CGTalk - JVC Camera uses uses unusual version of .mov/mp4 format?

meleseDESIGN

02-01-2010, 07:56 AM

Apple are bastards.
HDV is MPEG-2.
QuickTime Pro 7 on Windows comes without the MPEG-2 plugin, it sells for $20 last time I checked.
Once you buy the MPEG-2 plugin, it still does not allow decoding of HDV in Quicktime container.

If you are unfortunate enough to have footage in Quicktime/HDV, or were silly enough to capture with FCP into HDV (you can capture in ProRes HDV with FCP - which QuickTime for Windows will decode, thus work in Premiere), do not worry, there is help for you.
You have 2 options of getting MOV/HDV footage working in Windows.
1. You transcode it.
2. You demux it back to an MPEG stream.
The best method is obvously 2, as it doesn't recompress/re-encode, you will not lose quality.
1. Transcoding
You can use a variety of tools, the easiest is probably VLC.
Note that RAD video tools will not work with HDV in Quicktime, it will transcode it, but it cant decode it and you will end up with blank video.
You launch VLC then click file->convert/save, browse to your file (you can do a batch convert via command line - it's on VLC's wiki), click open.
Then you choose the encapsulation container. Do not use MPEG-TS, this might not work with Premiere.
MPEG-PS should work with premiere, as should MPEG-1, ASF/WMV, MP4, and MOV.
Go to the video codec tab, check video, choose a codec, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 should all work inside of MOV and MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 should both work inside of MPEG-PS and MPEG-1 for Premiere, MPEG-4 and H.264 should work inside of MP4, WMV-1 and WMV-2 and I think MPEG-2 should work inside of ASF/WMV for Premiere.
Set the bitrate as large as possible (8192).
Go to the audio tab, check audio and use an appropriate codec, with a high bit rate, or just use WAV (if its supported in the container format).
Check the check box next to file, and click browse and after finding a location for it, enter a file and its extension (.mov for mov container, etc).

Here is an how-to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYUpQYakbjM

2. Demuxing
This method has been tested with both Premiere Pro CS3 and Premiere Pro CS4.
Download AviDemux, Avanti and FFmpeg (choose latest) for Windows.
Install AviDemux.
You will need WinRAR or 7-Zip to Extract the Avanti and FFmpeg packages for Windows.
Extract Avanti, put it in C:\Avanti or a preferred place, before running Avanti, extract ffmpeg (all files in archive) to the ffmpeg sub directory in the Avanti directory.
Run Avanti
In source one, click browse and locate your craptime MOV file, click browse on destination and type file name and press enter.
Change the codec for audio to demux audio, same with video, change it to demux video and change the drop box next to it called container to ES.
check enable for video, click start, uncheck video then check audio and click start, this will generate a .mpg and a .wav
Your .mpg and .wav files are now ready to be used in Premiere.
However, for best performance in Premiere I recommend an extra following step.
Run AviDemux, click file and open and locate the newly created .mpg file, and open it, when it asks to index click yes.
Set the video track to copy, and the audio track to WAV LPCM, change the format to MPEG-PS (do -not- use MPEG-TS).
Now click the Audio menu and click main track, change source to External Wav.
Then hit browse and locate the newly created .wav file and hit open.
Now go to File->Save->Save Video, find a location to save in, type a file name and use the extension .mpg or .mpeg

Now you can import this file in Premiere, it'll take a few seconds to import and then to conform it after importing, but once it's done, it'll act and behave nicely, and performance will be fast (or at least normal) rather than doggedly slow as it would be if you captured to ProRes.
You can do batch conversion with FFmpeg via command line.

Cheers!