omino pixel blog

My dad recently transferred all his (our!) old 8mm movie reels to dvd. We’re talking 1957 to 1972 for this first batch. He sent me copies, three dvd’s worth.

It was pretty painless; he used yesvideo.com, which distributes through Costco. I think the pickup and delivery was at Costco. Quality seems a bit blurry, but maybe that’s the source.

Of course, I want to reedit the content a bit, in Final Cut and After Effects and all that. Turns out it was very easy to import the DVD’s into the Mac, in a usable format, with qt_tools!

(Download my command-line qt_tools here.)

The catch is, you need the Apple MPEG-2 Import Component either for $19.99 from Apple, or installed with Final Cut.

All the video lives in a .VOB file. The biggest ones are usually the content you want; the littlest ones are usually menu loops. Using qt_tools, we convert VOB to quicktime. Well, mp4, anyway.

qt_export --dodialog VTS_01_1.VOB ~/mp4s/VTS_01_1.mp4 --savesettings=mp4_pretty_good.st

I found mp4 at about 5000 kbits/second looked ok.

This only works on personal dvd’s, of course. Unencrypted.

qt_tools 2.7 corrects some incompatibilities with Mac OS X 10.5, “Leopard”.

Particularly, the settings dialog could get stuck in a hidden, inoperable state.

That is all.

Subject says it all. Oft requested and long overdue, here is a universal binary (PPC and Intel) build of my Macintosh QuickTime command line tools, “qt_tools”. Sure does compress movies faster than emulating that ol’ Moto cpu.

Sorry for the wait.

I hate to admit it, but I only last week started using an Intel-based Macintosh. A quad-core 2.66GHz, to be precise. I guess it does feel faster than the dual-core 1.25GHz G4 it replaces. And I was very very worried about my software not working.

But fortunately, everything actually does still work! I use Photoshop CS2 and After Effects 7.0 and even DVD Studio Pro 4, and they work fine. (Oh, I’ll be getting the latests for them, when I can. This is personal use costs, and I don’t use pirateware, so it may be a little while. And then they should really click right along, huh?)

Anyway, this post is to report that my free QuickTime command-line utilities qt_tools seem to work fine on this here Intel Macintosh! Hooray.

(I’ve heard reports that they can be recompiled for Intel with about a 50% performance improvement. And I’ll be investigating that as time permits, but porting software from big-endian to little-endian, or biendian, is not to be taken too casually.)

But what is qt_tools?

Well, you can get the full schpiel at the qt_tools page but generally, it lets you transform movies and images at the command line. Here’s some examples.

$ qt_export foo.mov foo.mp4                                   # convert a movie to mp4
$ qt_export bar.wav bar.aif                                   # convert a sound file
$ qt_export --sequencerate=30 frame001.jpg framesAsMovie.mov  # import frames to a movie
$ qt_export big.mov --size=80,60 tiny.mov                     # resize a movie

It’s very handy for some kinds of bulk processing, and certain production flows. If you’re into shell scripting — a very retro and powerful technology!