Video Editor Help

[Takeo Rey]

Hey all, I made the switch from PC to Mac and bought my first iMac a month ago and I love it!

Anyways, I'm starting a side video project but I'm having a tough time. I have a bunch of video files, most of them mp4, that I want to cut segments out and upload and send to people. I don't want to convert or change the quality really, just cut out a short 5 to 10 minute segment from these videos. I thought iMovie would be able to do this, but it won't let me use a lot of my videos.

Is there any program that will let me just cut parts of a video out? Is there an easier way that I'm over-looking that I can do?

 

[dolphin842]

MPEG Streamclip will losslessly trim files with ease. Just scrub the playhead to where you want the clip to start, press 'i' (this sets your 'in point')... then go to where you want it to end and press 'o' for your 'out point.' Then go to Edit-->Trim, and your clip is ready; just do a Save As and a you'll have a new copy of your trimmed video.

 

[johto]

Quictime Pro lets you select the in and out point, then cut/copy/paste/join differend clips and then you can just "save".

 

[arjen92]

you said "but it won't let me use a lot of my video". Do you mean with that, that it won't import movies, wont play them, you can't edit them. If that's the case it could be because it doesn't has the right components in quicktime. You should install perian from perian.org. That way you can watch divx movies etc too.

 

[dolphin842]

Yes, Perian is a "must install" component if you want to work with video on your Mac. As for the poster who mentioned QuickTime Pro... MPEG Streamclip does exactly what you said; there's no need to pay $30 for QuickTime Pro when MPEG Streamclip is free.

 

[Takeo Rey]

I do have Perian installed already. As far as trying to edit them in iMovie, it won't let me import them over. I have been trying MPEG Streamclip but when I drop an mp4 into it, the video freezes, almost chugs along and will sometimes quit on me. Any idea why this happens? Anything I should do to correct this problem?

 

[dolphin842]

Do the videos play correctly in QuickTime Player? The fact that iMovie won't convert them may suggest that the files themselves are a bit 'off spec' and the QuickTime framework is having trouble handling it. Sometimes high-profile mp4 files give QuickTime trouble, even with Perian installed. On that note, Perian was recently updated to 1.1.1, so I would make sure Perian itself is up to date on your machine if it isn't already.

As a general rule, everything that plays nice in QuickTime should play nice in MPEG Streamclip, so I'm not sure off the top of my head what could be wrong.

 

[Takeo Rey]

Yeah they play fine on Quicktime, it's just a bit hard to edit because I will try to move the scroll bar but the video doesn't sync up, sometimes it's just the audio playing while the video is frozen...

I did update Perian this morning and it seems to run better, but the scrolling problems still persists.

 

[dolphin842]

Ah, it seems to be an oddly-encoded file, then. Perhaps transcoding it will help make a more 'normal' file that will behave in QuickTime? You can use the free QTAmateur to export in different formats.

Any ideas from other people on how to troubleshoot this?

 

[Takeo Rey]

I ended up using VisualHub and converting them to avi files. A lot better now and easier to edit now.