free utilities to preview omf’s?

[Mark Burton]

The Media Manager tool mentioned above is a great tool and the developer is working very hard to support all the feature requests people ask for – all for free. Since I started using it there have been around 5 or 6 updates, each bringing new features and again all for free. The media preview feature is clearly not a simple tool to implement. I know of only a few 3rd party tools which have some sort of OMF playback ability:

Drastic Preview – WIN. Will play most OMF types, quality is poor with DV types.
https://www.drasticpreview.com

Media Munger – MAC. Will play/convert most OMF types except DV it seems. Expensive.
https://www.gallery.co.uk/mediamunger.html

Quicktime Player – MAC/WIN. If you want to view OMF files which are DV25 based, then you can temporarily change the extension from .omf to .dv and the file will play in Quicktime Player. Fairly sure this only works with DV25 clips. Audio will not play.

[Joseph Mehr]

Drastic prewiev is very interesting, thanks for the link !

[Mark Raudonis]

This inability to “see” clips unless you’re on an AVID is one of the reasons we switched to FCP. With our entire workgroup connected via X-SAN, anyone on the net can simply double click on a file and it opens in Quicktime player. You don’t even need FCP. PC ‘s work too. Very convenient.

Mark

[Dom Silverio]

Except if you used one of the Apple only codecs like HD and DV50 – then there is no difference.

[James Brooks]

Thanks for you comments on DrasticPreview! You are correct about the DV. It is currently decoding as a fast, low quality image. We are replacing our DV decoder in the next version to improve quality and make way for supporting DVCPro50/100 as well as the DVSD/25 currently supported.
Also, after a meeting with Avid at NAB, we have been told we will be able to ship DNxHD MXF support in DrasticPreview by the end of June. We are hoping to also add DVCPro50/100 MXF to our existing XDCam and uncompressed Y’CbCr MXF support.
Enjoy, James