Phone videos into Home movies

July 31, 2020 1:36 PM

How do you get phone videos to be like old school home movies? I converted old 8mm film and old camcorder tapes into DVDs we can enjoy on TV or a computer. Once we started using phones to video things, we have lots of disconnected short videos on various phones. How are people converting/saving the files these days for watching them as if it was a continuous film? Hoping for an easy process and software recommendations.
posted by maxg94 to Technology (6 answers total)

That's pretty easy to do on iMovie if you have a Mac. You just drop one in after the other on the timeline and export the whole file.
posted by captainscared at 5:45 PM on July 31, 2020

What if you use windows?
posted by bahama mama at 7:23 PM on July 31, 2020

No idea if it's any good, but MS now ships a movie editor as part of the Photos app that comes with Windows 10. Since it comes with, it will probably be worth your time to take it for a spin.
posted by flabdablet at 9:36 PM on July 31, 2020

Personally I vastly prefer command lines and scripting to GUIs and clickery, especially for naturally batch-oriented jobs like this. So the first thing I'd try is mkvmerge, and if anything even slightly cleverer than simply sticking clips together end-to-end turned out to be necessary I'd break out the big ffmpeg guns.

The ffmpeg learning curve is horrible but it can be used to script any imaginable video conversion task.
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 PM on July 31, 2020

No Mac or access to one. I was really hoping for something easy like iMovie.
posted by maxg94 at 1:17 PM on August 4, 2020

Windows Movie Maker was OK for this kind of thing, and whatever is now built into Photos is its replacement, so give that a crack.
posted by flabdablet at 11:21 PM on August 4, 2020