Working with movie files

More and more digital cameras allow you to shoot small movies. These movies do not have a big resolution and generally cannot be very long but this is still a nice feature. cam2pc brings unique features to manage those small movies. To access those functions, right-click on a movie file in the Image Browser, and display the "Edit Movie" popup.

Set Movie Thumbnail

cam2pc uses a default frame (the frame at the middle of the movie) to create the initial thumbnail for a movie. This frame may not be relevant and you may want to use another one. Once the Set Movie Thumbnail dialog is displayed, seek to the frame you wish to use (you might want to pause the movie to ease the task). Once you are on the right frame click the OK button and that's it!

Cut Movie

Often when you shoot a movie, nothing happens during some part of it. Cutting out these parts makes your movie more enjoyable for future viewing. Select the Cut Movie menu entry. By default your whole movie is selected. You can see its duration under it. You can seek to the positions you wish and use the Set Start and Set End buttons to change the part of the movie you want to keep. For AVI and QuickTime formats, cam2pc can do a lossless cropping by just extracting the relevant information from the original video files but you may also want to recompress it to another format as most digital cameras do not use any compression scheme when storing video so you end up with very big video files. For MPEG-1 files, cam2pc is not able to perform this lossless cropping and recompression is mandatory.

Once you have set the start and end of your selection as you wish. Click the OK button. If you selected "Convert format", the convert movie dialog (see below) will be displayed. Othersiwe you'll be able to give a name to your cut video.

Convert Movie

Converting a movie is a matter of recompressing the video frames and soundtrack of an existing file to another format. cam2pc supports AVI, MPEG-1 and QuickTime formats. For AVI and QuickTime formats, all the codecs installed on the machine are available. For more details about codecs please refer to the Creating video files page. When converting movie the final video width, height and framerate are taken from the original file so you should not have to modify these values.

Rotate Movie

To rotate a movie, cam2pc must extract every single frame of the movie rotate them and rebuild a movie out of the rotated frames (of course keeping the soundtrack). That's why when you select one of the rotation commands, you will be shown the Convert Movie dialog. The width and height will have been exchanged to reflect the change of orientation of your video file.