Hi guys,

A friend asked me to look at some footage for possible re-edit located on a Lacie drive. The problem: My friend does not know what format the footage was shot in, only that it's HD. Oh yeah I am a PC user and don't have a mac or ready access to a MAC NLE. I can see the footage and copy it, but since I am seeing the MAC footage on a PC it does not have an extension on the file. When I tried to import it into premiere pro2 edius it either did not read or crashed after import.

When I copied the file to my hard drive and gave it an avi extension windows media player played the file but painfully slow and shaky in both audio and video. I am uncertain if that is due to the unknown codec, the HD stream, the windows conversion of the Mac format or some combination of all three.

It also played in premiere pro after I added the extension. However, though it seemed to be the right speed (fps) in premiere, it still has some shakiness and skips (this takes the form of the footage jumping back and forth, which oddly enough looks like a cool effect video) in the audio and video. Obviously I am only using the footage I copied only the PC hard drive and not the original.

Other than "get a MAC" does anyone have a practical solution as to how I can figure out what the native codec is in this footage, and then convert it in either premiere or edius for smooth playback?

If I might suggest. Download the free application called MPEG Streamclip. It has a lot of flexibility in what it will play. You might also try adding an MOV extension to the file rather than AVI, since that's the native file wrapper on a MAC.

If you do get it to play in MPEG Streamclip, you can open the properties window to see the codec and other specs for the file.

-gb-

I figured it out, at least partially. I renamed the clips to mov and that worked for the already rendered files. I discovered using a small utility called mediainfo that the rendered files are in SD (720x480) not HD. However, the source clips are native mov and are in HD (1920x1080). I'm not sure what it was shot on (maybe an f900 or a CineAlta but I'm guessing) and still am uncertain as to the codec.

Ok, so now the raw hd footage plays on media player, but although it imports into premiere, the video is a white letterboxed screen (the audio plays fine). I suspect it is DVCPro HD since it was probably edited on FCP initially. I have serious magic's decoder which is probably why it plays the video and audio using wmp, but I still can't figure why it wont show the video in premiere.