DVCPro HD with FCE
 

I am surprised there are not any other posts that I could find dealing with this...

I have a client that does not have FCP, only FCE (no QTPro either) I handed over some DVCPro HD (720pn24) footage and he is unable to view it. He is in England, and I am in the USA, so that makes a simple transcoding and handing over new footage difficult.

1. For him to view the DVCPro HD footage he needs to simply purchase a QTPro license, right?

2. Once QTPro is purchased, will he also be able to view/edit the footage in final cut express?

He wants to do a very rough edit before taking the footage to his editor (who presumably has FCP)
Oddly enough I also gave him some ProRes stuff and he can view that... I thought that was a QTPro only thing as well...the reason I thought he'd be able to play DVCPro HD...blasted assumptions.

Quicktime pro is the way to go. Pro Res is a different beast in that Apple owns the codec and lets it out for free for everyone to view footage. I had the same issue too when trying to import some DVC Pro HD quicktimes into Avid. We ended up just getting the tapes sent to us and renting a deck instead. Not my budget but Quicktime Pro would of most likely worked except that the Quicktime Player version at the time was not certified to work with Avid.

P.S. I'm not too sure on FCE if it will leech off of the codecs Quicktime itself can support. Not sure how to check on that either.

Didn't work
 

Blast! Qtpro did not work!
Any ideas? I think it's rediculous that Qtpro won't play dvcprohd files. Is this a fcs only codec? Would MPEG streamclip play it?

Negative. MPEG streamclip uses the quicktime engine. You should look into a program called Raylight that will let you play it back. Raylight Decoder, DVCProHD and DVCPro50 Quicktime Decoders for Windows

Solved-Kind of.
 

James he is on a Mac, so no go for the windows decoder. I think he is just taking it to his post house now...

In further research, for anyone's information, the DVCPro decoder comes only in FCS. NOT FCE or QTPro. If you do not have FCS then you will need a third party decoder like the
Calibrated[Q] DVCPro Decode.
It is available as a demo and full license as well. I've never tried it, but I suggested it to my client as a possible solution, and it's fairly inexpensive.
I should have transcoded to ProRes from the beginning! Lesson learned when handing over footage to a non-editor client!

hope this helps someone else out!
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