necessary. I checked the results, and it was frame-for-frame identical to my edit within Lightwork's player, so it clearly wasn't doing any kind of pull-down. Probably just a bug.

Anyway, I've pieced together a pretty good toolchain for doing free, professional-level editing:

Codecs:
Matrox VFW (Video For Windows) codecs - needed by Lightworks for importing (decoding) and exporting (encoding)
Apple Quicktime / QT Lite (codecs only) - needed by Lightworks for importing (decoding) and exporting (encoding)
x264vfw - An H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoder; you'll need this if you want to encode to H.264 using Virtualdub
LAME MP3 Encoder - Pretty much the best MP3 encoder in existence. Virtualdub can use this for audio.

Editing:
Lightworks

Encoding/Decoding/Transcoding:
Freemake Video Converter - A very user-friendly transcoder/(de)muxer that can be a good alternative to Avidemux if you don't really know what you're doing.
Avidemux - Another good transcoder/(de)muxer. More sophisiticated than Freemake.
VirtualDub - Yet another transcoder/(de)muxer. It really only works with AVI containers, as far as I can tell. But it offers even more gory detail than Avidemux.

Misc:
MediaInfo - An essential tool for gathering precise and accurate information about source clip format (resolution, framerate, encoding method, etc.). Lightworks is picky about matching framerates: importing 23.967 fps clips into a 24fps project is okay, importing 25 fps into 24 fps is not. MediaInfo will give you what you need to pick the right framerate for your project. It's best to avoid using pulldowns (which is why Lightworks just doesn't allow it by default), but if you must, you can use something like Avidemux to transcode your sources to a different framerate before importing.
GIMP - 2.8 was just released. It finally has a single-window mode. It ain't Photoshop, but it'll do. Great for creating title cards, static image overlays for image keying, etc.

Motion Graphics:

I really know nothing about this area, but you might check out Luz or some of the projects listed here.

For full-blown CGI effects there is, of course, Blender. You can combine it with Yafray or similar to produce actual ray-traced renders if you need Hollywood-quality rendering. Its nodes and compositing engine is supposedly useful for doing motion graphics and 3D + live action compositing, but again, I know nothing about it.

Audio:
Audacity - An awesome audio editor. Enough said.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

So I used MPEG Streamclip to rip the DVD into an NTSC DV format. I then went to import it into Lightworks, it analysed it, I then clicked Start to import it, and it came up with a dialog that says "Import Error". That's it. No direction whatsoever, or where to start troubleshooting.

Any ideas?

I'm guessing that when you ripped it with MPEG Streamclip, it used an encoding method that Lightworks doesn't presently support for importing. Honestly, if you aren't a video encoding guru, I would recommend doing this with Freemake Video Converter instead. You don't get as much control over the gory details of encoding, but it does good automagic there anyway.

Basically:

• Click the +DVD button at the top.
• Select your DVD drive/folder where you copied its contents.
• Optionally click on the clip button on the right side of the input file if you want to narrow the rip down to just one section of the DVD.
• Click the "to Apple" button at the bottom.
• Just below the huge preset button at the top of the dialogue, click the blue cog to create a custom preset.
• Set "Frame size" to auto, "video codec" to H.264 (if it's not already), "Frame rate" to Original, "Bitrate type" to auto.
• Set "Audio codec" to AAC, "Channels" to original, "Sample rate" to Original, "Bitrate" to auto.
• Click OK.
• Select the "Save to" destination.
• Optimally, change the one-pass encoding option at the bottom to two-pass. Doing so will take a bit longer, but you'll get less encoding artifacts.

These settings will rip to H.264+AAC, keeping the original video format (resolution and framerate) untouched. While you're still in Freemake, you might also want to rip to MP3. Since DVD audio is either uncompressed or losslessly compressed, you might as well use the maximum 320 Kbps @ 48KHz preset.

Clean up the MP3 in Audacity however you want to go about that.

Then have a look at the MP4 you created in MediaInfo to verify that it really is 4:3 NTSC @ 29.97 fps. If that's the case, start a 30 fps project in Lightworks. On the project title card go to the video tab and set the format to NTSC 4:3. Import "picture" only from the MP4 and the audio from the MP3. If all goes well, you should have two tiles in a temporary "Imports" bin - one for the video clip and one for the audio clip. Create a new edit (3rd button on the Tools palette). Drag the tile for the video clip onto the player or strip window for the edit. This will insert the clip into the V1 track of the edit. The A1 and A2 audio tracks will still be empty.

Rewind the edit to the beginning. That is, the red "read head" will be all the way to the left and the T/C should read 00:00:00+00. Click on the tile for the sound clip in the Imports bin. Click the V1 button in the edit strip to deselect the video track. Click on the "Replace" button in the console at the bottom. This should replace the empty A1 and A2 tracks in the edit with the audio from your cleaned up audio clip. Click on the V1 button again to turn the video track back on.

If you hit the Play button on the console now, you should be getting video and audio, and they should be in sync. If everything looks good, you can export now. Leave the edit open while you do this. Click the export button in the Tools palette (last one before the divider). Change the Content from "Whole project" to "Edit #1" (or whatever it is), which should be listed under Logs if and only if you left it open like I said :p. I would dump to AVI, uncompressed. I've had problems with anything else. You can encode it to whatever you'd like using Freemake, Avidemux, Handbrake, MPEG Streamclip, Virtualdub, or FormatFactory just to name a few options. H.264+AAC in an MP4 container is ideal for Youtube uploads, at least for 16:9 stuff. I'm not really sure about 4:3.

Alternatively to this workflow, you could just import both audio and video from your MP4 rip, and not mess with the MP3. Lightworks has various audio filters available (under EQ) like lowpass, highpass, bandpass, notch, etc. I haven't tried using any of them, but if you know what you're doing, you might be able to clean up the noise directly in Lightworks. I kind of suspect that Audacity is the better part of valor, though, since it has a bunch of filters, including some specifically designed for noise reduction.

Edit:

Actually, I should warn you that uncompressed AVIs are ginormous. For DV NTSC, I'd guess something like 400MB/min. 1080p @ 24 fps is about 2GB/min uncompressed. If you don't have a large disk for scratch space, you can export to DVCPRO 100 or MPEG I-Frame HD instead, but those are both strictly for 16:9 HD resolutions. I'm not sure what to tell you for 4:3.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Thanks for posting all the program and techinfo Stathol, I recently outgrew the software I was using for Video Editing and I have been looking for a replacement, Lightworks looks excellent. Definitely giving it a try.

There's quite a bit of learning curve. If you're going to do very much with it at all, I'd strongly recommend reading the Quickstart Guide and at least selectively reading the full User's Guide. There are a lot of little things there that can make a huge difference in useability. For instance, you can right-drag anywhere on a window to move it around without having to reach for its title bar.

Dvstudioproductions has a bunch of good Lightworks tutorials. He goes a little too fast, but they're still useful for getting oriented.

Shaunslwvids also has good tutorials, but he goes a little too slow.

On average, they have just the right pace!

My latest trick is figuring out how to get Wax and WinMorph working as an effects plugin for Lightworks. There's a tutorial for doing that here. Lightworks still doesn't have a built-in text/titling engine yet (it's on the To-Do), so Wax is handy in the meanwhile. Plus you can use it to create all kinds of crazy effects and motion graphics that Lightworks will probably never support on its own. This tutorial is a good example. There seems to be a bug if your edit references subclips rather than clips, though. When you send it to Wax, the duration is right, but you get nothing but black. Not really big deal if you know about it, but it's kind of odd.

On that note, Lightworks supports Adobe Premiere plugins, which is how it interacts with Wax. There might be some other free plugins for Premiere lurking out there that can be forced to work with Lightworks instead.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I used Freemake Video Converter to. Convert it into an avi, then imported it into Lightworks. I had to leave for work before it was done, but it seemed like it was working.

Well, I guess it didn't work. It imported without errors, but when it imported it, it did so as a green screen with no audio. I checked the ripped AVI and it is fine.

So an update. I was able to take the audio track and edit it with audacity. I was able to eliminate most of the buzzing noise, except in one part where it gets really loud. When I try to remove that part it screws up the entire audio. At the end of the audio the buzzing noise is occurring by itself, so I used that to get the noise profile, then removed that noise from the whole clip. That worked except in this one section where it is apparently different and so it wasn't removed there.

I am still having issues with Lightworks. MPEG and DV format error out, AVI imports without errors, but it is just a green screen. I'm out of ideas at the moment on that.

Freemake has the ability to remove the audio track, and then add another one, but when I add the fixed audio track to the video in Freemake, it doesn't work. It just ends up with a weird clicking noise and no audio.

At this point that is all I have left to do. I have the audio track in MP3 and WAV form, I have the video in MPEG and AVI form, I just need to combine them somehow.