Tuesday 27 September 2011

A film makers guide to Mpeg Streamclip

By Mitchell Blackwood


Mpeg Streamclip is a great piece of completely free software - yes free! That allows you to transfer and encode videos easily into different formats and codecs.

It is readily available on Macintosh and Windows xp. The software was developed by Squared 5 and may also be saved from their website.

It is possible to use MPEG Streamclip to open up, play and edit video clips with cut, insert and copy functionality. The promoted input types: M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, .

I take advantage of Mpeg Streamclip to transcode the H264 files created by my own Canon 5DMk2 to Pro res LT preceding importing to Final cut pro 7. It's worth observing that although MPEG Streamclip absolutely does include a whole bunch of codecs built in, the Prores codecs used by apples Final Cut Pro are only readily available if Final Cut Pro is set up on your computer. This too is true for Avid's codecs - DNX is only readily available if Avid Composer or an alternate editing application by Avid is installed on on your computer system.

I'm mostly a Final Cut Pro Operator, and FCP actually does has the power to encode H264 files into ProRes in-built, unfortunately I have found it to (possibly) be much slower than MPEG streamclip and in many cases fairly unreliable sometimes bizzarely slicing the bottom end off several of my clips while transcoding, so my preferred option is to batch import into MPEG streamclip and save all of these files off to my Raid drive, these converted files will be then brought in into Final Cut Pro.

Also I Choose MPEG Streamclip to gather facts on a particular video file for example - frame rate, frame overall size and codec. A small amount of of this information is readily obtainable simply by right clicking on a video file and getting info but even more information and detail is always presented in Streamclip by going to the file menu and after that hitting 'show stream info'.

Occasionally I'm asked to clone DVD's for editing mainly when ever a client wants a showreel. I previously used to attempt this just by playing the DVD into Final Cut Pro using a firewire connection, it's a sluggish and repetitious process which often actually leaves you with considerable editing to take out the top and end of the file additionally you really have to sit there watching it, as the software will just keep on recording the DVD menu once your movie has finished.

But by using MPEG streamclip, transcoding a DVD will become incredibly easier - simply just load the DVD on the computer system right after which prevent it from playing with the inbuilt DVD player. Open MPEG Streamclip and browse through to the details of your Dvd movie disc. Import the largest video file directly into the MPEG streamclip package.

It will now ask if you'd like to launch a video stream - Yes! Decide on your file format and codec and the place you need to save it and you can let it start working. Simple.

Which means, to sum up, MPEG streamclip is an especially recommended bit of free software that I wouldn't do without. Did I state it's free!




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1 comment:


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