Looking for a really light weight HD mp4 editor?

[The village idiot]

I'm looking for a really light weight HD mp4 editor, only want to chop at I frames and no re-encoding when I save. Needs to be really light weight so I can use it on my laptop that only has an 800Mhz processor (Fujitsu u810). Not looking for real time playback or anything like that, just want to be able to chop and combine different clips and save them out to the original codec. It's from a GoPro Hero HD and most of the stuff I'll be doing in 720/30p. If I need to do anything complex I can bring it into FinalCut or MediaComposer on a more powerful machine. I think it records in h.264 and AAC mono audio, but I don't remember at the moment.

Looking for free and Windows platform for this software, there are two listed in the tools section that I'll grab and try. Cheap would also be considered if it works well.

Thanks.

[poisondeathray]

avidemux is one option. it's cross platform so there are mac & pc versions.

[Baldrick]

I use avidemux, even though it crashes every time I use it. I just haven't found any better free mp4 h264 editor.

[The village idiot]

Thanks, I'll give it my first try then.

at 1280x720/30p it took an hour to import 34 minutes of video into iMovieHD on a dual dualcore 2.66Ghz Intel mac. FCP was able to use the video immediately with no import, and Avid Mediacompser was going to take somewhere in the realm of an hour. Not that I have anything worthy of editing yet since I just got the camera, but figured I better look into the time table before I do have something of any value.

[The village idiot]

Seems to work fairly well for simple chopping duties. Now I just need to get some better stuff captured.

[The village idiot]

Bringing this back up again... I found that if you use the "regular" MP4 wrapper, the files will not work in Vegas (it doesn't see the audio). If you use the MP4(PSP) wrapper, then everything is good in Vegas Movie Studio platinum.

[highballblog]

I have two suggestions:

1 Covert your GoPro HD footage with MPEG Streamclip - it's a light program that coverts MP4 to AVI, MOV and other common video formats. It's developed by Squared5 - an italian software company. It's simply a great tool! And you won't loose the HD quality of your video after converting. Then you can use the clips (AVI) and work with your current editor.

2 Use Magix Edit Pro 15 Plus - they now released the 16 version but I highly encourage you NOT to BUY it... It's just full of bugs, it stalls and it crashes. I bought it and managed to export two clips with it, after that it became useless - didn't load projects - it was dead!!! I asked for a refund and they didn't give it to me but instead I asked them to give me the Edit Pro 15 version which I had used as a trial and worked great for all my GoPro HD clips. I shoot in 720p @ 30fps and I export the clips as MP4 with H.264 encoding - all this in Magix Edit Pro 15 Plus - that's something I recommend - unlike the 16 version which is full of problems.
You can both import and export in HD mp4 with Magix.

Hope this is useful. If you have any other questions please ask.
Cheers!

Constantin (highballblog)