Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote.
First step: The Cutting
To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard).I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu (Command + T).
Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position.
Then I clicked “Save As” from the File menu (Command + Shift + S)
To know more about Quicktime X, also check out our article on using it to do quick screencasting.
Second Step: The Conversion
In the computer world, the name Handbrake is identical with video converting. This open source application is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. In late November 2009, Handbrake just released its latest version: 0.94 with several new features and changes.To me, the most notable change is the speed. This is because the latest Handbrake is already supporting 64-bit while the old ones are still in 32-bit. This allows the 64-bit build to utilize the real power of Intel Core 2 Duo, even if your Mac is still under Leopard.
Please note that this speed-up applies only to the Mac and Linux versions. Windows users are still stuck with the old 32-bit for some more time.
To convert the video file, I selected the clipped presentation video file by clicking “Source” and browsed to the location. To speed up the process, you could use the search feature.
If you know what you are doing, you can add more presets to the list by clicking the Plus (+) button on the lower part of the side window.
You could also do several conversions one after another by putting the configured video file to the queue and clicking “Source” to add others.
A Little Experiment
I was curious. I felt that the 64-bit build is faster. But is it really faster? I wanted to compare both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds head to head. Fortunately, I still keep an older version of Handbrake. For the sake of comparison, I reinstalled version 0.93 (the 32-bit build) and did the exact same conversion of the same movie file on the same machine.On a smaller size movie file, the difference is not really notable. But with larger files, the 64-bit build is clearly faster.
These are the comparisons I did using one and a half hours of .avi movie:
32-bit – about 20 minutes (because the ETA counter moved up and down)
Don’t forget to check out our older article about using Handbrake to convert a DVD for the iPod.
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