One of the services we offer is to convert video tapes to computer files. We can support a wide variety of file types, but about 80% of demand is for Windows compatible files, the balance Mac. I’m pleased to say clients have been very happy with what we’ve been doing over the last four years.
Mac clients have been supplied with Quicktime files, based on the MP4 codec. I’ll try to explain that, Quicktime isn’t strictly speaking a file type it is more like a wrapper inside of which is a file with your film. The structure of that file is determined by the codec selected, as I said, in the majority of cases we’ve used the MP4 codec. Then last week I got a call from a client who couldn’t open our files in the video editing program they wanted to use - Apple’s own Final Cut.
As a consequence over the last few days I’ve been reading, checking, testing to try to get to the bottom of this, finally arriving at this point. For reasons I cannot understand if a Quicktime file is created using MP4 it can be opened and edited using Apple’s iMovie product but the same file cannot be opened in Final Cut.
I think the file type / codec Final Cut is looking for is DV format. Now, we can produce DV files, but there’s a big but attached. Mainly - but, they’re gigantic. A movie converted into Quicktime / MP4 ay just over 1Gb landed at a whopping 66Gb when processed as a DV file. And the conversion took about four times longer. For that reason we’ve made it clear that we aren’t offering DV format files.
What’s the solution if you would like to use DV files in Final Cut? Well, you can open these in iMovie and use that program to convert them to DV format.
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