by Natalie Mootz

Created on: December 03, 2008

You've just recorded the most epic PC gaming moment of all time. Now you want to set this little video clip to the perfect music track you've got squirreled away in iTunes on your Mac. If you used Fraps for Windows to record your video, you may have run into trouble trying to move the video clips over to a Mac for easy editing with iMovie. That's because Fraps saves clips in an

AVI format that some versions of iMovie won't import. This situation is particularly frustrating if you want to use a background audio file for the movie (e.g., a song) that happens to be on your Mac. You will soon discover that although yourAVI video files play on the PC, they can't be imported into iMovie and your Mac's audio files will not play on your PC. It seems you can't use either iMovie or Windows Movie Maker to put together your little movie. What to do?

SOLUTION ONE: MOVE THE SONG TO THE PC

It may seem that the easiest thing to do is move the song from the Mac to the PC. If the song you wish to use was ripped from your own CD onto iTunes, you'll have no problem copying the MP3 file from your Mac to your PC and using it in Windows Movie Maker. However, if you purchased and downloaded the song via iTunes, you'll find that even though you can copy the source file to your PC you cannot play the song on your PC or import it into Windows Movie Maker.

SOLUTION TWO: MOVE THE VIDEO FILES TO THE MAC

So you try to go in the other direction. You want to move your video files to the Mac use iMovie and your preferred soundtrack. Well, iMovie does NOT like the Fraps .AVI format and will refuse to import the clips.

SOLUTION THREE: CONVERT THE VIDEO FILES

Eventually you will come to the conclusion that you need to get the Fraps AVI video files converted into something that you can use in iMovie. The easiest way to do this is to convert the Fraps AVI into an older AVI format that the iMovie codecs can read.

Don't be scared. You don't need to know what AVI means or what codecs are or anything about the hairy copyright laws involving iTunes songs. Despite what you may have read before you came to this article, converting the movie clips is really very easy! You do not need a technical degree to accomplish the conversion.

Here are the simple steps:

* Download a piece of freeware called VirtualDub onto your PC. Extract the zip file and run the program. It doesn't need to install; it comes ready to run after you extract it.

* Open the folder on your PC where the Fraps .AVI files are. If you didn't change the Fraps default settings or move the AVI files, they should be in C:\Fraps.

* Drag a Fraps video clip into the big empty VirtualDub screen. This opens the clip in VirtualDub. You can also choose to use File | Open video file, but I find dragging easier.

* On the VirtualDub menu, choose File | Save old format AVI.

* Pick a NEW file name and a folder to save the converted file to. Don't use the same file name and folder because you'll overwrite your original clip.

* Off goes VirtualDub to convert your file! You can track the completion percentage on the pop-up window which shows a progress bar.

* The new clip can be imported into iMovie now.
So now all you have to do is get to work, you proto-Spielberg you, and start making your movie masterpiece!

Learn more about this author, Natalie Mootz.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.