50 MOV videos to MP4

Hello,

Thank you for your very usefull software.
I use a lot of stock videos and they all need to be converted from MOV to Mp4.
Somehow my vlc mediaplayer keeps crashing to do 50 video comnversions at once.
Any way to convert several or for example 50 videos to Mp4 wiith shotcut?

Have a great day!
Fred

Yes. Bring all of your mov clips to the Playlist. Go to the Export tab and make sure that where it says “From” it has “Playlist” selected. Then after setting your export options click “Export File”.

@DRM’s method is to convert all MOV files into one MP4.

If you want to convert each file to their own MP4, then still load them into the playlist.
Select “Each Playlist Item” in the export menu.
Give it a name. (will be the name for all exported from the playlist)
shotcut_2021-01-09_16-37-11
This is how the files will be named after export. I typed in “go” for the mp4 name.
shotcut_2021-01-09_16-37-34

Your source files are not actually converted, rather you’re creating new files. Shotcut doesn’t modify any source files.

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Ah, yes! That’s what I meant to write! “Each Playlist Item”. Thanks for the catch @Hudson555x.

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Hi, thank you for the fast replies, saves me a lot of typing and mousing… :slight_smile:
No way to keep the original filename?
As in travel tropical beach.MOV becomes
As in travel tropical beach.MP4 for 50 files?
Sorry to ask saves me a lot of filename copy paste work a few hundred times a day…
Thanks so far!

The export will go in order of how they are in the playlist.
So if you name the file “travel tropical beach”, then export with say 25 items, this is what you’ll see. A number will be posted on the end of each file name.

With export each playlist item, there is no way to keep the original MOV file names. You could always rename them after the export.

Hi, yes that workes thank you very much.
Only the next video is called “baby crawling at home.mov”
I just did 30 videos and it works but I still have to compare all of them and then copy the filename from one to the other.
If the filenames would be kept and converted to .Mp4 as in:
travel tropical beach.MOV => travel tropical beach.Mp4
baby crawling at home.MOV => baby crawling at home.MP4
And so on…
Would be amazing…
I tried some online comnverters but files of 2.5 Gb they dont like 50 at a time.
And often they make errors…
Any way that the filenames would be taken over and only the extention would be changed to .MP4 like VLC can do it?
It should not be that hard for the software to do that automatically I think.
Add to playlist => each playlist item => keep original filenames…

Great thanks

Handbrake has a processing queue feature. Maybe something like this could work for you:

@brian, could an option be added to the Export menu to use the original file name when “Each Playlist Item” is chosen? And if there is an issue that the file extension is the same I suppose something like “_2” can be added at the end?

Thanks for the advice. I checked handbrake but somehow I cant select for example a testbatch of 21 mov files at once. I use shotcut a lot and it is another program that I need to figure out… I will give it another go but first signs are not very hopefull… Adding 21 files to the handbrake que seems to be difficult and the page you posted is of an older version of handbrake so the instructions are not correct…
Thanks anyway!

Yes that extra option keep original filenames would be amazing!
Would that be possible to add to Shotcut please?

Perhaps.

Thinking about this some more…

  • Should we still use the source file name if the source has been trimmed?
  • If a file is sliced into three pieces, and then all three slices are exported from the playlist, we would end up with three files with the same name.
  • Should we still use the source file name if filters have been applied?
  • What if the source file is “go.mp4” and the exported file would be “go.mp4”? We can not write over the file while we are converting it.

Right. I covered that one in my reply to you. :slightly_smiling_face:

However, after your good questions I think it’s best to have the option be something like “Use Clip Name” which means the clip name that is set in Properties rather than specifically the source file name. When a clip hasn’t been renamed then the default is the source file name.

So if the user has changed the clip name in Properties of anything in the playlist, then it’ll just use that and avoid the issues you raised. But if there is more than once instance of the same clip name appearing for more than one clip (which could also be the default source file name) then something like a “_1” could be added at the end and it would just keep counting down (e.g. _2, _3, _4, etc…) for as many instances of that clip name being repeated in the playlist.

What do you think?

I think that using the clip name makes sense. But that would not be a common use for bulk operations.

I wonder if we would add some kind of common suffix like “_exported”. So “go.mp4” would be exported to “go_exported.mp4”. And then we could also add the numbering to avoid existing file names for the sliced scenario. However, in the sliced scenario I described, the first slice could get the name “go_exported.mp4” and the second slice would be “go_exported_1.mp4”. Still not very intuitive. Maybe for that case the user should take the time to set a clip name.

Would it be easy to do something like what OBS does with file name creations?
This way it would keep the original file name, but would be exported with date and time on the end of the file name.
obs64_2021-01-09_23-13-47

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I was writing a reply to you @brian but I like @Hudson555x’s suggestion so I’ll wait and see what you say about his post. :slightly_smiling_face:

J’avais fait une demande dans ce sens il y a quelques mois, mais elle n’avait pas déchainé autant de passion…

Dans le cas ou un fichier de même nom existerait dans le dossier de destination, l’ajout d’un indice numérique à la fin du nom me semble être une bonne solution. (e.g. _2, _3, _4, etc…)

I had made a request a few months ago, but it hadn’t unleashed as much passion…

In case a file with the same name exists in the destination folder, adding a numerical index at the end of the name seems to me to be a good solution (e.g. _2, _3, _4, etc…).

https://forum.shotcut.org/t/using-sc-to-create-proxies/17615

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I think it’s because your request was in the context of proxy creation and at that time we didn’t actually know how Dan would do proxies. After that Dan decided to use the custom hash codes that Shotcut creates as the way Shotcut identifies proxy files.

Although it’s interesting you bring this up because I was thinking for a while about suggesting an option to choose to use the hash codes for the file name in “Each Playlist Item” for anyone that wanted to use a very specific encoding for their proxy workflow that’s different than what Shotcut offers since you are able to use your own proxies if you want. I personally would never need such an option because I am very happy with how Dan set up the proxy workflow but since there is an option in Properties to copy the hash code of a file I was thinking that the next logical step would be to offer an option to use the hash code as the name of the files in “Each Playlist Item”.

Yeah, I think I am going to go back to suggesting my initial idea of using Shotcut’s existing numerical system (-01, -02, -03, etc…). I’ll come back later to respond to @brian’s last post.

Great discussion. Thanks I am following it and making a big pile of .MOV files to automatically convert if tehre is any testing to be done… :slight_smile:

Avez-vous essayé de changer simplement l’extension .mov en .mp4
Cela évite en plus un ré-encodage

Have you tried to simply change the .mov extension to .mp4?
This also avoids re-encoding.