How Can I Edit an mp4 movie?

[mileslong]

I have several mp4 movies that i would like to edit (take off the beginning scenes of each movie) and then tie them together and burn them to play on a DVD player.

I have the following applications:

VisualHub
DVD Studio Pro
IDVD
I Movie HD
I Squint
Mpeg Streamclips
Mpeg 2 Works 4

I played around with it and I had to use VisualHub to convert these files to AVI's in order to tie them together. Then I used Visualhub to convert them to burn to DVD. thats the only way I could get them to play on my DVD player. The quality suffered and it caused the audio to be out of sync with the video.

I would like to edit out the beginning of each video, then tie them together and then burn them to DVD without two full conversions. can any of the applications I own do this?

Thanks!!!

 

[sndcj1]

Well, someone with more knowledge can probably fill this in, but you will be forced into at least 1 conversion when you burn it from any application. I think iMovie can do the edit, but you go from an mp4 to dv file. I also believe that IDVD will import an mp4 file, but not multiple clips as a single track. I know you can do the edit natively in mp4 through quicktime, but that is not a free application. I think if you go with what you have, you might be stuck doing a couple of conversions. Either way, you go from lossy mp4 to lossy mpeg2, and will probably end up with additional visual artifacts in your end product. You should be able to get the audio video sync without any problems, though.

 

[Dimwhit]

I just did this Saturday. Quickest way (without waiting for file imports):

Create a new iMovie project and save it. Close out of it.
Right-click on the project file, select 'view package contents'
Drag your MP4 files onto the 'Media' folder
Open up the iMovie project. You'll get a message that there are stray clips in the trash.
View trash. Drag the movies to the clips pane.

Done. iMovie will edit the MP4 files just fine. Move over to iDVD when you're ready to burn it.

 

[mileslong]

thanks for the response. i do have quicktime pro as well. i just successfully edited one test mp4 with mpeg streamclip but when i tried to convert them and tie them together with mpeg streamclip it keeps saying it is an invalid task...

 

[SOMM]

I just did this Saturday. Quickest way (without waiting for file imports):

Create a new iMovie project and save it. Close out of it.
Right-click on the project file, select 'view package contents'
Drag your MP4 files onto the 'Media' folder
Open up the iMovie project. You'll get a message that there are stray clips in the trash.
View trash. Drag the movies to the clips pane.

Done. iMovie will edit the MP4 files just fine. Move over to iDVD when you're ready to burn it.

Legend, this worked a treat - many thanks