[FFmpeg-user] Splicing together videos with different characteristics

[Paul B Mahol]

On 11/26/17, Full Name <nuncestbibendum at excite.com> wrote:
> I have a series of videos of my daughter giving piano recitals over the
> years. The videos start when she was very little, playing with a single
> finger, till now, that she can play the piano with high proficiency. I would
> like to splice them together into a single video.
>
> The problem is that the first few videos were obtained with an older
> camcorder, that could do 640x480 resolution, whereas the later ones were
> captured with a newer camcorder, able to do 1920x1080 resolution. At some
> point I used a combination of HandBrake and ffmpeg to splice them together,
> but with incomplete success, in that the aspect ratio of the 1920x1080
> videos was modified to match that of the 640x480 ones. The end result was,
> of course, very unsatisfactory.
>
> I was wondering if ffmpeg might allow me to obtain better results. Is at all
> possible, with ffmpeg, to splice such videos together, so that the correct
> aspect ration is maintained for all the portions in the final video? I would
> have thought that the answer is 'no', but my knowledge of these things is
> very shallow.
>
> More in general, what I would like from experts in this forum is advice on
> how to splice together the videos above, in order to get the best results,
> using ffmpeg.

If you have originals of each period, than just resize and if necessary pad
each video to wanted size, than just splice them with concat filter.

For intermediate files use lossless codecs of course.