Federico Pistono

The Creative Vado HD and the Flip Mino HD are great. A portable tiny device that records videos in HD (720p).

720p is not the full 1080 HD, but it's fairly good quality and more than enough for web usage, most of the websites only support so much (YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion). Imagine you would like to edit the footage, using a non linear video editing program such as iMovie, Premiere, Cinelerra or even better Final Cut Pro, there is immediately a problem: you can't get the footage work out of the box, some tweaking is required.

There are many ways to solve this issue and get usable working files, I will illustrate the most effective method I found, as well as the easiest.

• download and install HandBrake, it works on Linux, OS X as well as Windows
• open the video file and choose the following settings: MP4 file, no rescaling, average variable bitrate 7500 kbps
  
• You can either add to queue or process the file by clicking start
• Once you have to MP4 file, add it to you timeline and tell Final Cut to adjust the settings.

Once you've done that you'll be able to finally edit the file smoothly, you will just need to render the audio track, which takes a few seconds at maximum.

It is of course possible to open every single video with this method and convert all of your library. But if you have something like, I don't know, a thousand video files to convert, as I do, you might want to get smart.

Download and install HandBrakeCLI, the command line client for HandBrake and save in a directory in your $PATH (for example /usr/local/bin). Make sure you give the file the permission to execute. Suppose you downloaded the file in your Desktop, open a terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop *enter*
chmod +x HandBrakeCLI *enter*
sudo mv HandBrakeCLI /usr/local/bin *enter*
*insert password*  *enter*

*enter* of course doesn't mean to type *enter*, but to actually press the enter button on your keyboard. Next, create a file with the preferred text editor and save it as mp4fullhd.sh in you /usr/local/bin directory.

#!/bin/sh
for i in $@; do
  HandBrakeCLI -i $i -o $i.mp4  --preset="PS3" --vb 7500
done

OK, now the shell script is ready to run and do all this nasty job for you. Open a terminal and move to the directory where the video files are located (that could be easily done with the command cd /path/to/dir or even simply by dragging the directory in the terminal after the cd command) and type the following command:

mp4fullhd.sh *.AVI

This will convert all the AVI files in your directory to readable MP4 H264 encoded video file, with more or less the same quality. Launch the command and go out with your friends, or make some tea, it will take a while. :)

After you are done you can delete the original AVI or MP4 files, of course I suggest to always keep a backup somewhere else. Those who follow this blog closes may be asking themselves: "Why didn't he use mencoder?". In fact, I did, I have also a working version that uses mencoder and mplayer, but I wanted to make a guide that could be comprehensible and easily applicable also to those who don't have any experience with compiling and configuration.

That's all mates, this will hopefully save you a lot of time and allow you to edit in all tranquility.

Happy editing! >_<