[rslifka]

All I want to do is 'merge' a bunch of AVIs together. Seems like a pretty simple task conceptually, but I have two hurdles.

(1) When I import a movie into iMovie and play inside of iMovie, the video is fine, but the audio skips like crazy. This was the first thing I did in iMovie, so I haven't changed any settings, etc.

(2) When exporting (why on earth it's hidden File -> Share blows my mind, certainly "Save Movie As..." is much less intuitive ), I can't seem to approximate the quality of the input videos. The choices are either way too big (DV) or way too small (CD-ROM).

Any tips? Thanks,

Rob

[Uncle Skeleton]

If by "merge" you mean append, don't use iMovie. iMovie is designed to edit (cut/copy/paste does not count as editing in Video land) your own movies shot with your own camera. It's really unsuitable for anything else. QuickTime Pro is ideal for cut/copy/paste style manipulations. It requires no rendering or re-encoding; it's almost instantaneous; it's quite amazing really. If you don't want to buy it (if you ever plan to do this in the future it's a bargain) and can't find a way to get access to it for a minute, you can cobble together an applescript solution...somehow. QT's biggest weakness is that it's the Apple app that hasn't been overhauled in the longest time, but since new Apple apps don't really support Applescript very well, that weakness is a strength in this case (the case of the guy who doesn't have $30 for something that's easily worth $100). If you haven't already, you will undoubtedly need to install the (free) divx component from www.divx.com to make QT play nice with your not-really-avi files. Possibly also the xvid and ac3 delegate components from www.insaneness.com

If you want to "merge" your files just so you can play them back to back, almost all Video apps these days have playlists, notably VLC

[rslifka]

Thanks for the detailed reply US! Glad to know I was getting off on the wrong foot. Saved me a lot of time and confusion

What I wanted to do was merge multipart movies into one movie and then use iDVD to DVD up the place. Surprised there's no command-line tool for something like this (i.e. just the merge part). I wouldn't mind trying to write something like that, but certainly not looking forward to it. I'll check out Java's Media Framework since I'm very familiar with that language.

So you're saying there's an Applescript solution? Any pointers on which dictionary to check out? I'll start with QT's...

Rob

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally posted by rslifka:
then use iDVD

I haven't used iDVD a lot but doesn't it allow you to add a "play all" button or something that might let you skip the whole combining process?

Surprised there's no command-line tool for something like this (i.e. just the merge part). I wouldn't mind trying to write something like that

it would be very easy with the QT framework. I program in Obj-C, but cocoa java should have the same functions. This is all from memory, so it might not work right off:

Code:
#include <QuickTime/QuickTime.h>
//
NSURL *path1 = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:@"/path/to/a/movie"];
NSURL *path2 = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:@"path/to/another/movie"];
NSString *outpath = @"/path/to/new/saved/movie";

// open the movies
NSMovie *smovie = [[NSMovie alloc] initWithURL:path1 byReference:NO];
NSMovie *dmovie = [[[NSMovie alloc] initWithURL:path2 byReference:NO];

// select all on the first movie
SetMovieSelection([smovie QTMovie], 0, GetMovieDuration([smovie QTMovie]));

// copy it to the second movie
PasteMovieSelection([dmovie QTMovie], [smovie QTMovie]);

// save it to a reference file
Handle h = NewHandle(0);
PutMovieIntoHandle([dmovie QTMovie], h);
NSData *d = [NSData dataWithBytes:*h length:GetHandleSize(h)];
[d writeToFile:outpath atomically:YES];

[smovie release];
[dmovie release];

hope that makes some sense.