How to Split an AVI File Into Smaller Parts
If you have captured raw footage from a camcorder in AVI (audio video interleaved) format, you may want to split a very large AVI file into smaller parts. Microsoft-designed AVI files reach up to 2GB in size and work with DivX, DivX4 and MPEG-1 codecs. You may split AVI files into smaller parts to upload on websites for streaming video or peer-to-peer downloading. AVI files comprised of MPEG-1 video and MP2 audio can also be played in most software video players.
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Instructions
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Download your AVI-splitting software and run the setup program by double-clicking the file in your "Downloads" folder. Follow the onscreen instructions for installing the software. Free versions of AVI-splitting software include AviSplit, Easy Video Splitter and SC Video Cutter Max (see Resources).
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Run the AVI-splitting program from "All Programs" in the Start menu. Click "File" at the top of the screen and drag the mouse down to "Open." Browse for your AVI file in the folder and click "Open."
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Click "Video" at the top of the screen and drag the mouse down to "Direct Stream Copy." If your splitting software doesn't offer this option, continue directly to splitting the files. Choosing "Direct Stream Copy" ensures that your software doesn't re-encode your AVI files after splitting them, which would take a long time and yield poor results.
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Click "Audio" at the top of the screen and drag the mouse down to "Direct Stream Copy." Skip ahead to splitting the files if your software doesn't give you this option.
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Drag the slider under your video all the way to the right to find out how many frames your video contains. Use a calculator to divide this number by the number of clips you want to create. Ignore the time counter for this step and instead divide only the number of frames.
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Drag the slider to the beginning of the video and click "Set New Marker" from the "Edit" menu. Drag the second slider to the end point of your first clip to select the first split file. Right-click the selected portion of the slider bar and drag the mouse down to "Save Selected Fragment As" and choose a new name for your fragment. Click "Save" to create a version of the smaller file on your hard drive.
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Drag the slider on the right to the end point for your second AVI clip, and drag the slider on the left to the start point, which should be the end point for your last clip. Right-click the selected area in the slider bar and click "Save Selected Fragment As" to create the next AVI clip.
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Delete your original file after splitting it into smaller parts if you want to free up space on your hard drive. Your AVI splitter will not automatically delete the original file.
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Tips & Warnings
Use the time counter under the frame slider to split files into individual scenes. Just line up the start and end points with the first and last frames of your clip and right-click the selection to save the fragment as a file.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit A silver digital video camera - close up image by Werg from Fotolia.com
