DV for Mac from PC

[Jon Shohet]

Hey all,

What would be the most failproof way to export DV PAL video from Premiere or After Effects on a PC so that it will be compatible wth a Mac?
".mov" using DV PAL settings? ".dv" ? Does Premiere do a good job of exporting a quicktime DV on the PC or is After Effects a safer bet?
If I hand an editor working on a Mac an AVI-DV file, would that be good enough?


many thanks in advance,
Jon

[Theodore McNeil]

I think if you just sent them a DV PAL .mov file you should be fine. I know those DV .mov files work in both Premiere and Vegas.

[Jon Shohet]

Thanks.

Does anyone have any experience exporting to QT DV from Premiere on the PC?
I've exported to Quicktime Animation in the past with good results, but for compressed QT Codecs (like H.264) I've seen Premiere encode very poorly. I never tried going to QT DV before, though.

[Jiri Fiala]

Animation is just a notch under uncompressed, and it´s really an overkill for most uses.

It all comes down to what you want to do with that footage. If you go for simple editing, you could either use DV PAL, some kind of DVCPro (though that may be limited to Macs, I can´t remember offhand) or Motion JPEG.

If you plan to composite or color-correct the footage, go as high as you can - Photo JPEG or Animation.

If you have alpha channel (transparency), go with Animation. PNG produces smaller files, but it´s way more demanding on CPU.

[Jon Shohet]

Hi Jiri, thanks for replying.

I'm aware of the differences in file size, compression, alpha channel options and color space between the different codec options.
The request from the editor I'm handing the file over to was for DV PAL.

My question was specifically about Premiere on the PC. I've noticed that it does a very bad job exporting compressed QT. If I export to QT Animation Best - no problem. But if I export to - for example - QT Photo Jpeg 85, or to QT H.264, exports from premiere seem noticiably worse than exports from After effects or QT Pro at exactly the same settings.... That's my experience at least.

I was wondering if Premiere does a good job at exporting QT DV Pal or not.
In any case I had to rush the file over so I didn't take any chances and exported the Premiere sequence from After effects - but I'm still interested to hear from Premiere users if they regularely export to QT DV PAL from a PC to deliver to a Mac with no issues.

Thanks. Jon

[Mitchell Lewis]

Not quite the answer you're looking for but......

We've recently had to share HD files between a Mac (FCP) and a PC (Premiere). Our solution (thanks Perronne!) was to use the free Avid DNxHD codec. You can install it both Mac and PC and then use it to create files in the DNxHD codec that will be readable on both platforms. It works sweet! Try looking to see if they have a similar codec for SD files. Or maybe this codec will work with both HD and SD....dunno.....never tried it.

The only issue we ran into was how to physically move the file from one computer to another. If you use a portable hard drive to move the files between systems, you can format the drive as FAT 32. But the problem with that is that FAT 32 has a 4GB file size limit. In our case the file was 17GB in size and we'd get an Error when we'd try and move the file over. We ended up using a PC laptop and moving the file via an ethernet connection from our Mac onto the PC laptop (took about 45 minutes). Most PC's have internal drives that are formatted NTFS which can handle large files. Then we took the PC to our client and he transfered from the PC to his editing system hard drive. It was a PAIN, but it worked. :)

[Dan Foster]

Originally Posted by Mitchell Lewis

The only issue we ran into was how to physically move the file from one computer to another. If you use a portable hard drive to move the files between systems, you can format the drive as FAT 32. But the problem with that is that FAT 32 has a 4GB file size limit. In our case the file was 17GB in size and we'd get an Error when we'd try and move the file over. We ended up using a PC laptop and moving the file via an ethernet connection from our Mac onto the PC laptop (took about 45 minutes). Most PC's have internal drives that are formatted NTFS which can handle large files.

Hi Mitchell, wanted to make two suggestions in case it helps in the future:

- Consider formatting the portable HD as NTFS, which you can do with Paragon's add-on NTFS driver for MacOS X that supports read/write NTFS use. While this worked great with Leopard, I have yet to test it with Snow Leopard. Alternatively, MacOS X has hidden read/write NTFS support that can be enabled, but I have heard of mixed results -- some folks had no issues while others were seeing sporadic system crashes.

(I understand Paragon NTFS v7 supports Snow Leopard but only if the system is booted into 32-bit mode.)

- Consider using a crossover gigabit ethernet cable, assuming both machines has a built-in gigabit ethernet port (or has some sort of add-on card for it). That will go much faster than Fast Ethernet.

Difference is, with fast ethernet (100 Mbps), you're limited to about 7-8 MB/sec transfers while with gig-e, you're limited to as much as (theoretically) about 120 MB/sec. But realistically, with gig-e, you're more likely to be constrainted by the speed of the hard drives you're using on both ends -- probably around 40 to 60 MB/sec. Still much faster than fast ethernet.

[Mitchell Lewis]

Thanks Dan. Great ideas! Next time I have to transfer data to a PC (something I do about once every 5 years) I'll give the crossover cable a try. Thanks!

[Jon Shohet]

egad! this thread has been hijacked ;)

Another solution you can try for moving files from Mac to PC is to keep your portable HD in Mac formatting, and try to open it on the PC with this free utility:

HFSExplorer
Catacombae - HFSExplorer