Editing .AVI files on a mac?

[shmay]

I just want to piece together a few clips from .avi movies, but of course I cannot do that with iMovie. I wish that I could use Movie Maker. Anyway, is there a way to edit .avi files on mac, without resorting to converting them to .mp4 or mov and quadrupling their size?

Thank you.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Maybe Adobe Premiere can help, but as .avi files normally use highly compressive MPEG-4 codecs like Divx or Xvid, and as MPEG-4 codecs are only meant for delivery and not editing, you might not get around transcoding the .avi files to a proper editing format like QuickTime (.mov container) using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) for video and Uncompressed for audio.
If you want to edit properly, and WMM is not a proper editing tool, there is really no way around transcoding when you want to use iMovie (not a proper editing tool too, but thousand times better than WMM).

 

[shmay]

Maybe Adobe Premiere can help, but as .avi files normally use highly compressive MPEG-4 codecs like Divx or Xvid, and as MPEG-4 codecs are only meant for delivery and not editing, you might not get around transcoding the .avi files to a proper editing format like QuickTime (.mov container) using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) for video and Uncompressed for audio.
If you want to edit properly, and WMM is not a proper editing tool, there is really no way around transcoding when you want to use iMovie (not a proper editing tool too, but thousand times better than WMM).

Thanks. Could you recommend a good converting program? I've googled around, but mainly ran into a bunch of advertising pages.

 

[atticus18244fsa]

I use Adobe Premiere for putting clips together and MPEG Streamclip to split clips up and convert.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Thanks. Could you recommend a good converting program? I've googled around, but mainly ran into a bunch of advertising pages.

MPEG Streamclip, it even has a Batch List (CMD+B), thus you can add several video files to a list and let MSC transcode them all to the same format and only have to set the settings one.

 

[shmay]

Thanks a bunch. I'll try trimming and converting with MPEG Streamclip, then do whatever with iMovie.