Editing 365 1-word video into one full-text video

October 27, 2008 10:58 AM

[VideoEditingFilter] Easiest/quickest way to join MANY single-word videos into a whole, full-paragraphes one?

My little project currently consists of saying a whole text over the course of a whole year. The text is 365 days long, of course.

I've been recording the videos almost daily - and to catch up with potential missed days along with choice of best take, I chose to use many words on daily videos, cutting them for easier editing : for example, I'd say "I... am... happy... to... be... here..." for a few days, then when time comes up, "be... here... in... order... to", then "order... to...ask...questions." You get the idea, hopefully.

So, that makes for a hefty bunch of videos already, and with the end of the year comes thoughts of HOW to edit this all together easily - and quickly (less than 15 days, say).

I've made a test with a couple sentences in iMovie HD (from my MacBook), and while it makes for rather easy editing for long videos, small videos (1-2 seconds) quickly overcrowd the timeline, the zoom is not really efficient, and I can get lost easily.

So I thought of doing it "1 sentence = 1 video", which in iMovie is already long, but still easier than 365 words. Thing is, my concern is about quality: once I have exported my 30 1-sentence videos (for instance), I'd neet to import these 30, edit them into one, and export them again? That looks like a huge loss of video-quality to me, what with compression-over-compression and all that (not an expert here, obviously). Also, all this comes at the cost of disk-space...

Not to make things easier, my camera died mid-year, and the new one gives me better-quality videos, but smaller (think 640 width to 320 width). How should I best handle that?

Thanks a lot for any idea/suggestion!

posted by XiBe to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

I'm on a PC and haven't used iMovie, but the way I'd approach it is: take each clip and crop out all but the one word you want to save. Export as its own (very short) .mov. Name them something like "001 I", "002 am", "003 happy", etc.

To combine everything you just drop them onto the timeline in order. I'm not sure iMovie would preserve the order if you select the lot and drag them all in, but that's worth a try. If not, you'll have to add them one at a time, which will be tedious, but that's the nature of the project. You won't have to worry about getting lost, just add everything in order.
posted by echo target at 11:40 AM on October 27, 2008

Let's do the one sentence bit.

Cut together the sentence.
Share menu>Quicktime
Quality: Full quality.

Export that and reimport it.

If the codec is identical (and an I-Frame based codec such as DV), and no effects are added, the software will just join them in the new file into a new QT file (with no compression/changes/loss)

On the 640x320, what did you shoot it with?
posted by filmgeek at 2:26 PM on October 27, 2008

I'm not a super video expert, but I have some experience. If you export them at a reasonable quality (say, a quicktime movie encoded in H.264 or motion-JPEG @ 5000kbit/sec) you'll not lose much quality. As long as you don't do it too many times in a row, you'll probably be okay.

Good luck! Sounds fun, let us know when it's done.
posted by Magnakai at 2:53 PM on October 27, 2008

Seconding exporting it at full quality.

I've been editing a video today which consisted of a bunch of smaller videos. To do this, I first edited the smaller videos into their proper parts, then I exported at Full Quality.

The only importing iMovie had to do was copying the file from one project to the full-movie project.

Good luck!
posted by 47triple2 at 3:52 PM on October 27, 2008

Best answer: So, now that it's done, I can update you on the project I guess :)

My main concern was: "I've made a test with a couple sentences in iMovie HD (from my MacBook), and while it makes for rather easy editing for long videos, small videos (1-2 seconds) quickly overcrowd the timeline, the zoom is not really efficient, and I can get lost easily."

Luckily for me, iMovie 09 was released merely days before the end of January, and therefore I could use it to make the whole video. I had no problem important all of the videos in this version of iMovie, easily navigating between them and in the timeline. Even better: the new cutting up tool makes it even quicker to select a part of a video depending on the sound.

So, the final answer was: use iMovie 09 instead of iMovie HD :)

The final result can be found on my blog.
posted by XiBe at 4:00 AM on February 25, 2009