Sort of a strange question
 

I have @2 hours of footage that we shot with the H1. I now need to get the footage as files to a windows computer (I'm on a mac). What is the best work flow for that. I don't think that windows will see the apple HDV codec. Has anyone done this sort of thing before?


Mark Johnson

The simplest thing would be to import the clips into FCP and convert them to Quicktime. Windows can see and use QT easily. If the PC has any of the latest NLE's such as Avid or Velocity it should see the HDV codec without issue.

At work there is one PC computer and when I tried to play a hdv codec quicktime on it - no go. It had quicktime pro. But not knowing PC's well enough, I didn't know where to look to find where the codec's were installed.

Mark, you're right. Quicktime for Windows will not have the QT HDV codec.

Furthermore, I'm not aware of any codec suitable for HD resolutions that are transportable to Windows besides possible motion JPEG. Blackmagic has an uncompressed HD codec for both Mac and Win but I doubt very much that's gonna be practical.

Robert, the issue here is that right now every NLE has it's own solution to working with HDV, and there is no common codec/file format.

Mark, I'd consider skipping ingest on the Mac entirely, if you can.

It's got to be converterted out of HDV to be edited anyway so I would think that if you injest it as DVCPROHD on the Mac that you should be able to edit those files on the PC. I did a short training video on the Mac, exported to QT using the H.264 codec and was able to view (project) that using a PC but I don't know what magic the IT guy did to make it work. So that codec may represent a possibility for you (much smaller files) but it did take forever (more than a day) to compress about 20 min. video.

Conversion Options
 

Try using the free MPEG Streamclip utility to covert your HDV footage to MPEG4 (avoid h.264 because it takes forever), DVCPro HD or even a Sorenson 3 full quality QuickTime file. The MPEG Streamclip utility is a great tool for batch conversions from HDV to other more compatible formats. I use it to covert 1080i m2t files to 1080i DVCPro HD files for a better editing experience in FCP. I believe they offer a Mac and Windows version.

Link:
http://www.squared5.com/

Hope that helps,

CJ Rogers

Take the raw .m2t's and use MPEG Streamclip and convert to PhotoJPEG @75% quality.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....40&postcount=7

That is what I was starting to do before I posted the question. My biggest problem now is how to deliver. I was given a drive to put this on, but of course is formatted as NTSF so I can't write to it. The clips are bigger than can be written to DVD.

Why can't they just be on a mac?



Mark

You may want to try skipping all of the conversions and just recapture the footage on a Windows machine using an inexpensive utility (adobe, studio 10 or something like that). It won't take much time if you only have two hours of source footage to capture again. I know that means repeating a process, but it seams like the quickest solution to the hard drive format problem. At least all of the time code and editing information will sync.

CJ Rogers

Flip4mac
 

It allows you to export to Windows Media HD from FCP or any QT app. There are different versions of the app including a free player.