Cut... cut... cut... cut... cut...

July 24, 2010 1:00 PM

I made a long video, and I need to break it into ten-minute-long chunks, so that I can post it to YouTube. I would LOVE some app that let's me batch process this task. I want to start it running in the morning and come home at night to find a whole bunch of ten-minute-long videos on my desktop. I'm using an Intel Mac. I'm willing to buy an app if I have to.
posted by grumblebee to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

SplitFuse looks pretty good for this. It's $12 and has a free demo version.
posted by jedicus at 1:10 PM on July 24, 2010

Does it have to be YouTube? There are plenty of other options that don't have 10 minute limits: Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion...
posted by cbrody at 1:14 PM on July 24, 2010

If your content is original, could you apply for a YouTube Director account? That would mean you wouldn't have to snip up the video at all. Sorry if you already considered it!
posted by rollick at 1:25 PM on July 24, 2010

On reading further, the director feature has been terminated. I apologise for the error.
posted by rollick at 1:28 PM on July 24, 2010

Are you sure this is a good idea? If you cut exactly at 10, 20, 30, ... minutes you might cut in the middle of something. A human will be able to avoid this but a computer won't.
posted by madcaptenor at 1:34 PM on July 24, 2010

Do you have to use Youtube? Viddler deos not have the same restrictions on content size that YouTube does.
posted by COD at 1:53 PM on July 24, 2010

How comfortable are you with batch processing at the command line? Because you could do this with ffmpeg, something like
ffmpeg -i yourlongfile.ext -sameeq -ss aa:bb:cc -t aa:bb+10:cc oneofyourshortfiles.ext

Where -ss seeks to where you want to start the clip measured in hours:minutes:seconds[:frames, if you need] -t is 'record until', in this case 10 minutes longer than before. And -sameeq keeps the same settings/quality for your output as input.

Shouldn't be too hard to write a simple loop in python or something to run through it.
posted by Lemurrhea at 1:54 PM on July 24, 2010

If it's just one video, batch processing seems like overkill to me. Not clear if you mean you plan on doing this over and over again. As madcaptenor says, human cuts will be better.

Director program doesn't exist, basically it's just the partner program now. You can apply to be a partner but there are a couple requirements - http://www.youtube.com/partners has the info
- basically, you have to own everything you're uploading, that part is fairly obvious. You also have to "regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users, or you publish popular or commercially successful videos in other ways (such as DVDs sold online)."

I long for the day when we can change our length restriction.
posted by wildcrdj at 4:19 PM on July 24, 2010

I've only played a little with it, but the ffmpeg flag is '-t duration', so it should be "00:10:00". Most times I've seen split videos, people simply overlap the splits by 10 seconds or so... not perfect, but not really annoying to me. Since ffmpeg also takes raw seconds as input..

ffmpeg -i input.ext -sameeq -t 600 part1.ext
ffmpeg -i input.ext -sameeq -ss 590 -t 600 part2.ext
ffmpeg -i input.ext -sameeq -ss 1180 -t 600 part3.ext
...

This could be scripted up pretty easy into a Perl or even a Bash script without much difficulty. (just keeping track of start offsets and part numbers).
posted by zengargoyle at 4:55 PM on July 24, 2010