Automating cutting video together and exporting it

Question

I'm a data analyst for 5-8 beachvolley teams, who send me their matches, recorded from a GoPro. But they could easily have played 3-5 games each, during a weekend, which means 15 to 40 games, all in a big Dropbox-folder. Before I can start analyzing it, then I need to cut the video-material together (since GoPro cuts every video in 2 gb-chunks).

So that means:

• Open Adobe Premiere
• Drag the three clips in there
• Export (I usually use H.264-format with a custom preset).

... And this export then takes a 10-20 minutes. And then on to the next video. It's the most tedious job in the world.

Does anyone know of a way to optimize this? Perhaps, so I could que up the videos, so my computer could export all matches overnight and doesn't require me to do something in between each export? But ideally, automating the whole process...

Answer 1

I base my answer on the assumption that you are on Windows, and I think that GoPro produces .mp4 video files (the answer can be easily adapted to other video types).

You need to first install ffmpeg as your tool to join the video files.

A batch file (.bat) with the following commands will then join together the video files in the current folder:

(for %%i in (*.mp4) do @echo file '%%i') > mylist.txt
ffmpeg -f concat -i mylist.txt -c copy output.mp4

For more information, including instructions for Linux, see the ffmpeg wiki article for
Concatenating media files.