Video Toolchain

Phew. This is challenging.

Using my phone's camera (plus Blender for graphics), I am trying to get good at posting Youtube videos ( http://youtube.com/user/DrFooBarson ).

I am stuck using Windows, so some of the Open-Source tools are not available to me (for now). Here is the tool chain so far.

Audio(Edit)

My phone's "Voice Recorder" app produces .amr files.

I use the Mobile AMR Converter to convert them to .wav, then use Audacity to edit.

Video(Edit)

Conversion(Edit)

My phone's camera produces .3gp files, and so far I have found these methods of transcoding:

ffmpeg, e.g.:

ffmpeg -i VIDEO_001.3gp Foo.wmv
ffmpeg -i VIDEO_001.3gp Foo.mpg
ffmpeg -i VIDEO_001.3gp -vf hflip,vflip -r 24 -vcodec rawvideo Foo.avi

Format Factory

Analyzing(Edit)

An odd-interfaced but decent tool is MediaInfo. It will happily show the video codecs, dimensions, framerate, etc.

Graphics(Edit)

Blender and The GIMP

Editing(Edit)

Amazingly, the only free video program I have found to remotely work is Windows Movie Maker. But WMM barely works. When I import a .mpg, sometimes the video is worthless. When I import a .wmv, sometimes everything works except for, get this, saving the final movie. It takes a massive amount of determination and combinations of attempts to get something to work. (Note: I am slowly learning the Blender Video Editor. Maybe that can obsolete WMM for me.)

A new approach I took was doing the editing on the command-line using mpgtx. Example usage:

mpgtx -j Foo.mpg [00:00:15-00:01:30] [00:01:45-] -o Out.mpg

An interesting note: .mpg's can be concatenated together. E.g.: