Converting mov files to MP4 with FFMPEG

I did some screen recordings for a new plugin that i’m developing. MacOS does great with screen recording, Quicktime really makes the whole process much easier. But, when you start editing..

Editing Quicktime MOV files in Premiere is terrible

I started questioning my equipment. Why is it lagging – why do render previews take so long? Am I even on hardware acceleration?

Apparently the files are just terrible to work with. It takes a while, but luckily we have FFMPEG available for this.

(Don’t have ffmpeg installed? Check here: Install Homebrew and then run: brew install ffmpeg)

The solution

Open up a terminal window, go to the directory where your files are located and run this:

for i in *.mov; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.}.mp4"; done

It takes a while, but when it’s ready editing live becomes a whole lot easier, and you also save some disk space..

Happy editing!