joining videos too slow in iMovie

 If like me you have found that sometimes you just want to join a series of videos from your phone together into one video, iMovie is slow and an overkill ... it takes at least as long as each clip to import each clip, then you have to drag and drop them to the timeline, export as, etc etc.

This is much faster:

on the Terminal, make a shellscript and put this into it. The script just looks at the mp4 files in your current folder and merges them.

#!/bin/bash


rm -f list.txt


for f in *.mp4; do

  echo "file '$f'" >> list.txt

done


ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy output.mp4

Also, if like me you find that MOV files take up tons of space you can convert them to mp4 which is much smaller, like less than half.

In the below, replace input.mov with the movie file name, and output.mp4 with the new file name.

                ffmpeg -i "input.mov" -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac "output.mp4"

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