my client has submitted 2 dvd's of her television/video work. i am to make a reel for her with footage that i cull from the dvd's (which have the video and audio _ts folders contained therein).

i've used Handbrake to rip the dvd's.

problem is: Handbrake gives me 3 choices for file output: .mp4, avi or OGM.

i've chosen mp4. it seems that fcp 5 won't accept mp4 on import, ie "file error: 1 file recognized, 0 denied, 1 unknown"

i'm trying to understand why mp4 won't work. anybody know?

i would prefer to use a quicktime over an .avi. i don't even know what an ogm is.

thak you.

FCP will accept AVI files. It will want to optimize them for you. You'll see a message to that effect but you don't have to.

Choose AVI as your output and see how that goes.

-gb-

If I am not mistaken, I believe the .mp4 version is an umbrella of the recent series of codecs of which the newer h.264 is a variant, although I understand that not all h.264's are created equal. First, I would see if the .mp4 file you have is able to be opened via Quicktime. In OS X, these files by default try to open in iTunes, you may have to control-click it to choose QT to open it. If your QT is up to date, and as you say your are running FCP 5, if it is able to open in QT, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't let it open in FCP...but I haven't tried this yet myself.

Either way, if it is an h.264 file, (as I believe it may be), it will yield a nice image, but at a significantly more compressed ratio than what would likely be offered through the avi version. FCP should be able to open the avi version. If it cannot, try to open in QT. Many (but not all) avi variants can open in QT. You can then just transcode it to a full quality dv stream and then throw it into FCP - but try to just drop it into FCP first.

Hope this helps - I usually don't know what I'm talking about.
-Jon

it turns out mp4 is not an editable file format.

i found a free utility called MPEG Streamclip that converts mp4s. i'm psyched.

here's the link:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/mpegstreamclip.html

thanks for your tips, though, greg and jonathan.

sergi

MPEG StreamClip is INDESPENSIBLE in my opinion. Glad you discovered it.