Splitting up movies with no loss of quality?
July 20, 2017 7:50 AM Subscribe
I have these digitized Super 8 movies that I need to break out into the digital equivalent of their original reels.
So a while back my mom finally got all of our old Super 8 home movies scanned. Dozens of reels were cleaned, spliced onto one large reel and scanned. We got a portable hard drive with six MOV (Codec: DV/DVCPRO - NTSC, Linear PCM, Timecode) video files sent back to us with the originals film.
I imported these into iMovie, where they now sit as six ginormous events. A while back I set about dividing these six files back into their original reels. The only way I could figure out how to do this in iMovie was to make individual projects for each reel. Now I have dozens of iMovie projects sitting in my iMovie library. (They’re in iMovie 9.0.9 since I guess later versions dropped support for 4:3?) Can these be exported without losing quality and then reimported as new iMovie Events? Or am I headed down a less than optimal path?
I don’t do much video editing and I certainly don’t know anything about best practices and future-proofing in regards to video. I would like to break these six large files back out to digital equivalents of their original reels. Is there a way to do this without losing any quality? Thoughts? Suggestions?
So a while back my mom finally got all of our old Super 8 home movies scanned. Dozens of reels were cleaned, spliced onto one large reel and scanned. We got a portable hard drive with six MOV (Codec: DV/DVCPRO - NTSC, Linear PCM, Timecode) video files sent back to us with the originals film.
I imported these into iMovie, where they now sit as six ginormous events. A while back I set about dividing these six files back into their original reels. The only way I could figure out how to do this in iMovie was to make individual projects for each reel. Now I have dozens of iMovie projects sitting in my iMovie library. (They’re in iMovie 9.0.9 since I guess later versions dropped support for 4:3?) Can these be exported without losing quality and then reimported as new iMovie Events? Or am I headed down a less than optimal path?
I don’t do much video editing and I certainly don’t know anything about best practices and future-proofing in regards to video. I would like to break these six large files back out to digital equivalents of their original reels. Is there a way to do this without losing any quality? Thoughts? Suggestions?
Response by poster: MOV video files (Codec: DV/DVCPRO - NTSC, Linear PCM, Timecode)
posted by entropicamericana at 8:09 AM on July 20, 2017
posted by entropicamericana at 8:09 AM on July 20, 2017
You could use the ffmpeg command-line tool to do this, just make sure to use the .mov extension for your output file and not .mp4. You'll just have to open the source clip in Quicktime or another video player to get the timestamp of the start/end of each clip. You can get ffmpeg here (click "Download as DMG")
Not an expert on video codec preservation but I think DVCPRO will be with us for awhile. Check back every decade to make sure popular tools still support it.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:55 AM on July 20, 2017
Not an expert on video codec preservation but I think DVCPRO will be with us for awhile. Check back every decade to make sure popular tools still support it.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:55 AM on July 20, 2017
Yeah. If ffmpeg will parse the file then something like
posted by pharm at 9:19 AM on July 20, 2017
ffmpeg -ss (start time) -to (end time) -i input.mov -acodec copy -vcodec copy out.movshould do the job.
posted by pharm at 9:19 AM on July 20, 2017
Response by poster: Can you give me an example of what the timecode format would look like for the command line?
posted by entropicamericana at 9:27 AM on July 20, 2017
posted by entropicamericana at 9:27 AM on July 20, 2017
It’s hours:minutes:seconds IIRC. eg 0:23:22 for 23 minutes and 22 seconds in.
posted by pharm at 1:06 PM on July 20, 2017
posted by pharm at 1:06 PM on July 20, 2017
avidemux for Mac is I think basically a GUI for ffmpeg. It's a clunky interface, but gets the job done eventually.
posted by homesickness at 4:26 PM on July 20, 2017
posted by homesickness at 4:26 PM on July 20, 2017
Response by poster: I just had to chance to check out these replies and found that macOS doesn't seem to have ffmpeg preinstalled and I'm not comfortable with installing software from any of these sites... Are there any other options?
posted by entropicamericana at 3:46 PM on July 22, 2017
posted by entropicamericana at 3:46 PM on July 22, 2017
I’m sure there are, but I’m not aware of them because command line tools are my first port of call for problems like this.
What are you not comfortable with? Installing binaries off the net?
posted by pharm at 1:55 AM on July 23, 2017
What are you not comfortable with? Installing binaries off the net?
posted by pharm at 1:55 AM on July 23, 2017
Response by poster: Outside of well-known software houses, yeah. Also not comfortable with compiling code.
posted by entropicamericana at 10:04 AM on July 23, 2017
posted by entropicamericana at 10:04 AM on July 23, 2017
You could install a Linux VM and run ffmpeg inside that instead.
Alternatively install MacPorts or Homebrew and let those handle the installation of ffmpeg for you under MacOS.
I don’t know of any off-the-peg commercial software that will let you cut the original files losslessly.
posted by pharm at 11:09 AM on July 23, 2017
Alternatively install MacPorts or Homebrew and let those handle the installation of ffmpeg for you under MacOS.
I don’t know of any off-the-peg commercial software that will let you cut the original files losslessly.
posted by pharm at 11:09 AM on July 23, 2017
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by pharm at 8:03 AM on July 20, 2017