Video Editing On Mac

I have been making a few YouTube videos with iMovie on my Mac. It's free, it's HD, it's awesome.

Really simple and easy. For me, not quite as old-fashioned easy as Final Cut Pro 7, but incredible as it is, since it likes AVCHD footage.

Sad that I wasted $50/month for 6 months with Premiere Pro. What a headache compared to the ease of a Mac product.

About to cut my first 1-hour porn video. I shot the scenes single camera, so should go pretty fine. Two video tracks looks limiting at first, but two video tracks is about what I do most of the time anyway.

I still have FCP7 running, if I need to. Hopefully not. I want to try a little green screen, and haven't gotten to the point of figuring out if chrome-key is native. If iMovie just doesn't cut it, FCPX is - what - $300?? What I wasted on Premiere Pro.

The first thing I did was download an App from the App Store that is an iMovie tutorial. Since Apps auto-update, I've noticed that the iMovie Tutorial App has already updated itself a couple of times!

Thanks, Apple!

I edited my first full-length movie on iMovie10 yesterday.

Very smooth!

First, I had mixed media. I had an hour of AVCHD files, shot last week. I also had 3 .MOV files, from previous shoots with the model in 2005.

I imported the video files into the iMovie Library, and was able to work with them immediately! No converting or waiting on background conversion or rendering.

Selecting the in/out points in each file was easy. There is a poster image object representing each video file, and you scroll your mouse (no clicking) over the poster image to see the video in the file, then point-click-drag-release to select the range (in/out) of the video in the poster that you want to add to your timeline.

I assembled the clips. One scene was shot portrait instead of landscape, so I put a background under it to fill out the full frame. That was easy, backgrounds are built in - or I could have used one of my own.

I did a picture-in-picture with one scene, to merge the video of the models hole getting a massage, with a JO event. That was quite easy.The only part of that that was a struggle is that I needed to crop the JO video, but the crop tool is "fixed" in terms of width-height proportions. The crop isn't individually left, right, top, bottom, it is a rectangle. I hope they fix that.

I did come color correction, white balance using eye dropper. Very slick.

Next, I need to do audio. I have experience doing audio with iMovie10 for Tutorials, so I am not approaching that with any in trepidation.

Next month, I trade in my MacMini desktop for the newest version, which makes me eligible for the free iMovie11. All iMovie versions are free, depending on release date of your hardware. So I have free iMovie on my iPad, MacBookPro and MacMini.

I might then consider FCP X. But the movies I make, just don't require much more than what I did yesterday with iMovie10, usually much less!

The only thing I am disappointed with iMovie10 right now, is that to Export the movie to a file, anything more custom than the built-in output options for YouTube, Facebook media, is a handful of choices for mp4 video. No 720x480 full-size .mov. It estimates that 1-hour of mp4 video will be 1.5GB, but as we all know, 1-hour of 720x480 NTSC .MOV is 13GB!

The 1.3GB mp4 is fine for making a DVD, but VOD platforms do encourage fill-size .MOVs as well.

My first iMovie movie "Travis And Coach Karl" (described above) went live on HotMovies two weeks ago, and on AEBN yesterday. Both debuts were with solid minutes viewed by customers.

I went with the 1280x720p version. It technically is HD, but requiring less processing time than the full 1920x1080i/p HD. So it is more widescreen than SD, and more definition, but less time spent by HotMovies or AEBN to encode and prepare for VOD, than the full-bore 1920x1080p.

It could have gotten there a couple of weeks earlier, but I wanted to time the customer base dealing with the Income Tax deadline, and Lent, Passover, Easter. And, I was distracted with planning my probably-to-be-aborted trip to Dublin May 1, for the Gay Theatre Festival. (Unless someone here wants to give me $175USD/night for Hotel for 21 nights!!!!, Dublin seems to have closed its doors to US working class tourists.)


Friday, I finished my first movie in FCPX! I had also made the same movie in iMovie a couple of weeks ago, using the same process as "Travis And Coach Karl," ut FCPX worked just fine.

I waited until last week, as I wanted to wait to go with FCPX until I got my new computer. In the middle of April, I fulfilled my plan to upgrade my (portable) network. In December I acquired the new MacBook Pro. I had to wait until mid April to upgrade my iPhone, iPad and MacMini, as an important sales channel of mine was going through re-structuring, and was 5 months behind in paying. But on April 4, I got paid in full, plus a couple of months more that planned, so I got the new iPhone, iPad and MacMini, ~$2,400, configured them all, individually and for sharing on my portable and iCloud network, and sold the previous items at ~22% of their original cost 2 and 3 years ago.

Of the Apple software (Programs, Apps) that I use, only Final Cut Pro ($299 with 30-day free trial) and partner Compressor ($50) require purchase. iMovie, iLife, Preview, iPhoto, iWork are all free, and I use several as part of my movie-making process. I also use Toast Titanium ($70?) to burn DVDs, but will no longer need to use Toast to pre-process AVCHD files to .MOV for FCP 7, as FCPX accepts raw AVCHD.


The FCPX learning curve took a couple of days. The current version of FCPX was released in late January, and I am actually very glad that I waited, had to wait to get paid in order to get to order the new MacMini with its 2.6 Intel Core I7 and solid-state HDD. Many of the useful features left out of the original FCPX in its Cavalier release in 2011, that caused Legions of FCP editors to flee to Premiere Pro, have been restored now almost 3 years later. The "magnetic" timeline needs a strong-willed attitude, and stomach, to over-come at times.

There's two-tons of fertilizer in the one-ton truck that is the FCPX work screen.

There's now Libraries. I love Libraries in the real world, but having FCPX manage my video clips in what it calls Libraries is a real pain. It wants to manage my Projects, but I think I can do that better on my own.

So I've made two movies with FCPX. Both fairly simple edits in comparison to the 400 that I have made with FCP 7. 400 of mine, plus over 100-150 for other studios. Assembly of clips, transitions, live sound, music. I also made my "Warnings" clip, with the Copyright statement and Certificate of Compliance for the age requirements, as well as my DVD Movie Menu, which is for the consumer DVD, not VOD.

The harder part of FCPX has to do with the different way it handles cropping, scaling and positioning of video clips, as compared to FCP 7.


Here's the really good news: Compressor. I had had frustrating experiences with Compressor over the years, to the point that I had just let FCP 7 do the Export (Output) itself. The current Compressor is also brand new as of January 2014, and is now successful to use.

I now have a couple of Custom output settings in my Compressor called "AEBN...", in tribute to their (VOD) output purpose!


The only SNAFU I had, which I was able to overcome because my 2.6 I7 processor runs 3X faster than my previous MacMini or iMacs, has to do with the built-in Compressor output setting for DVD MPEG-2. It comes with a bitrate of 9, which DVD Studio Pro does not like. DSP likes a max of 7.5 for SD. You can't edit the built-in settings, but you can "copy" and rename them, and those then become editable. Smart, very smart.

So I have now a path to make a movie in FCPX, output it for VOD, output it for DSP SD DVD, and author a SD DVD.

My next workflow will be to output a 9 bitrate MPEG-2 file for any other DVD authoring software that will accept >7.5 bitrate files, e.g. maybe Toast (I already own it for $70, might as well try to use it). I had iDVD 10 years ago, but it seems that I have not for 7 or more years, and it can't seem to find on-line a path to get anything for more than Lion ~2011.

Will Blu-Ray BD DVD be on the horizon in the (near) future? Seems highly likely!

Thank you for your share. What's a critical tool to edit movies :)