plip

plip is a batch and linear video editor. Yes, you read that right: It's a linear editor, not a nonlinear video editor, and proud of it!

The basic idea of plip is to simplify or automate the more tedious tasks of video editing, while leaving the more sophisticated tasks to standard nonlinear video editors. A linear video editor is capable of including or excluding segments, but not reordering them or repeating them. For many video editing tasks, this is a large part or even all editing required, and the video editing process can be sped up by having a simple tool perform these tasks rather than relying on a nonlinear video editor for everything.

The workflow for plip is as follows:

1. Optionally, during recording, using a monitor such as the included monitor for OBS, you create a marks file which records what sections of the recorded video you want to keep, and what sections you want to discard.

2. plip demuxes and performs automated audio processing, such as dynamic range compression, on the audio.

3. Optionally, you use plip's integrated marks editor to select sections of the video you want to include or exclude. This is a simple editor meant for fast and easy editing, but intentionally is not capable of the power of a nonlinear video editor.

4. plip clips your video and audio based on the marks created by the monitor and/or integrated editor.

5. You use either a nonlinear video editor for final edits, or plip's integrated mixer to finalize your video.

plip is based heavily (in essence, entirely) on ffmpeg ( https://ffmpeg.org ), which does all the heavy lifting. plip itself just organizes the tasks.

Dependencies

All dependencies are included in the Windows ZIP file.

plip depends on ffmpeg, ffprobe, and audiowaveform being available in $PATH.

GUI

plip's GUI is optional, but of course, for users accustomed to a graphical user interface, it is a good option. Run plip's GUI with the plip-gui (or plip-gui.exe) command. Simply select a file, select an output directory if you'd like (defaults to the same directory as the file), and click "process" to perform plip's usual processing steps. You can enable or disable steps, as well as include or exclude files, from the GUI.

Most of plip's behavior, however, is controlled by its configuration files. If you want to customize its behavior, you will need to learn to edit them.

Monitor

To generate marks for inclusion/exclusion of video segments while recording, install plip's OBS monitor to OBS's plugins directory, and include plip-util in every scene you intend to use. It may be hidden, but it must be included to work.

Configure buttons to start, stop, and fast-forward marks in OBS's hotkey configuration. While recording, the monitor will show which mode you're in through its color, and how much included time has elapsed. It starts in excluded (stopped) mode, so make sure you start it after starting recording!

Configuration

plip's configuration file is named plip.ini, and largely follows the venerable INI file standard. If you are familiar with INI files, you should understand the basics immediately. If not, INI files look like this:

[group]
setting=value

The particular groups and settings available are described in docs/ini.md .

When you use the standard plip.ini and not a custom configuration file, plip is designed to refine configuration based on the directory. For instance, if you are processing a project in /home/plip/video/135, plip will load any plip.ini files found in /, /home, /home/plip, and /home/plip/video before /home/plip/video/135/plip.ini itself. In this way, you can set a default configuration for all of your video projects, and refine it for specific projects or subprojects.

In addition to standard settings, plip has a couple tricks up its sleeves. Many settings can be refined for specific tracks. To do so, specify a regular expression of the track name before the setting. For instance, to exclude a track named voice2:

[tracks]
/^voice2$/include=n

If you're not familiar with regular expressions, just follow the pattern above. If you are, you can hopefully see how powerful this refinement can be.

Finally, since plip expects nested INI files which refine each other, you can append to an existing configuration using +=:

[filters]
video+=,crop=1280:720:0:0

Or, prepend to one using <+=:

[filters]
video<+=fps=30,

Command-line usage

plip is intended to be fully usable from the command line (and indeed, the author exclusively uses it in this way). plip's steps are demuxing, audio processing, editing, clipping, and mixing. Demuxing is performed by plip-demux, audio processing by plip-aproc, clipping by plip-clip, and mixing by plip-mix. See the --help output from any of these tools for usage. As mark editing is a fundamentally visual task, it is only supported through the GUI.

To launch the editor directly, use plip-gui -e <media file> <waveform file> <input marks> [output marks]. The media file must be in MP4. For instance, to make a tmp.mp4 from out.mkv and audio1-proc.flac: plip-mix -V scale=-1:720 -o -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -crf 23 -threads 0 -preset ultrafast -b:a 128k ';' tmp.mp4 out.mkv audio1-proc.flac. The waveform file must be made by audiowaveform. For instance, to make a tmp.json waveform file from a tmp.flac audio file: audiowaveform -i tmp.flac --pixels-per-second 64 -b 8 -o tmp.json. To make tmp.flac from tmp.mp4: ffmpeg -i tmp.mp4 -map 0:a tmp.flac.