I have been away from videoediting for about a year. I recently moved from PC and Vegas to Mac and PP CS3 and I have some HDV footage captured through PP CS3. When on PC I could (using HD-link) capture and transform into an cineform intermediate fileformat so that I could edit "frame-by-frame" and not be restricted to GOP editing (not sure if this is the right term but I guess you know what I mean). Is there a similar solution for the Mac platform (I have, to no avail, spent time trying to figure this out)? Any input/guidance is highly appreciated.

Regards

Hans

Check with Cineform. My HD Link captures in .avi or .mov format, from HDV. I don't know if you need a separate license or if you can transfer to you mac system, but Cineform is also supposed to work in that platform these days.

I downloaded the Neo HD trial but it does not install on Mac unless you use Bootcamp or Parallels so that did not work.

//Hans

Here is Cineform's page on cross platforming.


CineForm QuickTime Mac Codec (http://www.cineform.com/products/MacOS.htm)


You apparently need serial number for MAC to install codec....

Thanks for the link. However, my understanding is that this is just a codec and that it as such does not achieve the effect of transforming the HDV captured video to editable mov-format, i.e. it does not work as HD-link. I will ask in the Cineform forum if the codec is sufficient or if there is something else that need to be done.

//Hans

ClipWrap (http://www.clipwrap.com/) will re-wrap HDV/.m2t files into a Quicktime wrapper.

BUT!!!!:
A. You need another program to capture the HDV/.m2t files
B. Final Cut Pro must be installed on your system so that ClipWrap has the codecs to convert properly to Quicktime
C. It's a Mac only program.

Can I obtain just the codec (I'm a hobbyist and don't want to invest in an additional videoediting program since I already have PP CS3)? Is there a software based capture program which I can use to capture in m2t files (the HDV captured via PP CS3 could not be read by ClipWrap)? I have an iMAC and a MacBook Pro so there is no room for a hardware capture card.

Use the free mac app DVHSCap.

Good Luck!

Thanks. I'll try that one.

//Hans

Downloaded DVHSCap and MPEG Streamclip. Used streamclip to convert the m2t-file to a mov-file for editing in PP CS3. My concern is that I guess/fear that this process/method is inferior to the ClipWrap solution since Streamclip encodes and ClipWrap just wraps. Anyone knows if and to what extent there is a quality difference between the two methods. I understand that the only way to have ClipWrap work is to have FCP installed. I live in Sweden and the cost for FCP is some USD 2,000 (!) and that is quite a cost for being able to wrap a file. Input as how to best preserve quality (preferably at a cost less than USD 2,000) is highly appreciated.

//Hans