Video Editing on a Macbook Pro

[jake.f]

Hi There,

I have a 13" Macbook Pro and recently I have started filming my flying lessons, and wish to edit the videos to put on youtube somehow. I tried iMovie first but when it came time to generate thumbnails my temperatures skyrocketed to close to 90 degrees celsius and the fan also sped up to over 4000 rpm, so I force quit it and stopped. I downloaded another few free video editors for Mac and none seemed to be able to even open my video. iMovie is also not very friendly with HDD space either.

Now, granted I am filming in 720p and the movie I tried to edit was almost 4GB in size which makes it difficult. I ended up with much difficulty editing this first video on our windows computer in movie maker, which decided it would be a laugh to keep the 720p resolution, but fill the majority of it with massive black borders for no apparent reason at all, shrinking the actual video resolution down. It took ages so I just saved it like that and am uploading to youtube now (I'll post it later so you can see what I mean)

So I guess what I am asking is how can I go about editing these videos in a way which will still keep them at 720p and not overheat my Macbook Pro? Is there a way to stop iMovie spending so much time generating thumbnails and almost overheating in the process? Any other software which will work (Needs to be free though). All I need to do with this editing is cut parts out and add some text. iMovie would be good but like I said the temperatures get too high for my liking.

The videos are in MP4 format, 60fps. Any help with this would be appreciated

 

[MacDawg]

If you are just wanting to trim and cut, you should be able to do that in QuickTime

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Your Mac is NOT overheating.
As you probably shot the video with some consumer camcorder or DSLR with video capabilities, the footage is highly compressed, which makes it hard to edit, as decoding such highly compressed footage (normally using H.264 as codec) is CPU intensive.
iMovie can't edit H.264 encoded video, thus it imports the video and during the import it gets transcoded to an editing friendly format and codec (.mov using the Apple Intermediate Codec), which takes up more storage capacity though (and external Firewire 800 HDD is recommended when editing video, even consumer grade videos).
Therefore your Mac was working just fine, as the fan is meant to speed up when the CPU gets hotter, which happens, when the CPU gets used more intensely, and as the CPU needs more power, it gets hotter.

Your Mac can handle CPU temperatures of 105° C quite fine and the fan may speed up to 6000 RPM if the CPU gets hot, but the Mac will not overheat. The Mac will also shut down, if the temperature gets too hot, to avoid heat damage.

In other words, iMovie is just fine for editing 720p footage, if you let it properly import the footage and accept heat and faster fan speed as quid pro quo.


PS: I don't use iMovie, but I recently edited 1080p footage on my 2007 iMac and my 2009 MBP in Avid Media Composer, and it worked just fine. I just transcoded the footage into a proper format, just like iMovie does for itself, and then I could work just fine.

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[jake.f]

Good idea with the quicktime trimming thing, never realised I could do that. Next time I'll try that and then add the captions and stuff with the youtube editor, I also will give iMovie another shot