converting mac captured HDV to something viewable/editable on a pc

[Dylan Tucker]

I recently recieved a disc from a friend that contains some hdv footage that was captured on a mac. I am on a pc, and need to be able to edit it. I can play it in QT but only get audio. The video just shows up as a blank white screen. I don't know anyone around me that owns a mac, so I cant just go somewhere and convert it. I'm using PPro2. Any ideas?

[Chris Leong]

Yeah, it's QT voodoo time....
Like the SCSI voodoo of yore, QT isn't as simple as many would have you believe :)

Here's the deal.
There's many flavors of Quicktime.

What you have is a QT movie that's created on a Mac using a encoding/decoding algorhythm (codec) that your playback machine doesn't have. These codecs come with QT, but, depending on which version of QT you're running, what NLE (non linear editors) you have in your system (and iMovie is an NLE too, BTW), if it's a Mac or a PC (QT works on both, but with slight differences), yadda yadda.

The current flavor of the month codec is called H.264 and mostly all the newest Macs have it in their system. Note: Mostly. Newest. Windows machines have similar, but are different again for XP and Vista.

Get Info/Get More Info/display Properties on your wayward QT movie should yield the flavor of codec your movie was made in.

Then you'll either have to download that codec from Apple's QT site, or go back to the exact same computer the QT was made on and make another one using H.264, AIC or another more common codec that your playback PC has.

QED.
HTH
Cheers
Chris

[Bill Koehler]

Originally Posted by Dylan Tucker

I recently recieved a disc from a friend that contains some hdv footage that was captured on a mac. I am on a pc, and need to be able to edit it. I can play it in QT but only get audio. The video just shows up as a blank white screen. I don't know anyone around me that owns a mac, so I cant just go somewhere and convert it. I'm using PPro2. Any ideas?

I was recently dealing with this exact same problem on my HP laptop running WinXP Pro.
I assumed the problem was with the wireless connection I had recently setup for the first time.

A few days ago I was looking into the problem - again.
With the video playing in QT 7.1.6 I popped into Window --> Show A/V control.
With the video playing I started playing with the brightness control.
The moment I moved it off of dead center, the video showed up.

YMMV