Increasing the scale of the timeline

[CaptainCrawdad]

Hi all.

I'm brand new to Avidemux and I'm trying to trim videos. The timeline on the program seems to default to a scale where each "notch" on the timeline is about 10 seconds of the video I'm trying to trim. How do I get a finer-grain navigation on the timeline so that I can trim right down to the frame I want to start and stop on?

Thanks!

[eumagga0x2a]

There is no such thing as a "timeline" and the notches are completely meaningless. If you trim without reencoding, you must set the marker A to a keyframe (navigate using up and down arrow keys) and the marker B either to a keyframe or to a P-frame when saving in copy mode from A to B. The granularity is given by the length of GOPs (group of pictures).

If you reencode, it doesn't matter where you place the markers. You can seek in 2 seconds steps using Ctrl+Left/Right or in 4 seconds steps using Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right. Ctrl+Up/Down seeks in 1 minute steps. All three are computationally expensive and quite slow.

Of course, you can always step from frame to frame using Left/Right arrow keys.

[EEMcGee]

That would be a nice feature.  It would be nice to have it magnify the part of the time line that the mouse is over for fine control while still being able to move the mouse fast to seek through the time line.  I've seen that before but don't know how hard it would be to program or if there are any libraries available that  have that function.

[EEMcGee]

The P-frame cutting on the tail is only usable in some codecs like MPEG-2 that don't have the ability to reference past frames.  With newer codecs like MP4/x.264, That should not be done as there may be a frame trying to reference past frames.

[CaptainCrawdad]

Thanks for the help, eumagga0x2a. I'm using the cursor keys to scroll through the video more finely.

It would be a nice feature to be able to more easily navigate around the video using the mouse. I'm just using the tool to do simple trims and was using Windows Movie Maker, and that program made it easy to just skim through the video and spot the parts you want to trim out.

[Jan Gruuthuse]

- fastest moving (coarse): select slider knob [  ] with left mouse button and hold it down, now you can move forward/backward moving mouse right/left
- fast moving (mouse wheel) or Jog/shuttle
- select editing points in copy mode: keyboard up/down arrow

demo: Avidemux Demo, fast forward in 720p 5 1/2 hour video