Okay, complete newbie on this issue -- I've never done, or wanted to do, anything with video editing before, and I've almost never used Quicktime for anything that the system didn't do invisibly/automatically.
Almost all the video I watch on the computer is fanvids produced by Windows users, so of course they're mostly .wmvs, with the occassional .rm or .ram. I hate RealPlayer with a passion, but never had any real problem with Windows Media Player, so I don't really get all the fuss about Flip4Mac -- I tried it out, but for my needs, it seems WMP is probably still better than Quicktime for watching the vids, at least watching them through the QT Player directly.
However, I would dearly dearly love to be able to move these wmvs into iTunes and watch/listen from there, and use all the database and rating functions to help organize them. It would make a huge difference to me to be able to do that. But the Flip4Mac (free version) still doesn't allow me to drag wmvs in to iTunes. Okay. My second choice would be to convert them to an iTunes-readable format, which Flip4Mac is supposed to let you do, and my third choice would be to extract just the soundtracks that I could save to mp3, and I understood from past MR discussions that Quicktime Pro would let you do that.
So, I have OS X 10.4.3, the free Flip4Mac downloaded yesterday (so it should still be in its trial period, when exporting is supposed to be possible), and I just bought Quicktime Pro (7.04). The exporting doesn't work, but I figured that was okay... I read something about problems with the latest codec, and anyway, I should just be able to "Save as..." instead of exporting anyway, right? And, yes, I can "save as" the wmv files to mov instead. BUT... the new mov files are about three times larger than the wmvs! I want to have them in iTunes badly enough to buy QT Pro just for this, but not badly enough to triple the storage space. I'd have to buy a new hard drive just to hold them all! I can't find anything about changing compression settings, and frankly wouldn't know what to change them to if I could.
And I still can't even save the audio tracks. The exporting doesn't work, as I mentioned. I can extract the audio track from the movie properties window, but it won't let me save the extracted audio -- it tries to, but then says it can't be saved.
Can anyone explain how to do either of these things properly to me? In simple terms -- I'm a word geek, not an AV geek, and quite happy with that status.
Almost all the video I watch on the computer is fanvids produced by Windows users, so of course they're mostly .wmvs, with the occassional .rm or .ram. I hate RealPlayer with a passion, but never had any real problem with Windows Media Player, so I don't really get all the fuss about Flip4Mac -- I tried it out, but for my needs, it seems WMP is probably still better than Quicktime for watching the vids, at least watching them through the QT Player directly.
However, I would dearly dearly love to be able to move these wmvs into iTunes and watch/listen from there, and use all the database and rating functions to help organize them. It would make a huge difference to me to be able to do that. But the Flip4Mac (free version) still doesn't allow me to drag wmvs in to iTunes. Okay. My second choice would be to convert them to an iTunes-readable format, which Flip4Mac is supposed to let you do, and my third choice would be to extract just the soundtracks that I could save to mp3, and I understood from past MR discussions that Quicktime Pro would let you do that.
So, I have OS X 10.4.3, the free Flip4Mac downloaded yesterday (so it should still be in its trial period, when exporting is supposed to be possible), and I just bought Quicktime Pro (7.04). The exporting doesn't work, but I figured that was okay... I read something about problems with the latest codec, and anyway, I should just be able to "Save as..." instead of exporting anyway, right? And, yes, I can "save as" the wmv files to mov instead. BUT... the new mov files are about three times larger than the wmvs! I want to have them in iTunes badly enough to buy QT Pro just for this, but not badly enough to triple the storage space. I'd have to buy a new hard drive just to hold them all! I can't find anything about changing compression settings, and frankly wouldn't know what to change them to if I could.
And I still can't even save the audio tracks. The exporting doesn't work, as I mentioned. I can extract the audio track from the movie properties window, but it won't let me save the extracted audio -- it tries to, but then says it can't be saved.
Can anyone explain how to do either of these things properly to me? In simple terms -- I'm a word geek, not an AV geek, and quite happy with that status.