Need some advice on video
by Volker Weber
I want to record a few short video clips to be uploaded to YouTube. Their upload page says:
# Videos are limited to 10 minutes (unless you're a Director) and 100 MB.
# Videos saved with the following settings convert the best: MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format, 320x240 resolution, MP3 audio, 30 frames per second framerate
I can record in 320x240 MPEG-4, video is .mp4v at 15 frames a second, audio is 2 channels .mp4a at 16bit/48 kHz. I can also record at higher resolutions up to 1280x720 (720p) at 30 fps, or 640x480 with 30 or 60 fps, but I think for Youtube I am fine with the lowest resolution.
The videos will be short but I need to make three adjustments:
- crop the movie to not include a few seconds at the start and at the end
- slice it into 10 minutes segments if that is ever necessary
- put a title screen at the front
This workflow should be as easy as possible and not require a lot of attention. I also do not want to recode the video streams if possible. I am on a Mac. Which software would you suggest?
Comments
It's too bad that iMovie does't expose any of it's features to Automator.
Which part of your workflow will iMovie/Quicktime not handle?
@David,
"This workflow should be as easy as possible and not require a lot of attention."
It's my understanding that Volker would like to automate it.
A scripted Quicktime workflow. You can use Javascript if you don't like Applescript or you need a more powerful language.
Take a look at MPEG Streamclip. It is probably not perfect for your situation, but it has helped me a couple of times in similar situations.
Cleaner used to have such workflows. i do not know if it is still available, because i remember that it was sold years ago.
Mike
a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that you will often need to shoot one hour of video to get one minute if useful content (unless you have storyboarded what you are doing in advance, to perfection).
@Chris,
Tell that to the masses over at YouTube. They will laugh at you ;-)
@Bruce
I think Chris is correct and YouTube proves it. It takes about an hour of junk on YouTube to find 1 minute of quality.
The masses prove it.
...although I haven't proved my thoughts yet, you might consider taking the vlc player via the command-line interface.
With some streaming and a playlist you could probably find a solution for your problem. It's even scriptable.
(After installing VLC) Point your Mac-Terminal.App to /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS, there's a clivlc. Tons of possibilities and options there, some only reachable via cli, not in the ui version.
Try this editor: http://www.jahshaka.org/content/blogcategory/1/46/
and / or read this (in german) about SMIL: http://www.schockwellenreiter.de/categories/multimedia/index.html
It's maybe not what you wanted but maybe points you to the right direction.
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