Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Free Video Editors for .MOV files

Avidemux 2.5 http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

If you take lots of home videos in .MOV format, you might like this handy little program that allows you to delete unwanted segments of your video easily. All you need to do is to view your video, mark a point A and a point B on the video and select Cut from the Edit menu, and the segment between A and B will disappear. Its scroll button allows you to move frame by frame along your video file enabling you to make the selection of the unwanted segment with precision.

This program is also great for taking out advertisements on recorded programs, or extracting segments that you want to incorporate into other videos.

It will edit almost every video format including MOV files which many editors cannot handle, and will save it in its original file type or an alternative such as AVI or MPEG. It is freeware.

Movavi Video Editor Free Edition
Works almost the same way. You mark the beginning of a segment that you do not want, then mark the end of this segment, and cut it away using the cut tool.
If you do want the segment, instead of cutting it away, you can split the video file at selected spots and delete the portions that you do not want.

But this handy little program seems to be no longer available. I downloaded it once but subsequently could not find either the original an updated version of this program.

AVI trimmer http://www.solveigmm.com/?Products&id=AVITrimmer
is another small and free program that will remove segments that you do not want but it will not read .mov files. It works fine with most of the other video formats.

Pinnacle's Video Spin http://www.videospin.com/Redesign/
Wanted a payment for the enhancement to read .MOV files.

Jahplayer http://www.jahshaka.org/
could not read .MOV files

Advanced Video Editing http://softwaredepo.com/v-editing.html
Did not work for me. This software converts video frames to image files. Also it did not read .MOV files.