Filmage Video Converter
Convert any video or audio format with ease
$9.99 From filmagepro.com
Needs OS X 10.11 or later
If you have ever tried to play back or convert movies in anything other than Apple’s preferred MP4 and MOV formats on a Mac, you’ll have found it tricky. You need a third–party app like VLC for playback or Filmage Converter to change legacy or unusual formats such as WMV, AVI, or MKV into Mac–friendly movies. These might be your old camcorder movies, movies you ripped from DVDs or any other video files.
Priced at just $9.99, Filmage Converter puts a simple interface onto video codecs and libraries. You drag any movies for conversion onto the app and choose an output format or device type. Pretty much everything is available here from iPad or Apple TV formats through Apple ProRes, WMV, and more, all with frame size, rate, and quality presets. You can click to edit any preset and reveal options on the level of quality — as well as codec, frame, and bit rate settings and audio bit and sample rates. Presets can be saved once edited and the presets to save audio files separately from their video component are really very useful.
The developers call this app a video editor, but this is only true in a certain way. You can merge videos together, but it’s not a linear editor. That said, clicking the Edit button for a video reveals tools to trim videos’ start and end points, crop their frame, add subtitles, effects, and watermarks. These are super easy to use. In Final Cut or Premiere, rendering basic changes like these can mean legwork setting up projects, so it’s incredibly useful to have a quick way to do it.
There’s also an internet downloader where you paste a video’s URL to make a local copy, but this is a little hit and miss and depends on whether the site you’re downloading from has explicitly coded to prevent it. There’s batch processing of course — set up a list of videos, each with unique settings if required, and leave it to run. Performance varies depending on how much you’re crunching a video file and while not fast, is decent. It seemed to load the dedicated GPU on my 16 inch MBP rather than the CPU, meaning the Mac remained responsive and the fans didn’t go crazy during conversion.
THE BOTTOM LINE. A great video toolbox for converting to and from any format. HOLLIN JONES