[Automator] Quick Action to Concatenate Videos in a Folder for YT-ready Upload

ffmpeg_merge_videos_in_folder.md

Q: How do I combine individual video clips into one movie file for upload to YouTube using ffmpeg?

The following assumes you have ffmpeg installed on your Mac. If you need to install it, please use Homebrew.

The settings for encoding for YouTube with ffmpeg can be found here and here.

There is no error checking here. It assumes that there are videos in the folder, and that they have mp4 extensions.

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Automator Steps

1. In Automator, start by creating a Quick Action to accept FOLDERS in FINDER.
2. Set Value of a Variable to Path

3. Ask for Confirmation to confirm the path being used. (Ignore the mention of the Leader video. This was a later modification.)

4. Run Shell Script. The following is the /bin/bash script, passing input as arguments

cd "$1"

for f in ./*.mp4; do echo "file '$f'" >> videos2bmerged.txt; done

file_name=Merged-FINAL.mp4
current_time=$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M")
final_filename=$current_time.$file_name

/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i videos2bmerged.txt -c:v libx264 -preset slow -profile:v high -crf 18 -coder 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart -g 30 -bf 2 -c:a aac -b:a 384k -profile:a aac_low "tmpVideo-PROCESSING.mp4"

rm videos2bmerged.txt

mv "tmpVideo-PROCESSING.mp4" "$final_filename"

5. Display Notification Indicate that the processing is complete.

#automator #ffmpeg #videos #concat #youtube