Help with movie conversion for Mac

ecoleman · 12 Nov 2012

Hi

I've just bought a Fuji bridge camera for my son as he has expressed an interest in photography and there no way in hell he's getting his hands on my kit just yet.

He has my old iMac so will use iPhoto for the photos and would like to use iMovie for the video but it seems iMovie does not read .avi file format.
Does anybody know of any useful utilities to convert .avi to a compatible iMovie format. Preferably free, but happy to pay a small fee.

I've google this and there seems to be a few out there, but wondering if anybody has any particular experience with anything .

rssmrry · 13 Nov 2012

Handbrake is pretty good. Should do what you want and is free too which is nice. On my mobile so can't be sure of the right URL but I think it's handbrake.fr

ecoleman · 14 Nov 2012

Thank you, will take a look.

srichards · 14 Nov 2012

There's also vlc. That's free too. It plays as well as converts. Pretty sure it does avi.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-media-components-quicktime

I used to have the flip4mac extension above which let you play avi files more easily.

jhdee · 16 Nov 2012

I use ffmpeg for most of my conversions - and its free. Will convert some formats that handbrake doesn't.

Find it here http://www.ffmpegx.com for Mac OS

Adow2 · 16 Nov 2012

Plus one for handbrake - nice and easy to use, never let me down.

ecoleman · 16 Nov 2012

srichards said:
There's also vlc. That's free too. It plays as well as converts. Pretty sure it does avi.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-media-components-quicktime

I used to have the flip4mac extension above which let you play avi files more easily.

Thank you. I have VLC but can't see where to convert files?

ecoleman · 16 Nov 2012

Well take a look at handbrake and ffmpeg, thanks everyone.