Extracting audio from a FCP Reference Movie

[Michael Gissing]

If the original media is gone, then the ref Qt must be finding a mixdown file or render file perhaps. I didn’t think reference Qts save the audio as a separate file but if you are hearing it intact in finder then the file must be there somewhere. It is likely the audio file is somewhere in a render folder with a useless name which, if you can find it, should be loadable directly into Quicktime Pro

As Quicktime player isn’t loading it, an alternative is to try VLC which is a free clever media player that might just let you play the audio without the video. If it does then it has the functionality to export like Quicktime Pro so you should be able to save the audio as an aif.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[Elena Chopchits]

Thank you Gentlemen,

As fate would have it, I have to go out of town and won’t be able to mess around with this until Friday. I’ll let you know how I do.

Thanks again — Elena

[Elena Chopchits]

Hello Again,

Well, I wasn’t able to get QuickTime to export the reference movie. It would load and play the audio, but as soon as I tried to export it it would hunt for the missing files. I downloaded VLC and it wouldn’t load the movie (though that looks like good software to have in any case).

There were no scratch folders on that drive, and the reference movie is 1.2GB in size (it’s nearly two hours long), making me think the audio is in that file somewhere.

However, I found a DVD master of the video, and used DVDxDV software to grab the audio from the section I needed. Hooray! Still a mystery though how to extract audio from a file where it’s seemingly there. Lesson learned through — have copies of everything!

Thank you both for your help,
Elena