avi vs. mov
 

I am compiling footage for a video from several different people and they typically give it to me on a cd in the form of an avi. This has always worked well for me. Someone recently gave me a cd with the footage in the fioe format mov which is basically a Quick Time format. I cannot open it and cannot import it. My question is this, is mov the same quality as avi and can it be imported into Premier Pro? Is it as good as an avi or is avi the desired format for tranferring video from a cd to my computer? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Like avi's, there are different codecs for QT. If you don't have the right ones installed, it won't play properly, or not at all. Premiere should be able to work with it, again, providing you hqave the right codec.

As for quality, I love the way QT saturates the colors. It is a very powerful format.

By no means am I trying to hijack this thread, but, is it possible to capture uncompressed .mov files in Premiere on a PC. The .avi files are obviously a Windows format, and though .mov is compatible with both, could I edit uncompressed .mov in Premiere instead of .avi? I haven't experimented with this myself yet because I know for sure that working in uncompressed .avi is not going to hurt my workflow in regards to quality (though I almost always export to .mov in the end anyways).

As far as I know, yes. I have used premiere in the past to capture as QT, I don't see why it would be different now.

maybe I should clarify. I don't want to play the files on my computer. I only want to upload them to Premier and eventually make a dvd. I have always used avi and need to know if mov is as high quality and whether or not it is compatible to capture with premier. Thanks

It doesn't matter what you want to do with them, if you don't have the right codec, you just have a file taking up space. Premiere may have it, or you may need to install the latest QT player to get them.

AVI and MOV are container formats . As stated before one can't answer the question which one of the format has better quality because it depends on the codec used in the container. Follow the wiki-links for better understanding ;-)