Comments on: Not Getting Famous on YouTube

Question: Not Getting Famous on YouTube

tmcw — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:24:55 -0800

I have a song I composed / recorded / etc. I'd like to make simple video by cutting together fragments of public-domain films with this song. I have a MacBook. How to get to point B? iMovie is crashing on every import.

iMovie seems to crash every time I open the "Import Movie" dialog. Not a sign of quality software.

I don't want to spend much/any money on this. I've tried writing a quick app in Processing.org to do this, but the movies I'm working with are 100-200MB mpg files, and that fills up Java's heap very, very quickly - I can't imagine throwing FFT analysis on top of that.

Are there are any open-source or cheap applications that allow fairly basic video editing capabilities like this? Anything possibly designed for VJs or very nonlinear editing like this will be? I'm a little miffed that there hasn't been an obvious, slick answer to this like there has been for 99% of my mac artsy-software needs.

Thanks for any help!

By: ISeemToBeAVerb

ISeemToBeAVerb — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:44:53 -0800

The problem isn't the software. You don't want to be editing mpeg clips. Use Mpeg Streamclip to convert your mpeg files into Quicktime .mov files. That should do the trick.

By: filmgeek

filmgeek — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:40:26 -0800

Yeah, the problem is...that MPEG is a very lossy format - not all the frames have all the information. MPEG Streamclip can transcode your video to a codec like DV, which 'edit's easie...and likely will be a whole lot larger (and iMovie will hadnle without crashing)