I had some footage that I wanted to piece together. I figured I'd just drop them into iMovie and be done in a few minutes. Nope.

Memory cards are formatted with exFat. Not only is this unreadable on Mac, but it will actually delete your content if you insert it into a mac. So unfortunately, step 1 of this is to grab the files off the card using Windows first (Parallels or Bootcamp should work).

Second, audio is recorded using an 8 bit a-law G.711 codec. iMovie doesn't support that. So I used ffmpeg, to convert it to AAC. I did this in terminal as follows:

for i in \*.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec aac -vcodec copy "aac${i%.\*}.mp4"; done

This will loop through every mp4 file in a directory and create a new file with AAC encoded audio. I grabbed those new files and stuck them in a new directory.

Next, I created a text file that contained all the newly encoded files that I want to be joined together:

for f in ./*.mp4; do echo "file '$f'" >> mylist.txt; done

I could then pass that file into ffmpeg's concat function to join them together:

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i mylist.txt -c copy output.mp4

Someone with more ffmpeg experience could certainly join the commands together and spit it out in a more efficient way, but I thought this might help someone. Happy Wyzeing!