Sony vegas will not support MOV files???

[Graham Bradfield]

I ended up buying Sony Vegas platinum 11 pro it said it supported MOV files but not so,I ended up downloading a converter and had to convert from MOV to AV1 that was still no good so I went from AV1 to WMV now bloody fantastic.

[Mike Kujbida]

Graham, I deal with students who shoot on all kinds of camcorders and digital still cameras and have yet to have one bring in footage that Vegas can’t handle.
Do you have a current version of QuickTime installed on your computer?
What’s the model of your Nikon?
Can you shoot and upload 10 sec. or so of footage to a site like Dropbox (this link gets both of us an extra 250 MB. of storage space) and share the link with us so that we can try to figure out what your problem is.

[Dave Haynie]

Same here… I have used dozens of cameras with Vegas, helped hundreds of people using it, and never run across something it wouldn’t edit.

One thing that everyone getting into video needs to understand well is how multimedia frameworks function, and it sounds like our friend Graham is still a little shaky on this.

There’s no such things as a Quicktime video or an AVI video. Quicktime (MOV) and AVI are file wrappers… they’re standards for bundling other things together. So are .mts, .m2ts, and .mp4 files, though as those all come out of the MPEG people, they usually (not always) contain things defined by the Motion Picture Experts Group.

The things that go into these files are, obviously, your audio and video streams. Technically, an AVI or MOV file can contain nearly anything… including video or audio types that Windows, Quicktime, or Vegas didn’t come with. There’s no reason to expect Vegas to edit video formats that are totally unknown to your PC. The piece that your PC needs has been dubbed a CODEC (CODer-DECoder), and there are standards for installing new ones under Video for Windows (AVI), DirectShow (AVI) and Quicktime (MOV). If you camera comes with a weird video format, it should ideally come with this CODEC as well, though some actually come with a conversion program instead, and don’t allow direct editing of their video.

So when you say you convert Quicktime to AVI, that’s nearly a content free statement. Rather, saying something like “I converted a Canon EOS 60D Quicktime to Cineform AVI” or at least something that fully describes the input and output format would help us in helping you.

Many cameras use the Quicktime file format; as I mentioned before, some of that’s history. Quicktime actually offered a standardized Motion JPEG, MJPEG was supported under Video for Windows as well, but Microsoft never dictated a standard, so a camera maker couldn’t deliver a video file that would “just work”.

Quicktime continues to be used, again, somewhat out of habit. Standards like AVCHD have caught on from the camcorder world, but still camera companies like Nikon have stuck with Quicktime in most cases. Canon uses this as well. AVI is not a good home for more advanced CODECs like AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264, but it’s just dandy under Quicktime (the MPEG-4 file wrapper, .mp4, was derived from the Quicktime file wrapper). Canon’s using a video format that’s AVC, but quite different than AVCHD (44Mb/s, I and P frames only, no B frames), but it’s well supported under Quicktime, at least fairly recent Quicktime.

And very easy to edit in Vegas Pro anyway, and I believe the current versions of Vegas Movie Studio HD and Platinum. There’s no reason to expect a 2-3 year old program to edit video from a brand new camera… even if it does, it’s very likely the current version of the program will do a much better job.

It’s also a very good idea to mention the camera you’re talking about when asking for technical help. It’s quite possible there’s a known bug, glitch, or weirdness in your camera that’s well known. It’s also quite possible we’ll all bust your chops for buying a $5,000 camera and balking at spending $50 on software… but sharing information is still the best way to get useful information back.

-Dave

[Malcolm Ranald]

Hello

I’m having the same problem on a brand new Windows7 test host where I installed the trial version of Vegas Media Studio HD 11: It fails opening a MOV file (MPEG-1/2 video + A52 audio)recorded with my JVC camcorder. The file plays OK in VLC.

What should I do to edit this file? If that version of VMS can’t handle it, which Windows application would you recommend to combine the video with an external WAV file that I recorded independently?

Thank you.

[Eric Frazer]

I’m posting on this very old thread because there are a great many people on this thread that are terribly ill informed and feel free to give very bad info.

First: I work at Microsoft, in the video editing internals department. I know what I’m talking about. I worked directly with the Sony Vegas team. Again, I know what I’m talking about.

Sony Video Vegas used to be Sonic Foundry’s Vegas. The whole team got bought out by another company. The people writing the video file importer and exporters ended up not supporting them any longer. Vegas Studio is using an abortion of an effort to get video into and out of the computer. There is very little support left internally at the company to revise their importer code. As it evidenced by the fact that .MOV files are extremely troublesome in Vegas, some 10 years later, with no easy fix in site. Quicktime has even been discontinued, and still Sony Vegas can’t get a different block of importer code getting the files into Vegas. Folks, it’s not going to change.

To summarize what you need to do, here you go:
1. Buy a professional video editing software package. Vegas Studio, while fast & fun & easy, ain’t it.
2. Buy a software video editing package that still has support and developers that stand behind it. (Vegas ain’t it)
3. Convert your videos to some other format, using any number of free or low-cost converters. Yes, you’ll have to live with the fact you’ll incur a “generation loss” on the video. Too bad, but this is the way it goes.

be aware, there is a different between using Vegas’ 32 and 64 bit editions when it comes to decoders and encoders you’ve installed on your system. Both VFW and DirectShow, two formats that provide encoding and decoding for video programs, have both 32 and 64 bit plugins and they’re both different from each other. You could install a 32 bit decompression coded that won’t do you any good in 64 bit Vegas.

The trouble is, I haven’t figured out exactly how Vegas imports files, through what internal mechanism and what Windows APIs (internal) they use, if any. There’s a bunch of stuff behind .MOV files, .MP4 files, etc, that a lot of people don’t understand…

First off, MOV and MP4 and AVI are all “container formats”, more technically, they’re all “sort of” RIFF formats, they all contain chunk identifiers and chunk offsets, and basically store stuff inside in chunks. Any one of these container formats can contain ANY type of compressed video and audio chunks. A MOV file could contain video compressed to one of several compression formats: IV1, MP4, WMV, MP2, m2V, uncompressed, DIVX, etc. Likewise, an AVI file could contain the same thing. An MP4 could contain them too, but it’s unlikely. Also, MP4, MOV, and AVI files can contain various flavors of audio: AAC, MP3, WAV, etc.

Further making this a bit complicated is that even for MP4 or H264 video compression formats (which could be contained by .MOV, .MP4, or. AVI, or even within a .WMV file!) there are different flavors!

Now, if Sony keys off .MOV and only uses a quicktime reader when it sees .MOV then you’ll NEED to install Quicktime, even though it’s unsupported. Plus, whatever quicktime runtime you download (32 bit vs 64 bit), that will enable import in one version of Vegas or another (32 bit vs 64 bit), unless of course the 64 bit version of quicktime installs the 32 bit version as well, which come to think of it, is likely.

If Sony first tries apple-specific Quicktime to import .MOV files, then falls back to “whatever else” is on the system, then it will probably try to load a DirectShow or VFW plugin to try and decode the file. This will boil down to whatever you have installed on your system, and if you’re configured it right. Some people try ffshow-tryouts (32 or 64 bit flavors), and there are some other codec packs out there as well. probably a lot of them are virus-ridden too.

There are ways to move the compressed data from a .MOV to a .MP4 file and to an .AVI file without recompressing. When you do this, it will undoubtedly go through a different import path in Vegas, which has a lot of permutations to it. I’m trying to figure that out now. I refused to install an unsupported runtime (Quicktime) on my system until it becomes absolutely necessary. I used to be a big fan of Sony Vegas, but now that a lot of video imports as black or not at all, and it’s not getting fixed, I’m going to start looking around for a video editing package whose company stands behind it and does more than simply maintain it.

Sony (Sonic Foundry) – if you know who is writing this, (Eric), you know how to get in touch with me… 🙂

[Colin Hay]

Interesting read ….

I uninstalled Quicktime Pro last week as on Windows I read it was now unsupported and a security risk

No problem there I thought – hadn’t used it for years – except that of course my Vegas 12 Pro 64 bit can no longer recognise .MOV files from iphones and ipads ….

I guess my options are either to reinstall Quicktime OR convert the files to another format

I had hoped that Vegas would just support the MOV files out of the box 🙁

So no other option – no plugin or standalone codec I can install ?

[Dave Haynie]

That’s expected behavior.

Apple provides the Quicktime player that you see, but there’s also a whole multimedia framework for Quicktime that exports an API to applications like Vegas. Without that framework, there’s no knowledge of the structure of .MOV files. However, Quicktime files are a bit like MP4 files, only in that the MP4 file wrapper was based on, but not identical to, the Quicktime .MOV format.

You might try copying your .MOV file to a .MP4 file. That sometimes works, though not always. Otherwise, you need some version of the Quicktime API in order for Vegas to decode that file. Vegas, of course, understands the various CODECs in there: AVC, AAC, etc. What it doesn’t have built-in is the overall structure of the .MOV structured multimedia wrapper.

-Dave

[László Kovács]

Just to put my 2 cents 🙂
I used ffmpeg to convert mov to mp4.
ffmpeg -i input.mov -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4

That’s done in seconds, because there’s no reencodigng.
Only the container format is changed.

[Jorma Nippala]

“there are a great many people on this thread that are terribly ill informed”

I wouldn’t call guys like John Rofrano and Dave Haynie exactly “terribly ill informed” on the subject at hand.
What’s ill informed is expecting Sony to do anything with the Vegas line as they recently sold that to MAGIX GmbH.

[John Rofrano]

[Colin Hay] “I guess my options are either to reinstall Quicktime OR convert the files to another format”

Or buy a Mac! That’s what I did. My iPhone and iPad videos edit effortlessly in Final Cut Pro X on my Mac. 😉

Just re-install QuickTime and stop worrying. This is what Vegas Pro needs to process your MOV files. Just give it what it needs.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com