Apr
23
2008
Flip Video importer
Posted by: Kevin Ballard in Mac OS X, tags: Automator, AVI, Flip, videoI just picked up a new Flip Video and was dismayed to find out that it used a custom app to import its movies, and that this custom app was PPC. I was also dismayed to find out that iMovie ‘08 refuses to import AVIs even if you have the appropriate codec installed. So after some hacking, I put together an Automator workflow that will convert all your Flip videos into DV and import them into iMovie. You can download it here.
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April 26th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
What’s the “appropriate codec” that’s installed? Can you open the Filp Video AVI in QuickTime and get format info from the Movie Inspector (Command-I) or with some other method? There might be a way to get iMovie ‘08 to import it directly.
April 26th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
The “appropriate codec” here is Perian. And no, iMovie ‘08 apparently rejects all AVIs out of hand. I could try renaming the file to a format iMovie ‘08 likes, but I expect it to reject the file once it realizes it’s not a built-in codec.
Even if you can somehow convince iMovie ‘08 to accept the AVIs, there is still a benefit to re-encoding as DV, which is that generating thumbnails and scrubbing (and presumably other operations) are significantly faster.
April 27th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I was wondering specifically which video codec the Flip Video AVI contains and have since found “Advanced Profile MPEG4 AVI ” in the product specs, where I could have checked before asking.
iMovie ‘08 is able to import Motion JPEG video that my Canon SD800 digital camera records in AVI containers, but possibly relies on QuickTime plugins installed with Canon’s ImageBrowser software. That’ll be easier to confirm after upgrading to Leopard relatively soon, before installing ImageBrowser again (if at all; I’d prefer not to).
It might be possible to put that Flip Video’s MPEG-4 in a QuickTime container that iMovie can import though converting to DV might be preferable anyway if you don’t mind the larger files.
April 27th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I tried wrapping the AVI in a .mov but iMovie ‘08 still refused to open it. And disk space is cheap – I can always re-encode if I want the space back.
May 4th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Kevin,
Great script and thanks for creating this. I had to make a couple adjustments because either my computer is much slower, or my videos are longer. I added a ‘with timeout of 1800 seconds’ around the QuickTime Player loop. I don’t know if it’s worth adding to your version as well.
-k