Editing 550D Videos

The bad thing with the Canon 550D is that the videos generated are humongous. At 1280 x 720 50fps, we're doing almost 6MB/s. The generated MOV files are just too unwieldly to handle.

So I've been requested to make another birthday video. To get the video segments on Windows Movie Maker, the MOVs have to be converted into either mpg, wmv or avi. First software of choice is Freemake. The coverted AVIs are pretty laggy on WMM, and the converted MPGs have no video, even though then work fine on VLC. So I turned to online converter Zamzar. This time the generated MPGs work fine on WMM. Only downside is that Zamzar has a 100MB file limit.

Workaround is to get Freemake to convert huge MOV to smaller AVI, then get Zamzar to encode it to MPG. Still getting to video post-conversion - total waste of time and bandwidth. A closer look shows that Zamzar MPGs uses mp1, while Freemake uses mp2. This tells us that WMM doesn't like mp2 MPGs. Good thing the latest version of Freemake can do custom mp1 conversion. We don't even has to mess around with multi-format Zamzar conversions. Just use Freemake, as long as you're using 25fps MPEG1 for the video and 48kHz and 320kbps for the audio.

Another hiccup. After importing all the videos and still photos and putting in the slides and transitions, WMM refuses to save the final video. Says that the source files are missing. What do you mean the source files are missing?! As a workaround, I had to do the edits on WMM, then save the segments one by one. The resulting video files are out of sync, laggy, blurry, and full of green artifacts. Again, Freemake to the rescue. I still used WMM to generate the photo and text slideshows, but I used Freemake to trim the videos, and merge all the files into one.