A friend has offered to help me edit some old videos. We are trying to import/open them with FCP 4.5. The files were created by digitizing VHS tapes with an external USB capture device. The video was imported and encoded with ULEAD Video Studio (v. 5 or 6, NTSC, using basically the default settings and highest quality encoding bitrate). When I look at the file info, it says MPEG movie file. I can view the video in a number of apps, but suspiciously not in Quicktime (“this is not a file that Quicktime understands”).
I can’t import them into Final Cut Pro, and I’m wondering whether there is a codec or plugin to use with FCP for this, whether to try converting them to a different format (lossy, I would think), or re-digitizing them somehow. Any advice on how to import the original files or how to properly digitize the tapes in a format suitable for editing in FCP appreciated.
Ideally when editing, you should use uncompressed formats, or the least compressed formats possible. DV-AVI is the most common, as that is what digital handicams and prosumer cameras record in.
Some editing apps do not like working with compressed files, because they have to decompress them first to work with them, then they get recompressed, usually into a different format again, when finally rendered.
FCP is probably resisting a particularly tricky MPEG codec, or possibly it’s MPEG-4 which isn’t supported by some earlier versions of editing apps because they were made before it really existed.
Anyway, try to convert the original file again into a lowest-common-denominator codec, in AVI format.
There’s a very good freeware app called MPEGStreamclip that can take pretty much any .mpg format and convert it into something useful. Get that, or something similar, and export your footage to DV, FCP’s native format. You may need to do some re-rendering once in FCP, but it will import the file.
Thanks for the replies. I have been reading around on videohelp.com about the various formats, I had no idea this stuff was so complicated. Any advice about Mac hardware to import analog video?
Something like this?