For the longest time now, I've been capturing videos of my kids and family via my Panasonic digital camera DMC-FX01. The native format is M-JPEG compressed stream wrapped in a MOV container. If you are a Windows user, you will simply need to download the free QuickTime player to view the clips on your PC.
Over the years though, the number of clips I have grew and nowadays my family gets pretty bored when we have to sit through all those raw footage from the past. Hence I decided that its about time I pick up video editing to put them out of this misery.
As luck will have it, there is a pretty nice and powerful (for newbies and amateurs of course) video editing software bundled with the XP and Vista operating system called Windows Movie Maker. But alas, it does not support the MOV container format!
The good news is that there is a free and easy to use software called MP4Cam2AVI which can convert your videos from MOV into AVI at just the click of a button! The conversion is really quick if you retain the M-JPEG compression format (plus you don't suffer any loss in quality) and you can even select multiple files at one go! Of course, there is also the option to recompress the videos in XviD format during the converison to shrink the file size.
Although I would love to be able to just download the video files from my camera and start editing straight away, putting up with an extra step that takes just a couple of clicks and no more than a few minutes for the conversion (for free I might add!) is something I can live with.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
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