Viewing HDV files in Quicktime
 

I recently filmed a seminar and captured all 17 hours of HDV footage in FCP. My client now wants to view all the footage, so I gave him the external that this project lives on. He hooked it up to his mac that does not have FCP and he can not watch the HDV clips. From what I have been able to gather, the only way to view these clips in quicktime is if you have FCP installed on the machine. Is this correct? Does anybody know a work-around for this? I really don't want to transcode 17 hours of footage...

If transcoding is my only option, any recommended formats?

ClipWrap might work.

ClipWrap
 

Thanks, but it didn't work. It wraps .m2t files (not sure what these are). All my HDV files are .mov.

Any other ideas?

Does he have an up-to-date OS and latest version of Quicktime? How old is his machine? Those are some variables to look at as well.

yeah, he is up to date with everything.

QuickTime Pro might have the needed codec decoders to view HDV.

The HDV Component (AppleHDVCodec.component) is what is missing and it is only installed with Final Cut Studio. You will find it in Macintosh HD/Library/Quicktime on any Mac with FCP5 or newer installed.

ClipWrap won't work without it.

I got HDV .movs to open and play in VLC player which as far as I know, makes no connection to the Quicktime library at all so doesn't require anything other than its own installation.

Also, might installing Perian and MPEG streamclip work?

Thanks for the advice. I ended up re-encoding all the footage. I let it run over the weekend.

I tried VLC player and it did the same thing as QT, just audio, no video.

Is it possible to copy and paste the HDV Component onto different machines?

ProRes Decoder Option
 

In the future you could capture the HDV to Prores and have the Client download the newly released Decoder for machines with out FCPS it works on Windows and Mac.

I know they are bigger files but they wont tie up your machine transcoding to a codec that the client could watch.

HDV is Mpeg 2! That's a $20 codec for QT, that's why it didn't work.

Correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm not sure, but I don't think the $20 MPEG2 component actually opens up HDV, only SD quality MPEG2.

Really, but what's the difference? And if that's true why can you watch HDV on your computer? In any case I'm not recommending he buy the plug-in I just wanted to let him know it's a normal problem.

ClipWrap same as FCP HDV .mov files
 

Re: ClipWrap

Unfortunately, ClipWrap uses the same scheme as FCP, which locks you into only playing back the files on a Mac with FCP installed. But, when I emailed Mike Woodworth about this, he mentioned that ClipWrap files will play on a Mac with just the FCS Render Node? installed, so that might be something to look into. Would be interested if you get it to work this way.

As was mentioned before, this might be another way to go - Apple releases ProRes decoder for Mac & Windows

Or vice versa, if you have access to Cineform HDLink on a PC, transcode your HDV footage to a Cineform .mov files. This is what I use as it's compatible with anything that has the Cineform codec installed both Macs & PCs, doesn't really matter what NLE is installed.