Lossless join of many small MOV clips does not work

[keim]

Hi,

I have searched the whole internet for a tool, that joins my MOV files created by my video cam losslessly.

When using Avidemux, only the first scene can be viewed, then the movie gets erroneous.

Do I have to make special settings to avoid this failure?

Best,

keim

[styrol]

The settings (video and audio encoding, resolution, frame rate etc) of the clips to be joined have to be the same.

I have searched the whole internet for a tool, that joins my MOV files created by my video cam losslessly.

Have you tried QuickTime based MPEG Streamclip (Freeware) or QuickTime Player Pro?

[keim]

Hi Styrol,

Since the clips are coming from the same camera and are recorded subsequently without breaks long enough to modify the video settings, I strongly assume that the video and audio encoding are identical.

I tried QTPro, which is very uncomfortable (copy paste each single clip). The result could not be processed by DVD flick and seems very QTProPlayer specific.

Avidemux seems most promising but the result video stream is corrupted. I use the MKV format as output container.

I will try MPEG streamclip.

Any ideas, how Avidemux could manage lossless joining of MOV files?

Keim

[Jan Gruuthuse]

If that would fail? Work the other way around. As the 1st clip is loaded and processed by avidemux. Look for a batch processing / command line / scripted conversion with avidemux of the .mov files to .mkv 1st. Then join/cut/edit the new .mkv files?

[styrol]

I tried QTPro, which is very uncomfortable (copy paste each single clip). The result could not be processed by DVD flick [..]
I will try MPEG streamclip.

Open your joined MOV movie (saved by QT Pro) with MPEG Streamclip and save it as MP4 (= no re-encoding, just remuxing into new container; you don't have this option in QT Pro). Open the resulting file in your DVD authoring application.

The result [..] seems very QTProPlayer specific.

No, it's MOV format specific, you can put different (encoded) tracks together into a MOV container as long as QuickTime is supporting theme.

Other non QT apps only support a subset of the abilities of the QT file format, e.g. MOV (MPEG-4 ASP / AAC), MOV (h.264 / AAC) or MOV (MJPG / PCM) and older Codecs like Cinepak.

[keim]

Hi Jan and Styrol,

@Jan: I changed the conatiner from mov to mkv of several clips and tried then to join them: same bad result! After the first clip, the rest of the video turns grey or somehow disturbed.

@Styrol: MPEG streamclip provides exactly the same result as Quicktime, but with a much better handling. Except QT, no application (DVDflick, VLC, AVIdemux, Mediaplayer, ...) is capable of playing the video. Grey after first clip.

Meanwhile, I have spent 20 hours on finding an application, which can losslessly join my clips without success. I also tried the software, which is provided by Nikon, but it is limited on 11 clips. Other tools crashed, when the result file became about 1,5 GB. I can't believe, that I am the only person on this planet, who wants to join videos from his camera...

Thank you.

[styrol]

I can't believe, that I am the only person on this planet, who wants to join videos from his camera...

You may provide (via file hosting service of your choice) 2 short sample files (source files) form your camera.

[keim]

I experienced that the bitrate differs between the mov files. It seems, that only QT-player can handle this.

I found two workarounds:

1) DVD style allows to add files to a chapter, creating many titles. So I can still navigate on the DVD and the joining is done while compression to mpeg

2) I export the joined (and cutted) clips with a nearly lossless avi compression, which forces me to handle with very large files.

Thats not funny, I hoped to join and cut my clips losslessly, saving data storage.

Thanks for your help!