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Adventures in Video Formats
This is more of a commentary than anything, but might make for interesting reading, given the range of people who view this board, from novice to advanced.
Adventures in Video Formats
Ah, my mind goes back to the days when I used to explain to clients why S-VHS was so much better than standard VHS, or why Betacam was superior to 3/4″ U-Matic.
Oh, it’s 2006, sorry about that, I was stuck in 1994 for a moment.
Anyway, in a current project, people were asked to submit edited video clips on either DV, DVCAM or DVD.
(the DVD option exists for those who cannot get their video back onto DV tape – or for those who are starting off with non-DV material)
Before I could get a word in, that request went out to the masses.Well as many people have now learned, DVD means different things to different people.
So this weekend I sat down at my trusty new Dual-core AMD workstation to get all the submitted video ready for DVD.
Submission 1: mini-DV tape, black at the beginning, titles between clips and black at the end – sweet. Capture into Premiere, add narration, export to m2v and wav.
Submission 2: DVD disc. Looks innocent enough. Open in computer. It is a DVD disc allright, containing MPG files. Using free invaluable tool “Video Inspector” I see that these are in fact MPEG-2 file, but alas, the audio is encoded at 11khz 8bit for some unknown reason. Thus, these files cannot be imported into Premiere – workaround needed.
Submission 3: DVD disc, this one contains AVI files. Joy, import into Premiere. What’s this? Audio only? Says it’s a video file. Video Inspector tells me it is DIVX. Divx I should mention is actually a nice format for DELIVERY of final content, especially useful online and often used by unscrupulous folks distributing movies on the net. Incidentally if burned to a DVD Divx files play on some newer DVD players. So I need to download and install the free Divx player, and now I can import the files into Premiere. However they play sorta clunky, so I export each clip to proper DV-AVI and re-import.
Submission 4: DVD disc containing…drumroll please…DV-AVI files – incidentally this is what the original request meant by “DVD” that is “DVD containing DV-AVI files”
Submission 5: DVD disc – this one contains DV-Quicktime files. Can these be imported into Premiere directly? Will the excitement ever end? Tune in next time, same bat time, same bat channel (sorry, couldn’t resist)!
Submission 6: CD containing a WMV file – ouch!
Ahh, I feel so much better having gotten all that out.
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4 Replies
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Sounds like an adventure indeed.
Premiere Pro will load QT files as long as QT is on your system. They’ll render, but you can get them in…
TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Mike Cohen] “people were asked to submit edited video clips on either DV, DVCAM or DVD”
Wouldn’t have been more productive to have specified that the DVD was to be a DVD data disk with a DVavi clip? vice just saying a DVD
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Canopus Procoder is invaluable for these kinds of things… I’ve bumped all kinds of content to DV AVI for combining and editing.
I bet you’re going to make sure you get your word in quicker next time…
I’ve also found that people easily confuse CD and DVD… I was asked one time to supply a high level executive with a video presentation on CD. This is a pretty common request since we often distribute WMV’s for meeting presentations and training (majority of our clients do not have DVD drives in their notebook computers). Next day, sure enough their was a complaint that the exec couldn’t wasn’t able to play it on their home theater set top dvd player. A quick encode and dvd author and all was well. Lesson learn, what they ask for is not always what they want.Erik
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Oh even when I specify DV-AVI on a DVD disk, I get any and all flavors.
One reason is that many of the folks who are doing their own editing have only a rudimentary concept of what they are doing – editing video fine, but talk about format of video? Forget it.
Anyway the intent of this thread was just to be ready for anything, because regardless of what you ask for, you will get anything.
The original person on this particular project asked for DV tape or AVI files on a DVD – thank goodness I didn’t get an Cinepak files!!
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