Pandemic Journal, Day 397

Shir Hadash logo

Diane read Torah and I led services (on Zoom) for Shir Shabbat this morning. There was a Bat Mitzvah at the same time, so we couldn’t livestream the service to our BoxCast channel; instead, I had to record it and upload it later.

Recording was easy enough; I just had to push one button. But to make sure I didn’t lose track of what I was doing, I did the recording on a different computer, starting early and ending late. I wanted to trim out the time before and after the service – which I thought would be easy.

I opened the recording in QuickTime and figured out where I wanted to start and finish; then I tried to trim the recording and couldn’t find any way to just enter the time I wanted – or even to drag the trim bars reliably. Then I tried iMovie and had the same problem.

I finally gave up and installed ffmpeg; then it was easy to trim the recording to the exact times I’d found and upload it to BoxCast.

But I don’t think normal people would find it plausible to use ffmpeg and the command line to do the job – I must have missed something in QuickTime and iMovie. Right?