As I blogged on Friday, I wanted to have some stuff up this weekend of a video nature, but my video options are being very, very uncooperative. I have an OLD version of Final Cut on the Mac, but it has since been corrupted and can’t be used right now. Still, it’s a sledgehammer when many times a simple stapler will do.
In this case, I have video of a shell session (like a DOS command line) showing how to use Subversion to upgrade WordPress. I actually I have another unrelated video as well, but they have two things in common: they need their audio replaced with another audio track (recorded on a better mic). Now if it was a straight 1:1 audio swap, that’s trivial. But I do need the help of a video editor w/rudimentary capabilities to stretch out the video on a frame for a few seconds extra, or whatever, to make sure the audio is synced up. Simple stuff that they all can do if the audio/video is muxed together, but not so much if discrete tracks.
iMovie ’07 (I refused to upgrade to ’08, which would have actually put me backwards in this too) can do all this easy, except it MUST convert the video to one of DV (720×480)/DVwide or MP4 (640×480). The captured video is not in a “standard” broadcast dimension, so converting into iMovie ruins it, especially because of the text on the screen, in this case. QTPro can do simple video editing but not replacing sound unless it’s a perfect 1:1 swap.
Anybody have experience with 3rd party video shareware/cheap editors that can do basic editing of this kind while allowing for add’l audio track but play nice with QuickTime and non-std formats too? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But I can be surprised. 