How to Edit Out Commercials in Videos

One of the most frequent tasks for editing MPEG movies is to weed out commercial segments inserted during a TV show. The following steps show you how to use Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD to do it quickly.

Step 1. Open the MPEG file in the Input monitor.

Step 2. Find the beginning of the TV show by dragging the timeline slider. Use the mouse scroll wheel to step forward or backward to get the exact frame, and press the Mark-In button (or press letter 'I' on the keyboard).

Step 3. Press the Trim Left button (or letter 'N' on the keyboard) to cut out the beginning segment.

Note that the Mark-In frame now becomes the 1st frame, and that the total length of the video has been shortened.

Step 4. Next, we proceed to find and remove the next commercial segment in the middle. We start by repeating Step 2 to find the beginning of the next commercial and set the Mark-In. Then we move forward to find the end of the commercial segment and set the Mark-Out by pressing the Mark-Out button (or pressing the keyboard shortcut letter 'O').

Press the Cut button (or letter 'X') to cut out the marked segment, and note again that the total length of the video has been shortened.

Step 5. Depending on the number of commercial segments presented during one TV show, you may need to repeat Step 4 to remove all commercial segments in the middle.

The last cut is to remove the ending commercial segment.

This is done by repeating Step 2 to find the end of the TV show, and then set the Mark-In, so that the marked segment is the ending segment.

Press the Cut button again to cut out the last segment.

At this point, you may want to check your editing result by opening the Property display window, which is accessed by right mouse clicking in the image window and selecting "Properties...".

In this window, you can see a small map of segments for the current playback list. The solid blue colored ones are the segments remained; while the other ones are the segments being cut.

Step 6. Now, the video in the Input monitor are only the segments of the show, and we are ready to save it into a new MPEG file.

There are two ways to build the edited segments into a new MPEG file. One is via the "Trim" function of the Input monitor, and the other is via the Timeline editor and the Export window.

The Trim is most useful when you just want to join all the remaining segments into one MPEG file; and the steps are: (1) right mouse click in the monitor window; (2) select "Trim...; and (3) select a file name if needed and press the Save button.

Note: use the Trim Batch when you have two or more trim jobs to do.

Step 7. If you need to add a text title at the beginning of the show, or add blank fades at the ends of any segment, or add video transitions between consecutive segments, you should use the Timeline editor to build your final MPEG file.

First, while in the Input monitor, press letter 'G' to add the list of the segments into the timeline; add your text title in the 2nd track of the timeline underneath the video track; and then add your video transition to join the 2 video segments.

Step 8. Press the Export button, select "Automatic" for the "Save as type", enter a file name, and press the Save button to build your new MPEG file. With the smart rendering of Womble technology to ensure minimum video re-encoding, the export of one hour TV show will take only a few minutes, since most of the video content will be copied from the original recording into the new file without modification.

You can check this by viewing the encode map display from the Detail button on the Export window. The Encode Map display draws two colored strips for the export encoding selection, with RED color indicating re-encoding and BLUE color indicating stream-copy.