Mac and WMV help?

[Cyrano]

Looking for help and recommendations from DISers who use Mac.

I have a collection of old WMV home video files and a few unedited avi files from our old video camera.

Trying to become more proficient with iMovie (your job is safe though Dustin )and our family's vacation videos.

I know that I can use VLC to view the windows media files. However I would like to edit some clips into new projects in iMovie. Similarly I would like to be able to work on the avi files.

Suggestions, recommended software and your work flow to go this greatly appreciated

 

[WebmasterMike]

Handbrake to Convert to H.264 then edit away!

http://handbrake.fr/

http://www.iskysoft.com/rip-dvd/how-to-use-handbrake-convert-videos-on-mac.html

 

[mikelan6]

I use a program called Redux Encoder to convert avi files to Mac friendly files. Good luck!

 

[chirurgeon]

Thread hijack. Sorry. Best converter device for old slides and negatives?

 

[OKW Lover]

I second Mike's suggestion for Handbrake. Its free and works fine.

 

[Cyrano]

Thanks for the suggestions... keep them coming.

Free is good, though I don't mind paying if the software is good and in support of the developer.
I had already tried iskysoft and it was a pig to uninstall so I would not be keen to support it.

ReduxEncoder has been discontinued sadly.

 

[WebmasterMike]

Thread hijack. Sorry. Best converter device for old slides and negatives?

Best Converter, a company that does it for you!

Christy has a place she uses in the Northwest. We tried using the Slide/Negative Scanner without much success.

 

[chirurgeon]

Best Converter, a company that does it for you!

Christy has a place she uses in the Northwest. We tried using the Slide/Negative Scanner without much success.

Sounds good to me. Thanks.

 

[kcb1dizbksfan]

Looking for help and recommendations from DISers who use Mac.

I have a collection of old WMV home video files and a few unedited avi files from our old video camera.

Trying to become more proficient with iMovie (your job is safe though Dustin )and our family's vacation videos.

I know that I can use VLC to view the windows media files. However I would like to edit some clips into new projects in iMovie. Similarly I would like to be able to work on the avi files.

Suggestions, recommended software and your work flow to go this greatly appreciated

____

There is an awful lot you can do with iMovie even with a 7 year old iMac like I have and only two gigs of RAM and a real slow processor . . . my poor computer is screaming for what I have been asking it to do over the last few years with my huge RAW, TIF and JPEG files and very large HD movie files . . . but that is a longer story for another day.

I see there are many freeware software tools that are out in the public domain and so I guess its the software you feel most comfortable in using in making your final selection. So I use square5 as my tool for importing different video file types and then converting them to one standard format for use within iMovie. My general workflow is to import the video file into Square5 and use the H-264 compression because that is what SmugMug likes for uploading videos onto my web-site. The frame-size I use in Square5 is typically HDTV 1080i.

I don't know about the other freeware video converters listed, but the feature I particularly like from Square5 http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html is being able to export a specific frame or image from a video and then export that image as an uncompressed TIFF (My digital equivalent of a negative for film). I then import the TIFF image (person, place or thing) into my Adobe Lightroom software and then crop the image, make whatever post-prod adjustments to the exposure and then export the image as a .JPG as a very last step. You want to do all your editing with your huge TIFF image because ever time you touch a .JPG you deteriorate the quality of that image.

When I import all my video footage into iMovie now in the H-264 compression format, I can now also import my .JPG images that I selected from my video and then to include them into my video. I also import images into iMovie I have scanned from a very high res scanner i own from film negatives, positives and prints. So now I have a hybrid movie I plan to create with video clips and still images.

Just like Disney, but in my case using my own low-tech, cheap and simplistic way, I literally storyboard out (yes . . . sample video images that I use from my videos segments and photographic stills). You don't want to bore people with videos that are not interesting or never ending and so every image needs to be properly sequenced before you overlay a soundtrack at the appropriate time of the moving or still image to create either a happy or sad mood. I constantly replay back my video segments before I render the entire movie I created and I painfully wait for an hour or so for a 10 minute 1080 P HD video to render. Then I upload the video onto my Smugmug site and cross my fingers that after the rendering process is complete, that my image quality did not deteriorate too much.

Once you get comfortable with the tool, then you can experiment within iMovie and create your own personal masterpiece and then advance to Final Cut . . . but thats another posting!

Good Luck,