One-Click Movie Merging with Automator & QuickTime
Have you ever in a situation where you downloaded small bits of a full movies?, I’m NOT referring to adult movie galleries with several small clips that you download one by one. Now theres an easy way to merge them, yes! one click!, no dragging, or copy-pasting just select and click.
How to easily merge movies using Automator and Quicktime?
With Automator you can create a workflow that run an apple script that opens quicktime and merge selected movies easily, then save it as a finder plug-in so it can be a contextual menu, meaning you right-click on set of movies (named sequentially) and choose the workflow and QuickTime will automatically concatenate those selected movies, here’s how.
1) Open your applications folder then click on “Automator”
2)Look for the “Run AppleScript” Action and double click it
3) Highlight all the code inside “run apple script workflow pane” and paste the code below
The code:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Finder" to set input ¬
to sort input by name
repeat with i from 1 to the count of input
set this_item to (item i of input)
tell application "QuickTime Player"
if i is equal to 1 then
make new movie
end if
open this_item
tell movie 1
rewind
select all
copy
select none
end tell
close movie 1 saving no
tell movie 1
add
select none
if i is equal to 1 then
set this_track to make new track at beginning with data "Chapter 1"
set enabled of this_track to false
set the name of this_track to "Chapter Track"
set chapterlist of track 1 to track "Chapter Track"
set the movie_length to the duration
tell chapter 1
set the time to 0
set the duration to movie_length
end tell
else
set the newmovielength to the duration
set the duration of this_track to newmovielength
set the chapter_list to the name of every chapter
set the new_chapter_list to chapter_list & (i as string)
set the contents of the current chapter track to the new_chapter_list
set the time of chapter i to movie_length
set the duration of chapter i to newmovielength - movie_length
set the name of chapter i of this_track to "Chapter " & (i as string)
set movie_length to the duration
end if
end tell
end tell
end repeat
return input
end run
4)Save your workflow, click on File menu – Save as, save it inside “home (your user home)/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/” as what ever you want (i’ll use “merge movies”) hit save and when you right-click you’ll see inside automator context menu your merge movie action.
Now all you have to do is select the movies you want to merge, right-click, and click “merge movies” inside automator and let quicktime do the job for you. Don’t forget to save your merged movie!.
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Any chance this could be updated? I tried running it (creating using the new “Service” instructions for Automator which have changed since this was posted, also changed the application name to “QuickTime Player 7″), but it keeps getting stuck and opening the source movies in iTunes rather than QuickTime Player 7. Would be SUPER useful though…