General Video Editing Advice

[DrLazer]

Hi!

I've put quite a few hours into trying to achieve my goal and can't help but think that there are probably easier ways of getting as far as i have and progressing further. If anybody has any advice for me I would be very appreciative.

The goal :
I have used a flip mino HD to record a series of video clips. I want to chop selected bits out of the clips and use a timeline based editing tool to fit them together with the ability to add some transitional effects, my own audio and overlay some animated graphics.

So Far:
I have a license for Adobe Premier Pro 6, so i thought I might aswel make use of it. I installed it and got it running etc. When i tried to add my video clips in, I got an error "file format unsupported". The clips on the cam are MP4. So I got hold of a copy of MPEG Streamclip to convert them to AVI. I didn't want to loose any qulity so wanted uncompressed video. I used export to AVI and used the following settings.

Apple BMP Compression
100% Quality
1280 x 720p (unscaled)
Deselected Interlaced Scaling
Upper Field Dominance
No Cropping
No Zoom
MPEG Layer 3 Audio
Stereo 256kbps

I tried other compression options but this seemed to be the only one that would work with Premier. When i dragged in an AVI with any other compression mode, I got the error "unsupported video compression".

The AVIs I have now do work with Premier. I can drag them in and pick bits out and lay them on the timeline etc. The only problem is 3Gigs of MP4 have equated to 150Gigs of uncompressed AVI and I'm worryingly close to my HD capacity. Not only this but I can't really view the AVIs smoothly in any player including the preview in Premier they are very jerky to say the least.

I'm planning on having another blast on this later tonight and my plan will involve deleting all but one of the AVIs, using virtualDub to apply HuffyUV lossless compression to it, then reconverting the MP4s back into AVIs in the same way as before and applying HuffyUV one file at a time. Hopefully this will reduce the filesizes down by 50% and make it watchable in any media player. Ha! as if its going to be that simple.

After that Im going to create my audio track with Audacity .... and i don't really have an idea for the animation overlay yet. Maybe import the finished AVI into Flash?

If anybody knows an easier way through all this, maybe a way of getting premier to work with MP4 or something as simple? I'm interested to hear how you would approach and solve this problem.

[LJB]

Give MP4CAM2AVI a try.

[DrLazer]

Just wanted to thank you for your short but sweet post. I tried this software out, it's literally the bomb. I can convert an MP4 to avi that appears to be compressed in a lossless way with ffdshow with this app. the output video is about the same filesize as the Mp4 and it gets processed at a rate (on my machine) of about 1 minute per second.

Very usefull indeed