Home > Merge Movies


Video tutorial: "How to merge movies"


Imagine you have several movie clips about Parkour and want to merge them together for a "theme night" with friend. (By the way, do you know how to download movies from the Internet ?)


To make your "theme movie", you don't have to edit the shorts, but just to put them together.


How to merge

Just open the first movie, and place the playhead (blue knob) at the end of the movie with Alt-Right arrow. This is the point where the next movie will be inserted.

Drag the second file from the Finder and drop it into the Movie View.

If the movies have different sizes in pixels, SimpleMovieX will ask to confirm and resize the dropped movie to match the other.


HelpMerge.jpg


For the next movies, do the same: Place the playhead at the end with Alt-Right arrow, then drag from Finder and drop on Movie View.


Merging several movies in one shot

If you select several movies in the Finder at once, and drag them to a blank document window, you are offered the choice of merging them ordered by name or by date.


This is very useful when you have a collection of movies from your camera, and you want to merge them into one movie.

A chapter marker is created for each movie file, so you can easily navigate inside the merged file. If you want to get rid of the chapters, go to Tools > Chapters, and select Delete All Chapter Markers in the action menu.


MergeMultiple.jpeg



Now a bit more difficult: Merging from several open movies

Imagine that you want to merge several episodes of your favorite TV show, but don't want to include opening and closing credits of each episode.

(You may also want to cut commercials, but that's another story).


In this case, you open each episode, and cut the credits. The final assembly is made through copy and paste:

Place the playhead at the end of the first movie.

Select All and Copy the edited contents of the second movie.

Switch back to first movie, do Paste.


HelpMerge2.jpg


What about Saving ?

Once you're done, you want to save it.

The most common choice is to save in the original format, for example if I've merged 3 MPEG files, to create an MPEG file. This may not be possible if you have assembled movies with different characteristics. See Saving and Converting for more information.

If "Native Saving" is not possible, the fallback solution is to save in QuickTime format.


The other option is to create a "Playlist" with File>Save RefMovie. This is super-fast, but does not copy the movies 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.