I need to edit lot of videos quickly, how?

November 19, 2014 1:19 PM

I have a lot of videos I need to preview, then trim based on the preview, possibly rotate, then save. What should I use?

Currently I use iMovie, but the process feels longer than it could be what with navigating to the video directory each time, importing the video, finding it in the imported videos list, etc. I'm looking for either a quicker way of doing this, or another program with a faster workflow. What gems am I missing out on?

posted by devnull to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Quicktime Pro ($30) is probably a quicker workflow.
posted by nightwood at 1:31 PM on November 19, 2014

Seconding Quicktime Pro.

You can scrub through videos and shift-drag to create a selection. At that point you can treat it like text. That is, you can cut/copy/paste/delete the selection. Makes editing super fast. Use the spacebar to play/pause, and the arrow keys to step through the video frame-by-frame.

Definitely the tool I'd use.
posted by Wild_Eep at 2:02 PM on November 19, 2014

Just plain old Quicktime Player sounds like it's plenty for what you want. Open the video, ⌘-Shift-L (or R) to rotate, ⌘T to trim, and ⌘S to save, and it will modify the video on disk. You'd barely have to use the mouse. It might even be the most efficient in terms of time.
posted by wnissen at 4:11 PM on November 19, 2014

I would script it by writing whatever parameters (trim time, rotation needed) in a csv or excel document, then looping over that with FFMPEG, wrapped with bash or Python.

I may be gravitating towards the more complicated (but more hands-off) solution because of your username.
posted by supercres at 7:45 PM on November 19, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers. I went with QuickTime Pro. For people finding this thread on Google: Mavericks already comes with QuickTime Player which can do most of what I wanted too.
posted by devnull at 1:35 AM on November 24, 2014