Cut up .dv files for iMovie?

[walleymo]

Hi everyone. I was wondering if there was any software out there (hopefully free) for OS X that would cut up dv files created in ffmpegx. Basically I want to put some video from DVD's into iMovie, but of course, it is limited in the size of the file it will accept. So I think I need to cut the files. If someone has a better solution than that, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks in advance,
Jon

[rumplestiltskin]

The 2GB limit has been removed from iMovieHD. I believe it's now about 12GB.

If you need to import into v4, however, buy the QT Pro license. Then you may select portions of the source video (<9min or so), "copy", create a new QT movie, "paste", and "Save as". In the dialog, make it a "reference movie". Repeat this for the rest of the movie. Quit.

Note that the above process will be much easier if you make your start/end selections at the first frame of a scene and the last frame of a scene so that you don't get any overlaps you would otherwise have to edit out back in iMovie.

Launch iMovie and "Import" the reference movie pieces.

[walleymo]

Thanks for the tips! I think I'll spring for iMovie HD.

[AntnyMD]

iLife '06 is a significant release in my opinion ... iDVD6 is worth the $79 by itself.

[terryj]

or, if you want FREE,
( for reasons of your own),
and want to thus stay with iMovie 4
You can do a search on google for
Quicktime Scripts or MOV2DVparts
and get the MOV2DVparts applescript
which will break you movie into
DV Stream chunks
suitable for import.

[havema-1]

Yes, Oak Street Software has a handy AppleScript that can automatically split DV clips into smaller 9 minute chunks which iMovie 1-4 can handle. You can edit the script to other durations.

The script works otherwise OK but it seems the Mov2DVparts script currently drops a frame at every split seam except the very first seam.

And: unfortunately the script no longer works with QuickTime 7.

http://www.oakstreetsoftware.com/qtscript.html#dvsplit

Anopther options is to split the video into smaller chunks by cutting & pasting to new QT Player reference.movs. I prefer to cut because then it is easier to keep track what part of the movie is processed. Just remember NOT to save the source when closing it!

I recently tried some other split tools but they seemed to save their export as DV-encoded .mov, not as plain .dv streams which iMovie uses internally. So those splitted files have to be re-converted to .dv which takes unnecessary time and space.