Our Panasonic Lumix can take Quicktime videos. Our recent post showing a few seconds of backyard action is a compilation of three of those videos, edited to remove shots of the sky, my shoes and other irrelevancies.
We use VideoReDo, an easy-to-use editing program that, unfortunately, can’t accept highly-compressed digital video formats. We wanted a free and simple way to convert the Quicktime .MOV files to MPG-2, a format VideoReDo thrives on.
The simplest free approach we’ve found so far involves:
- Convert from .MOV to .AVI using RAD Tools (http://www.radgametools.com)
- Convert from .AVI to MPG-2 using AVI2VCD (http://home.cogeco.ca/~avi2vcd)
Since your definition of free and mine are likely to be the same, I’ll just define what I mean by simple: can the job be completed after three Merlots while watching a football game over your shoulder in less than half an hour, without errors or the need to consult documentation? These two programs do the job.