Exporting from a Mac

[Matthew Max]

Mis queridos amigos, I have a client friend who wants to process videos which he shot with his Mac desktop. Pretty nice Mac, about a year old, and I don't know what kind it is, but it's nice.

He purchased equipment recently based on information I got from y'all. So we've got those bases covered. Now I need to know how to tell him (long distance or Facetiming) how to create mp4's on his Mac. Can you tell me?

(Of course you can!)

[Steve Grisetti]

What model of camcorder are his original videos coming from and what resolution and format are they? (I assume they're MOVs, but even MOVs can have have hundreds of possible codecs, depending on how they were created.)

What video editing or processing programs does he have available?

What does he plan to do with his MP4s once they're output? Post them to YouTube, put them on DVDs, etc.?

[Matthew Max]

He's shooting the movies with his Mac computer, right out of its eye. I don't think he knows what software he has on the machine to edit with. I wonder if any Muvipix people know. I believe Apples come with basic editing capabilities, like Windows always came with the old Movie Maker.

The videos will be put on YouTube. (But he's been trying to upload 1.5 gig files! So it has to be pretty raw footage.)

[Steve Grisetti]

If he's on an iMac, he pretty likely has at the very least iMovie, which will do just fine. He should even be able to edit and process his webcam recordings with it.

And saving the result as an MP4 should be as simple as following the prompts. (Note that sometimes Macs output MP4s as MOV files -- but they're still just MP4s with .mov suffixes.)

[Matthew Max]

Ah! That what I wanted to know. Thanks, Steve.

Now...the other thing: how do you change .mov to mp4? My computer rejects the .mov.

[Steve Grisetti]

Have you got the Quicktime Player installed on your computer, MM? If so, you should be able to play virtually any MOV. (As I said above, Quicktime movies come in hundreds of flavors, but most of the common ones use pretty standard codecs.)

If not, let us know and we'll dissect that MOV and find out what's inside. I've never heard of a Mac shooting video "right out of its eye" -- so no telling for sure what's in that file. But most likely it does use a fairly common codec.

BTW, when you say your computer rejects the file, you mean that you can't play it, right? You're not talking about using it in a specific program, like Premiere Elements or Movie Studio, right?