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iamse7en

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 9, 2007
92
11
If anyone could oblige, I need some ideas for video editing software. I do very basic editing for different file types, such as .mp4 and .avi. I don't want to "import" anything, but edit the movie natively. All I need to do is make anywhere between 10-100 small edits, where I delete/cut out a second or two here and there. I've been using SimpleMovieX for years, and it has worked great. No importing, and a very efficient system to quickly find the second or half second I need to cut out, select it, command+x, and it's gone. Very quick. And then it saves it natively in its original format. It can even edit .avi files, though it saves it in a .mov container that will no longer play in QT (even with perian), but will only play in VLC. (e.g. an .avi file plays great in QT via Perian, but after saving the edited video file in SimpleMovieX, the audio no longer works in QT. VLC is the only place where it plays, which is a problem, because it screws up the audio so bad, that it won't even play in StreamToMe, and I can't convert the file either, because the audio is so messed up - BUT it plays great in VLC).

Either way... I was wondering if there was a native video editing software like SimpleMovieX that exists... SimpleMovieX is starting to get a little out-dated, and I don't like how it saves a .avi file that can no longer be played in QT (even with Perian). Any ideas? Thank you. I don't want to have to convert a file before converting it, or wait a long time to import it into something like iMovie or FCP! Thanks.
 
.avi is a container for lots of codecs, Divx and Xvid the most notorious ones.
.mp4 is a container for the H.264 codec.

All these codecs are MPEG-4 variants, and are not editing codecs, as they use the Long GOP method, meaning they don't store every video frame, just keyframes, where the rest is interpolated ("calculated") between those keyframes, thus frame precision editing with these codecs is a pain in the arse.

MPEG Streamclip can edit these videos in its native format, but you can only save as .mov as far as I have tried, though it will use the codec the source came with (I just edited an .avi file using the Xvid codec and saved it as .mov file and the .mov file was using the Xvid codec too).
It also has some export functions.

For proper editing look under the EDIT menu to see, what is possible and what keyboard shortcuts exist.
 
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