clacke@gemlog ffmpeg is great and I've used it and/or mencoder a lot for straight up conversion, scaling, cropping, trimming start and end, things like that.
We have ffmpeg installable as well, but in yesterday's situation it was about viewing and listening to the video and making decisions about what to cut, and that calls for an interactive visual program.
What I could have done with ffmpeg would have been to use the silence detection filter to produce a script for non-interactively cutting up the file, but for this time around I felt more comfortable making the edits myself rather than doing the batch job and reviewing the result.
I put in maybe an hour's work and reduced 37 min to 27 min. I think that was faster than automating it. If I do this more, it might be worth it to have a more automated pipeline and spending some effort to make sure I trust it.
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