convert AVI to iMovie editable file

Technical Videography and Photography
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i am trying to trim down a video i made for our team from a 30 to a 7-10 minute video to use for deminstrations with my new macbook pro but the file i have is AVI and won’t open in iMovie. Can anyone suggest some freeware that will convert this file to something that i can import to iMovie, i have one program but the freeware version has a giant watermark in the middle of my movie with makes it horribly unusable as no one wants to watch a film that has the words EVALUATION COPY across the middle of the screen

thank you in advance

2

try media-convert.com, no watermark but you need to know what file extension you want it to be.

3

looked like it was gonna work but the file is larger than 200mb

4

IF you have a Windows computer around, you can google 3gp_converter. It converts to many formats, including MP4 which you should be able to input. It is an apple format. Here is a link to the download site for it.

3GP_Converter

If you need help setting it up right, PM me. It’s straight forward though.

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THANK YOU

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the best one I have seen that is open source and can convert practically anything is ffmpeg. it is command line, but can do just about anything once you know the command for it

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Too bad I didn’t see this thread earlier. Quite possibly the best GUI-based video converter I’ve ever used [strike]is[/strike] was called Visualhub, and is available for OSX. I bought it a few years ago, but it’s now a free, open source project. If you don’t want to deal with having to compile the source code in Xcode, just torrent it.

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VisualHub is no more, (unfortunately) but the source code has been released to the public (as transcoder redux).

However, it is being rebuilt as “video monkey” at http://videomonkey.org and the developer just updated it to work with Snow Leopard. It’s not quite as complete as Visual Hub was yet, but it looks like it will get there. And with what you described, it will do what you need right now.

BTW, both of these (Visual Hub and Video Monkey) use ffmpeg as their engines - they are basically GUI front-ends for that program. ffmpeg, though, is not for the faint of heart, so those of us that have Visual Hub still on their computers are glad that we do!

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I generally use either “SUPER” which is a freeware video converter that works with just about anything, or “VLC Media Player” (Also Free) which has a very nice built-in conversion program as well.

I’m surprised that iMovie can’t open an AVI file, I figured the AVI format was pretty standard, and I thought it was an open-source format as well so there wouldn’t be any licensing issues (Like MP3 format)… quite odd… :confused:

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