I want to combine video and audio clips from various media into one file for use when running a weekend long retreat. Is there a particualr program that is best suited for that? And, I then want to use iMovie to edit same. Is there a preferred format for the media I will input? Thank you.
Mac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
iMovie will edit audio well, to a point.
It is good for editing the camcorder audio, and then adding music, sound effects, or voiceovers.
However, it is not good at combining camcorder video with a better recording of the same event. Say you are recording a band, and you have cameras, but for sound you want to use professional microphones and combine the audio and video later. For this, I would recommend Final Cut Pro X.
Here are some resources for understanding how audio works in iMovie.
First watch this Tutorial from iMovie 08 days.
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/imovie08.html#audioclips
Next, watch the video called All New Audio Editing to see some of the new features added with iMovie 11.
For best results, your audio files should be in AIFF or WAV format. You can convert in iTunes if you need to.
AAC and MP3 will also work, but they are highly compressed, and can cause problems, so stick with AIFF for trouble free audio editing.
Quicktime Player 7 is actually quite a powerful little application. You can do far more with it than just playing movies. For example, you can open up several movies, and copy and paste them into each other to create one long movie. Then you can save the resulting movie either as a reference Quicktime, which just points to the original files, or as a self-contained movie, which should be playable anywhere. You can also export the movie to a different format if you need to transcode it. Or Just tested Video Joiner - it indeed works flawlessly, without having to reencode. Sorry - I didn't know it's actually able to export joined videos without reencoding. I had thought it can't.
The latest version of iTunes should have the capability of importing them, however, you may have to convert them to AAC using iTunes. It is in the menues somewhere. But It seem that that's only in the Windows version via a built in Windows API for re-encoding WMA files. For mac computer. I use a program called audio converter, it converts wma to mp3. You can try that.
Combine video and audio clips... Edit with iMovie?
