a rediculously difficult task to edit a movie

M

Mischief[LTS]

Registered
I have a few sony handycams/camcorders around the house that take great videos. everything is really simple except one thing: editing and exporting. i cant find a simple editing program that actually WORKS, which will provide the BARE MINIMUM someone might look for in a proggie. im not looking for cool wavy effects, text, or any of that other stupid crap thats overly done anyways. i just want the ability to cut out segments of video clips, re save them in WORKABLE format, and thats the end of it. nothing more, nothing less. why is this so hard? (and no, im not going to fork out 100, 200, or 300+dollars for something ill use twice in my lifetime)

i've tried montage, and it wont even allow you to open mpg files, like it suggests. and then theres simplemoviex, which is terribly unorganized and doesn't even save files in a re-openable format! ill click the icon and it will just keep trying to load..trying to load..trying to load.. its really sad that something so simple is this difficult to accomplish. i haven't found any other solutions, other than paying some stupid amount of cash for a program ill use twice in my lifetime.

please, there has to be a program out there someone knows about. can someone enlighten me? im sick of forking money into this damn macintosh for every damn version upgrade and its been 10x more difficult to get things working like they were in OS9.

i just want to edit and save my .mpeg movies, not create a god damn cinematic big screen movie.
 
iMovie? I guess you probably got it free with your machine. While it can do fancy effects if you want, it should be fine for basic editing
 
i should have mentioned why i didnt want to use imovie: while of course the idea came almost first in line, the main reason i avoid it is because of compression size. even with low settings it's alittle rediculous, but maybe im just peticular.

sry if i came off alittle agitated or steamed up. sometimes i miss the simplicity of os9 env and the simple programs.. you know, alot of things previously available in the OS9 now costs money for the priviledge to use... bah, now its 10 bucks to have custom colored labels!

but thats another topic :)
 
Sad - iMovie is pretty darned simple. If the movie you make still turns out too big (file size), there are other apps to trim them down, but I have been able to get iMovie files down pretty small. It all depends on what you are doing with them.

And you have to like the price!
 
Mischief[LTS] said:
i should have mentioned why i didnt want to use imovie: while of course the idea came almost first in line, the main reason i avoid it is because of compression size. even with low settings it's alittle rediculous, but maybe im just peticular.
Click to expand...

When you say "ridiculous," do you mean that the clips are ridiculously huge in file size, or ridiculously bad in quality?

Mischief[LTS] said:
sry if i came off alittle agitated or steamed up. sometimes i miss the simplicity of os9 env and the simple programs.. you know, alot of things previously available in the OS9 now costs money for the priviledge to use... bah, now its 10 bucks to have custom colored labels!

but thats another topic :)
Click to expand...

"Label" colors are built-in to Mac OS X v 10.3 and up. Sounds like you could use an upgrade. (Not just for labels, but for additional speed and features, too).
 
nah, im on 10.3.9 and just too lazy to install this tiger Cd sitting on my desk :\ i mean remember back in OS9 where you could actually have custom label colors. different greens, blues etc. you could just click the color wheel and choose. but anyways, when i said ridiculous i meant as far as compression size, quality is directly affected by the compression i would think?
 
You can do this with QuickTime Pro, although there are a few gotchas.

As you probably know, QT Pro will let you copy and paste segments from any movie into new movies. There's no obvious way to edit MPEGs (I guess there's some licensing issue, or maybe Apple's just been stupid all these years), but you can easily work around this apparent limitation using AppleScript and these steps:

1. Open your MPEG, and select the part you want to copy.
2. Create and run this one-line script in Script Editor: tell application "QuickTime Player" to copy movie 1
3. Paste what you copied by running that script into a new movie, or whereever you want it.

QuickTime's MPEG support is a pain in the kiester, but it works.

Another problem you might have is that for some stupid reason, QuickTime won't let you export MPEG movies to any format with sound. I'm not absolutely sure off the top of my head how to get around this (there are a few techniques I often use, but I'm not sure if any really apply here, and I don't want to explain something that's irrelevant), but if you don't absolutely need it in MPEG form, you could just save it as a self-contained mov. That way you wouldn't need to re-encode and you'll maintain the full quality of the original.
 
If you just want a quick and dirty MPEG2 editor, try MPEG Streamclip. It's free and fast, but the scrubbing isn't quite as accurate as I'd like.

It outputs to Quicktime formats supposedly although I haven't tried that part of the program, I just output back to MPEG2.
 
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