macmacosquicktimevideovideo editing
For whatever reason, my camcorder saves recorded videos as "clips" all bundled into a massive AVCHD movie file. I can open each clip individually and manually export it through Quicktime, but this is a time consuming process I would prefer to automate. What is the best way to automate exporting each of these individual "clips" into their own movie files?
For reference, the "clips" view that shows upon opening the huge AVCHD file looks like the following:
If you have QuickTime 7 Pro, this is as easy as copy and paste.
Then you can save the combined movie.
Of course, it is likely you don't already have QuickTime 7 Pro already installed. Apple charge extra for QuickTime Pro (£20) which may not be worthwhile for you if you don't use it much. Also, if you are using Snow Leopard, that includes QuickTime X which doesn't have a Pro version available. In that case you'd need to install QuickTime 7 in addition to QuickTime X.
I imagine there has to be a way to do it with iMovie as well, but I don't have experience with that. Perhaps someone else might.
The easy way is to export instead of save. You can go to File → Export → iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch & Apple TV...
Then pick an option.
iPod touch & iPhone 3GS is the one that give you the smaller file size with a resolution of 640×400.
For the screenshot I test it with a video of 6.9 MB.
Best Answer
I ended up just opening each file in QuickTime and exporting each clip manually. It wasn't the optimal solution, but did get the job done.
For future viewers, showing package contents on the video file did yield a set of individual movie files in MTS format. I defaulted to manually exporting each clip, however, because I wanted the files in MP4 and didn't have access to a video converter app. However, that would have been a viable option as well.