How to Edit Video Using Footage From YouTube on a Mac

So many people are creating videos for distribution on video sharing sites. To make a video, I obviously need source materials. These could come from original camera footage, stock footage (which can be very costly), or from videos I find online and want to sample from. This last source will be the subject of this tutorial about how to make a FLV video clip ready for editing in Final Cut Pro or even iMovie.

Since the release of Final Cut Studio 2, the suite of editing programs have become more flexible with the file formats they recognize. FLV is still a problem for Final Cut, especially in older versions. I must have Quicktime compatible files in order to edit them in Final Cut.

If I want to use footage from Youtube (or most other video sharing sites), I first must rip it from the website and download the FLV to my Mac. There are a few Firefox Add-Ons that do this. I ripped a YouTube video successfully the other day using the Firefox Add-On DownloadHelper ver.3.1.1. DownloadHelper puts a little icon next to the Awesome Bar in Firefox, so when I am on YouTube I can just click and select the YouTube video from the list. For some reason, I tried FastVideoDownload ver. 1.6.1 first and it resulted in a corrupt file. Another website to check out is FlashLoad.net, where you can download high quality MP4s instead of FLV from certain sites like Youtube, Google Video, and Metacafe.

This process gives me a FLV file with the dimensions of 320×240 on my computer. Quicktime doesn’t like this filetype (FLV) on my computer, so I use the video player VLC to watch the video. I always preview source content to make sure it downloaded correctly. I then open the shareware Application called VisualHub to convert the video from FLV to DV. I set VisualHub to “Ready for Final Cut” and make the video dimensions 640×480. This upconversion works very well for me. I use VisualHub because it is easier than Quicktime Pro and allows me to do batch conversions. An article about VisualHub can be found here at iUseApple. If I want to convert the video using Quicktime Pro I use Quicktime Export, DV NTSC, Interlaced, 640×480 dimensions.

After the conversion, I have a DV file that is 10X or more the filesize than the FLV, in 640×480.

I start up Final Cut or iMovie, make a new Project File and import the DV files (iMovie will copy the DV file to your project location, so prepare to have lots of disk space when using iMovie). All the video I import for my project should use the same video codec, DV. Final Cut replies saying the clip is not optimized for Final Cut, despite having checked the “Ready for Final Cut” in Visual Hub. I should e-mail the Visual Hub people, but it always works just fine anyways.

I then edit together all the content in the timeline.

When I am finished editing, I export the video by selecting File -> Export -> Quicktime Conversion and set it to h.264, auto keyframes, 500 kbps, fast encode, deinterlaced 640×480, aac audio @ 32 KHz, otherwise default audio settings.

A further explanation of the export process is located in the “Apple Internet Video Made Easy” article on iUseApple.