Video editing woes

When it comes to editing videos on a computer I always wonder why oh why things are so incredibly complicated! There is not one program that "does it all"; you always have to keep a zoo of tools around and learn more about their intricacies, shortcomings, and codec voodoo than you ever wanted.

I'm now using Avidemux and VirtualDub for editing and VLC for playing videos.

What Avidemux can do that VirtualDub can't:

• GUI more userfriendly (obvious and quick selection of video and audio encoding options)
  

What VirtualDub can do that Avidemux can't:

• Use the Deshaker plugin for stabilizing videos
• Write uncompressed AVI (which produced huge files, but avoids quality loss when a coupling of editing steps are involved; some other programs want uncompressed AVIs)
  

Bugs/ problems I noticed:

• When I use VirtualDub and Deshaker for stabilizing a video, audio and video are out of sync by the one second (30 frames) that Deshaker introduces in certain modes ("use previous and future frames to fill in borders"). The saved video plays in sync in AVIDemux (!) only, but not in VirtualDub, VLC, and Windows Media Player.
• Uncompressed videos often don't play in VLC when your hard disc is "slow" (like, on a laptop). It seems that VLC does not play anything when loading the video is slower than needed for playing in (I would be happy with some stuttering).
• VirtualDub tends to write AVIs (especially xvid-compressed) that can't be read by others like Avidemux (in example, all frames are just plain green) or even VLC.
• Vista kept bombing when trying to render previews of MPEG4-encoded AVIs until I uninstalled the Xvid codec and removed any xvid remains in windows/system32. Then I reinstalled Xvid, and everything was fine.
• Compressing an uncompressed AVI with audio time shift (introduces interleaved audio!) produced by VirtualDub into XVID AVI with Avidemux produced stuttering sound.
• Stuttering sound? Probably VirtualDub is writing interleaved audio.
  

How to Deshake

• Load video into VirtualDub
• Copy any 30 frames("video", "select", "length" 30), append on the end (move cursor to the end, paste)
  
• Add Deshake filter, pass one ("scale" "full", "use pixels" "all")
  
• Play output video (or save to dummy file). This makes Deshake write a log that is used by the second pass.
  
• Edit Deshake filter, pass two ("use previous and future frames to fill in borders")
• Save output video
• Load output video into Avidemux (since shifting time with VirtualDub introduces interleaved audio which creates stuttering sound), set audio "Shift" to "1000" (ms), cut off first 30 frames, save