Home > Cut commercials
Video tutorials: "How to remove commercials"
You'll learn...
In addition, you'll also learn how to use chapters to remove all commercials in one shot.
What can I expect ?
The whole process will take a few minutes, definitively not hours. As a rule of the thumb, ten minutes per hour of movie.
The movie quality will not be altered, and the edited movie will be in the same format as the original or in QuickTime format if native editing conditions are not met.
Find the beginning and the end of the movie
I hope that you have captured the full movie or TV program, or at least I'll assume so.
The first thing to do is to find the beginning and the end, and eliminate all the sequences before and after them.
So let's start...
Open the file, do Edit>Select All and then Navigation>Scan selection
The drawer will open and show you regularly spaced frames inside the selection (which extends to the full file in this case as we have " selected all").
This reads from left to right, top to bottom like a comic strip.
This will help you to find where the movie starts and where it ends. By clicking on pictures and dragging back and forth, you will scan the movie.
Maybe 16 pictures are not enough, and you want to see more detail. Just do Scan 64 frames on bottom right corner of the drawer.
Keep in mind that every time you refresh the tile, it will show regularly spaced frames from the selection. Not always the full movie.
If you're not familiar with the timeline, it's probably a good time to learn: Master the time
In summary, you select the current time by dragging the blue knob, or with arrow keys. You switch with the tab key to the other end of the selection, make it active and adjust it. What matters is to adjust the rose strip - the selection - to the beginning and the end of the sequence you want to keep.
Once the selection is ready, you will do Edit>Trim
In this example we have selected a 23 minutes 30 seconds sequence out of a 2 and 1/2 hours movie, we trim and finally keep only the sequence (Note how in the bottom picture the selection occupies all the movie, now reduced to 23 minutes)
At any time you can undo or redo your last actions.
Find the commercials inside the movie
If your movie is long enough, there a good chance it contains some commercial.
Now we will find them, then remove them.
To carry out this task, you can use the Scan selection command, play with the timeline, and finally adjust the selection so that it matches the chunk to remove.
Once the selection is ready, you will do Edit>Cut or just press the Scissors button.
In this example we have selected a 2 minutes 10 seconds sequence, we cut it (Note how in the bottom picture the selection has collapsed and the timeline has shortened)
We'll repeat the same process for every commercial in the movie.
After every cut, don't forget to select all the movie and refresh the tile with Scan selection to help find the next commercial.
Saving
Once done, do File>Save or File>Save As...
The Save As... dialog gives you the choice of several formats, and indicates the disk space required versus disk space available to avoid bad surprises.
Bonus: The One Shot method
There's a faster way to do this, based on Chapters.
Let's restart from the beginning with the original file.
You scan the movie from beginning to end with Scan selection, and each time you find an "interesting time", either a beginning or an end of the movie or of a commercial, you mark it.
Marking is easy as Navigation>Add Chapter. A new chapter is created at the blue knob location.
Don't forget to validate the name of the chapter with Enter. Here the names don't matter, so just accept the proposed name.
When you've repeated those steps for every "interesting time", you're ready for the trick.
At the bottom right corner of Chapters pane, there's an "Action menu".
Open it, notice how the timeline aspect changes into a pattern of white and blue chunks.
Select Cut white chapters or Cut blue chapters.
All the chunks of the selected color will be cut in one shot.
If you have correctly selected the "interesting times", you should now have get rid of all the commercials.
Saving is the last step. Note that the chapter marks are still here. If you're purpose was just to remove the commercials, you probably want to delete the chapter marks before saving. Remember that, unlike the rest of formats, saving to a QuickTime file keeps the chapter marks.