[The_Equivocator]

I have 4 mpeg4 files that make up a single movie. I'm trying to combine them together with little luck.

When I try to use Quicktime 6 Pro to copy and paste the files into a single movie, the copying and pasting works fine enough, but when I try to save it, Quicktime gives my the spinning color wheel of death. Forever. I've tried reinstalling Quicktime... I've tried it on 2 different computers, and I've tried it in OS 9 and OS X. I've even tried re-capturing the video files and using other ones to see if that fixes it. Unfortunately, it doesn't, so I'm thinking that there is a bug in Quicktime.

I've also tried to use Final Cut Pro, but I'm not sure how to go about saving it. The files are already compressed, so I'd rather not compress them again since I would lose quality. I tried saving it with the video compression setting set as "none", but the file began to grow exponentially, hitting 1.5GB before even being 1% done.

I've even gone as far as trying the Unix tool cat, but that doesn't produce correct output.

So, does anyone have any suggestions for me? Any other apps I could try using or any help with FCP/Quicktime?

Thanks.

[lucylawless]

Did you try to export to mp4 with video and audio set to Passthrough? that option is always greyed out for me, but maybe that will be a good lead...

[The_Equivocator]

In what program, FCP?

Thanks, I'll take a look at it tonight. It can't be that hard to combine 4 mp4 files into 1...

[lucylawless]

no, in quicktime pro
I'm not at my mac now so I can't check exactly what it's called, but I think in the mp4 export options there's a choice under the video settings (at least) to pass through instead of re-encoding. But for me it's always been greyed out, and I think it might be because I wasn't working with recognized mp4 content (I guess divx and 3ivx don't count)

[The_Equivocator]

You are a genius and a God among men. Thank you so much for your help... your suggestion worked perfectly.

[OwlBoy]

can we see a sample of what you encoded? I can't get enuff of mpeg4

-Owl

[The_Equivocator]

I encoded a copy of Grave of the Fireflies, a pretty good anime movie that takes place in Japan during World War 2. It probably wouldn't be the best to sample since the video quality of the DVD itself is pretty poor.

Now that I have the entire mp4 encoding process down, I'll probably be doing some more in the near future. If you're interested, I can post some samples later when I encode something with a higher quality video track.

[lucylawless]

glad I could help. I'm also glad that the passthrough option works and was not just a tease from the preview version