Problems viewing Quicktime Movie. What else can I do?

Factual Questions
1

A client sent me some video in .mov format (once he sent it via ftp, the other he burned a disc and mailed it) so I can edit it together for an ad I’m putting together for their product. The guy who shot this is in college so I’m not sure what type of equipment he uses. In both cases when I go to view it my Quicktime tells me I’m missing components to properly view the file. This happens on both PC and my mac. All I get when it opens is a blank screen, but I can hear the audio. The size of the screen (even though it is blank) is huge, so I’m thinking this stuff was shot using HD equipment, but I’m not entirely sure of this.

What do I need to do to be able to see the video? I’m thinking it’s a codec issue, but I’m not familiar with dealing with these.

Any ideas?

2

On the Mac, do a cmd-i (get info) on the movie, and see what CODEC it uses.

3

It says HDV 1080i60, Integer (Little Endian), Timecode

However on the Quicktime components page I don’t see anything like this. Can someone provide a link?

4

Here you go: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1593754&tstart=22
Have him re-export and send again.

5

is there no way to convert this if I don’t have FCP?

6

You can try using a directshow codec pack like K-lite codec pack to see if that works for you.

7

Try Perian. It’s got support for a LOT of different codices. It’s a Quicktime plugin, not a separate player, so the file should open directly in Quicktime and should be editable if you’ve got QTPro.

If that doesn’t work, and you can’t get him to re-export it, you might try converting it with ffmpegX, the Mac implementation of the ffmpeg Linux project. It’s well worth having around for heavy-duty video conversion even if you don’t need it this time.

8

They aren’t a codex, they’re a codec, from “coder-decoder”. So, unless you were being witty and ironic, it is incorrect to use “codices”.