The LifeMaven

Sorry for the missing post last night, it was my girlfriend’s birthday AND I had a presentation due today.

I spent the better part of last night, (after spending time with my girlfriend of course) working on editing an mp4 movie in Avidemux.

I figured that my experience with it would be a great topic for a post, since I spent a good amount of time trying to get it to do what I wanted.

First of all, you can download the program here.

This is just a basic tutorial on how to cut a video. (In other words, this is exactly what I was trying to figure out >_>)

You can click on the images below to get the full size version and see what’s really going on.

After installing and opening the program you get this:

Next thing you’ll want to do is open the video file you want to edit by going to File->Open then browsing for the file you want.

That brings you to this screen, with the video being sample in the black window in the center.

I was trying to cut out the beginning and ends of the video leaving a small scene from the middle.

To do that, drag the progress bar to where you want your clip to begin.

So, in this example, I’m editing a clip of the fantastic web series Red vs. Blue.

Don’t worry, no spoilers.

Anyway, back to Avidemux; I only want the part of this video with the red soldier.

I drag the progress bar until the preview shows me where I want the clip to start.

The two other items I’ve circled are the Frame Number and the Time. This gives you another, more accurate way to keep track of where you want your markers to be. You might want to take those numbers down in case you have to find the exact spot again later and your computer crashes or you move the progress bar again. Then you could just use the frame number to get back to the same spot.

Since I want the clip to start here, I press the Marker B button, seen here:

When I do that, the blue box appears on the progress bar. This is the current selection. To remove that from the clip, just press the Delete key on your keyboard.

Then you end up with this:

The progress bar has now moved back to the beginning, but the output window is showing the point that we selected.

For deleting all of the video after a certain point, you would follow the same process, but use the Marker A button instead.

Press Delete.

This shows what your progress bar will look like after you’re done cutting the clip. Now we just need to output and save. The setting that I used last night was: Auto -> Ipod. This tells the program to automatically choose the correct codecs based on the output you want. The next screen should then be:

You then use the drop down box to select the Target Type you want. For me, I wanted MP4 format, but pretty good quality so I chose PSP full res. Click OK, and you’ll notice that the settings have changed in the circled boxes.

So now all the options are done, we just need to save and run the conversion. Go to File->Save->Save Video and then choose where you want the file to save. You also need to add the file extension yourself, so in this example we’re saving in PSP format, we’d name our file FILENAME.MP4 with file name as whatever name you like.

You should then get the progress window:

Followed by another window saying DONE when the progress is completed. And that’s it! You’ve just made your own clip.

Now if you really want to get fancy, like I had to do for my project, you might want to convert from MP4 format to WMV so that you can use it in a Windows PowerPoint presentation without any issues.

I used an online converter found here.

The conversion time is generally pretty quick, but you’re limited to files of 100MB or less. All you need to do is upload your file and specify the format you want. All of the converting is done for you and you download the finished product when it’s ready. There might be a limit on the number of conversions you can do, but I’m not quite sure.

That’s it! You can now cut your own video clips for free without needing to fork over a ton of cash to Adobe or Apple.

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