DIY Video: 10 User-Generated Content Tools You Can't Live Without

The solution is to use MPEG demultiplexing tools such as ffmpeg, which is useful if you are happy to use command line tools. Various GUI control panels have been built around ffmpeg so that you can access it more easily. Because this is open source software, it is available on all platforms.

Converting between the formats is something that I like to do within a QuickTime toolkit-based environment, provided I have the right codecs installed. I can plug in different import and export tools to access the formats that QuickTime didn’t already support natively. Flip4Mac, RealMedia, and Perian are all useful plug-ins on Mac OS. Always go for the pro version if you can afford the extra cost. It may be a few dollars more, but you’ll often get export tools as well as import tools.

Convert the clips into a format that you can use in your NLE. At the low end, that means DV files. At the high end, you can use more professional formats that preserve the color space better. Look for tools that work with 4:2:2 quality material. It is a better color space to work in.

File Splitting and Joining
You often need to top and tail clips to trim unwanted footage back to the core program material. Anything you record off air will probably need to be tidied up, and you may want to remove the advertising breaks. I find that the ads are sometimes creatively very interesting to study and so sometimes remove them from the program but keep them for future reference. They often suggest some very creative effects or camera techniques.

This all requires that you can split a file into pieces or extract a segment from the middle and close it up where that segment was removed.

The iMovie application is just great for this sort of job. Just position the playhead where you want to cut, and press Command+T to slice the clips. It is all done nondestructively, so your original clip is still intact. Then drag the unwanted segment to the bin so you can review or discard it later.

This slicing of video is possible at the command line level with other video tools, but it is so much easier to do interactively because you locate the cut points visually.

Some tools will automatically segment the clips for you using scene changes. That’s useful too. It isn’t 100% reliable, but it is a helpful starting point.

MPEG2 Works is a great tool for working directly on MPEG-2, DivX, and VOB files. Splitting the files so they fit onto multiple volumes is useful, but there isn’t a lot of visual feedback about what is happening.

You can use your high-end NLE to split or join multiple clips. This is fundamentally what an NLE is designed to do. If you are working with MPEG-2 material and don’t want to convert it, MPEG-2 Works will help you again with splicing clips together. Your NLE would need to convert the files before it can work on them, and that might degrade the quality. You may need to convert the files if you want to do frame-accurate cuts. This will depend on the software being smart enough to splice MPEG-2 files while preserving the internal structure.