Home > Saving and Converting
Once you're done with editing, it's time to save your work.
The important thing to remember is: You can't always save your work in the original format.
What ? Wasn't this supposed to be a nice movie editor for the rest of us ?
OK, we're not perfect, but SimpleMovieX is still probably one of the best product to this regard: It supports native editing of QuickTime, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.
Understanding limitations
Saving has a few limitations coming from the underlying multimedia technology. First of all, some codecs are one-way, they just open and decode but cannot encode or save. This is the case for example of mp3. In this case, the only possible saving options are QuickTime format, that always works, or re-encoding if the codec allows to do it.
Re-encoding means loss of quality and a very lengthy process.
QuickTime format is great as long as the "final customer" can read it. For example, set-top boxes can usually read DivX AVI and MPEGs, but not QuickTime format.
The second limitation is related to container format capabilities. While QuickTime can do almost anything, MPEG and AVI cannot handle chapter, resizing or mixing media from several sources. Therefore, for AVI, MPEG, the following actions will be discarded when saving:
and finally mixing media from incompatible sources will probably force you to save in QuickTime format.
A lot of ways to save your work
- File>Save tries to keep same file location and format.
- File>Save As... gives you the choice of location and of format.
- File>Export or Convert is a different way to save a movie. It involves re-encoding the media to the same or to a different codec and format, thus is very slow and involves some quality loss.
- Save RefMovie... is like regular QuickTime format saving, but without "flattening". It means that SimpleMovieX doesn't copy the media data, just the recipe to describe the movie. You can think of it as a kind of playlist where you can specify which chunks of movies are played in sequence. The main advantage is speed and low file size, the main drawback is fragility as if you move or delete any of the referenced media data, the RefMovie can be lost.
Go to Home
To learn more, consult related topics Native Editing, Glossary and Concepts