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I am looking for suggestions regarding editing a video. I have a video that's about an hour long and the scenes are out of sequence. I know what the timeline is for the sequences and how they should be properly arranged but I don't have any experience with video editors. I have downloaded flowblade but am totally lost. What might be a simpler tool, if any, to use for re-sequencing the video?

MY BAD: I probably should have stated that the file I want to edit is mp4 format.

i've had good experiences with ffmpeg.
this might help:
http://dt.iki.fi/screencast-ffmpeg
starting at "trimmed and concatenated"

I have downloaded flowblade but am totally lost

Have you seen this? https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/webhelp/help.html

arochester wrote:

I have downloaded flowblade but am totally lost

Have you seen this? https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/webhelp/help.html

Thanks for that link. However, I fiddled around with flowblade for a couple hours (before I saw this link) and I think I figured it out. In process of rendering the mp4 output as I type this. Hoping i got it right. I will post back on the completion of the render. About 10 minutes to go.

Thanks to all that responded to help me. I finally figured out how to use flowblade for what I wanted to do. Wasn't really that hard once I got my brain working in a "video edit" mode. Powerful but not real intuitive. Guess that stands to reason. More power generally implies a steeper learning curve. Again, thanks for the assistance provided.

arochester wrote:

I have downloaded flowblade but am totally lost

Have you seen this? https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/webhelp/help.html

Yes, I did look at those docs and found them to not be as clear as I had hoped. But I fiddled around and finally got it to do what I wanted. Thanks.

ticojohn wrote:I will post back on the completion of the render. About 10 minutes to go.

see, there's your problem using a gui behemoth like that: it apparently defaults to re-encoding the whole shebang, although the bits are all taken from the same video file and hence the same codec.
with ffmpeg, you can just stitch the bits together without re-encoding.
orders of magnitude quicker, and the quality is alsio better (100% that of the source).

debiman wrote:

ticojohn wrote:I will post back on the completion of the render. About 10 minutes to go.

see, there's your problem using a gui behemoth like that: it apparently defaults to re-encoding the whole shebang, although the bits are all taken from the same video file and hence the same codec.
with ffmpeg, you can just stitch the bits together without re-encoding.
orders of magnitude quicker, and the quality is alsio better (100% that of the source).

Ok. I looked at your link, before going ahead with flowblade, and saw that it was using mkv not mp4. As I don't know squat about ffmpeg I had know idea if it could also do mp4. I will take a look a ffmpeg and see if it might be easier the next time around. Thanks for the tip.

ticojohn wrote:I looked at your link, before going ahead with flowblade, and saw that it was using mkv not mp4. As I don't know squat about ffmpeg I had know idea if it could also do mp4.

it doesn't matter.
the magic is '-acodec copy -vcodec copy'.

debiman wrote:

ticojohn wrote:I looked at your link, before going ahead with flowblade, and saw that it was using mkv not mp4. As I don't know squat about ffmpeg I had know idea if it could also do mp4.

it doesn't matter.
the magic is '-acodec copy -vcodec copy'.

I read several articles about ffmpeg and I am not sure that it would be easier to use in my particular case. I wanted to take an mp4 file, about an hour long, and split into 4 parts. Then put those 4 parts back together in a different order. Yes, ffmpeg could split out the 4 parts into separate files, but what I read is that ffmpeg can not directly concatenate mp4 files. They would have to first be transcoded to mp2, then concatenated, then converted back to mp4. Perhaps I misread the articles, but I saw several that said ffmpeg can not concatenate mp4 files. Besides, once I learned Flowblade, the process was really straight forward and I doubt any more time consuming than going through all the steps required to do the same thing with ffmpeg. Plus, flowblade gave me excellent control (down to 1/100 of a second) as to where I wanted the splits, and it showed me the scene at which the split was occurring. Maybe bloated but really powerfull.

I may be all wrong. I am certainly not the expert here. But it looks to me that Flowblade, once learned, is easy to use and more powerful than ffmpeg. But I do appreciate your response to my question.

Mp4 files have an index, and a new concatenated mp4 file indeed needs to be reindexed. I remember doing that pretty quickly on the command line some years ago, probably with ffmpeg, with mp4 files that were exactly the same resolution, codec, and bitrate, but you say you also want to cut out your own clips first...have you tried Avidemux? I think you'll find it can do that, then make a new file from the clips without the lengthy transcoding, and it's easier to use than Flowblade, IMO.

It's not in Debian because of a current patent issue on some mp4 codec that it uses, but you should be able to use its AppImage for 64-bit on Stretch. Other platforms can get it from deb-multimedia without borking their systems the last time I checked it. It's also in my OBS multimedia repo if someone already has that.

stevepusser wrote:Mp4 files have an index, and a new concatenated mp4 file indeed needs to be reindexed. I remember doing that pretty quickly on the command line some years ago, probably with ffmpeg, with mp4 files that were exactly the same resolution, codec, and bitrate, but you say you also want to cut out your own clips first...have you tried Avidemux? I think you'll find it can do that, then make a new file from the clips without the lengthy transcoding, and it's easier to use than Flowblade, IMO.

It's not in Debian because of a current patent issue on some mp4 codec that it uses, but you should be able to use its AppImage for 64-bit on Stretch. Other platforms can get it from deb-multimedia without borking their systems the last time I checked it. It's also in my OBS multimedia repo if someone already has that.

Thanks for the feedback Steve. No, I haven't tried Avidemux as it isn't in official Debian repos but I may give it a try. This was really, I hope, a one time need. I had downloaded (gasp) a video that was kind of borked in that some scenes were out of order. One thin I noticed was that when I rendered the corrected video it ended up being 3 times as big as the original. Possibly due to sampling rates? Anyway,I have Stretch installed on one partition of my desktop machine (not the HTPC installation) and I might try to install Avidemux there and see how it goes. Again, thanks for the feedback.