>>10870In the top left select "Open Source", then find and select a clip.
Several tabs will open, the important ones are Summary, Dimensions, Filters, and Video. The rest you can basically ignore.
In Summary, it will tell you the output format, video codec, and resolution of the video you are about to create. Ideally, you'd want them to be identical to the original video, but I don't think Handbrake supports everything, like WMV for instance.
In the Dimensions tab, untick any boxes that aren't greyed-out, especially "Auto Crop", which was enabled by default for me for some reason. In this tab you need to make sure there is no scaling or cropping being done, so set those settings appropriately. (i.e. for a 1280x720 video you need to set all crop settings to 0, the width to 1280, and the height to 720.)
In the filters tab just make sure all the selections are set to off, you won't need any of them.
In the Video tab you can select what video codec to use. Generally you will want to set this to H.264 (x264), but you can give H.265 (x265) a try to get better compression at the cost of longer encode times. Also set the Framerate to the original video and select Constant Framerate. The default selection for quality/bitrate is constant quality with a RF set to 22, which is probably good enough for most HD/Full HD clips. Tune can be set to None, you can select Fast Decode, it can (probably?) make encoding faster. Profile and Level set to their default values of "main" and 4.0.
Finally, you can go through the rest of the tabs if you want, but typically there isn't very much info on these. The tags tab may have something if the author of the clip put something there, but more than likely there will just be the title.
The last thing to do is write a name for the new clip and click start at the top. Re-encoding a long HD clip may take a while, so be prepared to wait a few minutes for it to process.
After the first clip is done, repeat this process for any subsequent clips, but make sure to test playback on the new clip to make sure it looks just like the original. File size will more than likely change in some way, it could be smaller or even bigger than the original. File size will change depending on the inputs on the Video tab. There are guides elsewhere explaining what all the options do better than I can convey in a post here, so if you're interested I recommend doing your own research.
Also keep in mind, most video codecs are lossy, so every time a clip is re-encoded, information will be lost and video quality will go down. It is your job to make sure the final video quality stays as similar to the original as possible.
This is probably a lot to take in all at once, but I promise it's a pretty simple process, and it will both ensure you stay out of trouble and make everyone here very happy.
