Continue reading »]]> The Mac has long been the homestead for effective and easy video editing, graphic design, and video compressing for many professionals and novices alike. Maybe you want to throw together a few video clips. Maybe you have more time and want to fine-tune every edit. Or maybe you just want to flip through clips the way you flip through album covers in iTunes. To accomplish these tasks, you don’t really need invest on professional video editors like Final Cut Pro and Avid Studio. If you are at all interested in getting your creative juices flowing, video wise, iMovie works fine for novices. If, however, iMovie can’t import or handle your video in the way you want, there are lots of other smaller and still great apps available. Want to get your hands on some decent iMovie alternatives for satisfying all your video editing needs? Well, we’ve come up Top 5 iMovie alternatives that will take care of your tweaking requirements on Mac.

1. Media Magician for Mac

Media Magician for Mac is a user-friendly package for AVCHD transferring, compressing and entry-level video editing. It’s very handy to back up AVCHD (and other HD video recordings) to Mac HDD and export their own short film with just some simple editing, which is quite intuitive- any video from the media library can be dragged and dropped to the timeline where you cut video by frame-accurate, trash undesired frames, join multiple AVCHD clips together, set video effect including 3D Red-Blue/Red-Cyan effect, mute (or articulate) audio, rotate video, take snapshot, etc.

What set Media Magician apart from other video editing software is its massive import and export formats. Comparing with iMovie, this app accepts much more formats: MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI, MKV, MTS, M2TS, TOD, MOD, MOV, MXF, VOB, ect. Any video can be thrown in it for editing. In terms of export format, it’s also impressive, there are Lossless M2TS/MKV output is intended for seamless merge of multiple AVCHD clips; under Editor tab there are intermediate codecs such as Apple Intermediate codec, ProRes 422, Avid DNxHD so that professionals can further edit their artwork natively in Final Cut Pro, Avid, Adobe AE, etc; the Online tab offers a time-saving way for users to upload their work to YouTube; also there’s a Device tab under which you can find hundreds of presets for almost all the devices that play video, from tablets and smartphones to HD media players and video game console. This really makes sense for average users who has no idea what codecs are or what format to use- just find your device in the list and choose the preset.

Price: $45

Requires: Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), Snow Leopard (10.6), Lion (10.7), and Mountain Lion (10.8)

2. Adobe Premiere Elements

Adobe Premiere Elements 10 is the newest update to Adobe’s popular consumer video editing application. Premiere Elements is inexpensive, well designed, and easy to learn. Premiere Elements has both a storyboard and a more traditional timeline view. You can polish, add effects and export to YouTube, HD Video or to DVD.

Premiere Elements 10 also has the unique capability to export to Blu-Ray, although the Mac has yet to gain Blu-Ray burning capability. You can also keyframe by keyframe edit effects and transitions.

Price: $79.99

Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later

3. Mac iMedia Converter

You may want to edit a file or post a video file and that file is not compatible with your system. When you run across this problem you need to convert the file. The easiest way is to use a file converter like iMedia Converter.

iMedia Converter is easy to use and accepts many file formats. It also includes batch convert functionality. As an added value, iMedia Converter includes direct conversion and ripping from a Blu-ray disc or DVD!

Price: $52

Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

4. Final Cut Pro X

Sometimes you just need a real pro tool for the job. When those times call, answer with Final Cut Pro X! Apple upped in 2011 the ante by releasing Final Cut Pro X for only $299.99. FCPX has gained speed improvements, ease of use improvements, and many of iMovie’s looks and features. Although I still use FCP 8, FCPX is awesome for many projects and will come in handy if you get real serious.

Final Cut Pro X has many features to covet. The best includes magnetic timeline, built-in audio editor, a new 64bit architecture, faster rendering, built in effects, and a simpler to use color grading effect. Being that the price is hundreds of dollars lower the FCStudio, I could not recommend it enough.

Price: $299.99

Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later

5. Aurora3DAnimation

If you want to make your own 3D text or logo animation, normally you would have to use complex 3D graphics software and animate it yourself in After Effects. This is a tedious process that requires a huge skill set and thousands of dollars. With Aurora3DAnimation, you can easily create and animate 3D text and logos the exact way you want them without learning new skills. It could not be any easier!

Aurora3DAnimation offers beautifully designed templates, freehand control, light control, a built in graphic library, and excellent export capabilities. At only $49.99 you are not only saving hundreds of dollars, but many headaches!

Price: $49.99

Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later; 64-bit processor

Hope you love this roundup! Can you help me to share it for helping more guys? Thanks.

Continue reading »]]> Question:

“I am running Final Cut Pro 7 on Mac OS X Lion 10.7. From the age of 8, I would like to collect all kinds of DVDs or Blu-rays, and and some came from my friends, now I’m 20 years old, I want to extract part of the meaning from these DVD discs to Final Cut Pro X for editing, and then I can make DVD video as I want, as myself birthday gift, at the same time, also regard it as my childhood memories, a souvenir. So, is there a tool can convert movies from DVD to Final Cut Pro compatible formats? I’ve been hearing some free video converter tool and tried. However, the video quality is very bad after the conversion. Or FCP does not support the converted codec. Now, I only want a simple workflow with Final Cut Pro. Any suggestions. Thanks!”

For Mac users, Final Cut Pro 7 is really a very good tool to edit DVD movies. However, before loading DVD movies to Final Cut Pro 7 for editing, we need to do some work in advance.

As far as I know, the best compatinle video codec for working in Final Cut Pro is Apple ProRes Codec, which uses I-frame–only (intraframe) encoding, providing faster rendering and real-time playback performance, and has a generous color sample ratio and bit depth, allowing for higher-quality rendering of visual effects. So if you want to edit DVD movies in Final Cut Pro 7 without loss of quality, you may have to convert DVD to ProRes 422 or ProRes 4444 MOV under Mac OS X Lion 10.7. Here I recommend you a powerful Mac DVD to ProRes Converter – Pavtube Mac iMedia Converter, the program designed for Mac users to edit and rip DVDs to almost all other popular video and audio format.

Instructions

Mac iMedia Converter is a practical app helping you Covnert DVD to ProRes 4444 in MOV format. It supports convert Blu-ray, DVD, ISO files and 1080p cameras/camcorders footages to Apple ProRes 422, Apple ProRes 422 (LT), Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy) and Apple ProRes 4444, any of which would be nicely accepted by Final Cut Pro. It also can transcode all videos and movies to editable HD video formats for non-linear editing software like iMovie, Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro X, Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe Premiere etc. The HD footage can be compressed to SD video clips for storage when you wanna save storage space.

ProRes 422 (Proxy) – For craft editing or offline editing on a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

ProRes 422 (LT) – For projects such as news, sports, and multicam events that require reduced file sizes at broadcast quality.

ProRes 4444 – For compositing and digital workflows that require the highest-possible image fidelity.

Guide: How to convert DVD movies to ProRes 4444 MOV for Final Cut Pro 7 on Mac OS X?

Free Download Mac DVD to ProRes Converter.

Step 1. Install and run this Mac iMedia Converter. Bring out your DVD disk movie, insert it into your Mac DVD Rom, click “” icon, load DVD files, you’ll see all the DVD info listed in the software.

Step 2. Check the needed chapter or titles to be transcoded, and then choose the ideal output video format. For example, you can select “Final Cut Pro” -> “Apple ProRes 4444 (*.mov)“, or “Final Cut Pro” -> “Apple ProRes 422 (*.mov)“, etc

If necessary, you can change the a/v parameters by entering into “Settings” window.

Step 3. Specify an output folder to store the final Apple ProRes MOV files, this step is optional, if you don’t set it, the final videos will be saved in the default folder.

Before transcode DVD to ProRes MOV, you can also make some simple DVD editing with the Mac iMedia Converter: Trim DVD, split DVD, crop DVD, merge DVD, effect DVD, etc.

Finally, click “Convert” button to start converting DVD to ProRes 4444 or ProRes 422.

When the conversion finishes, you can open the MOV video files, and import MOV to Final Cut Pro 7 for editing.

If you want to make fantastic video, you can refer to the article – How to burn MOV files to DVD on Windows?