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FCP HDV codec - works in VLC! How?

Posted: 23 Nov 2008 08:24
by noveltymc
Hey there -

I'm a student making some comedy videos in my offtime - I like to edit in Sony Vegas (I use a PC) but imported in Final Cut Pro, about 8 tapes of footage on my schools HDV deck. I know this reason why the HDV footage doesn't work - when it's logged it uses transcode, some proprietary codec that is not available (to my knowledge) anywhere, for download or purchase.

So after months of googling, more googling, downloading programs, downloading more programs, downloading codecs, posting in forums, reading posts in forums, I began to feel completely defeated in this situation.

However I had a little ray of light when I downloaded VLC! The files worked perfectly! The files will play on my PC using VLC but the video can't be read into Sony Vegas 8 (both audio channels can). When I looked up what the codecs were, it seemed to say mpg2 and hdv2, don't know if that helps or what it means, but maybe that's something. I think it actually is AIC (icod) (apple intermediary codec)

So my specific windows question I suppose would be: how did you guys do this? Is it possible to extract something from VLC to make this work in Vegas 8.0?

This is absolutely killing me. Apple's proprietary codec has done a lot of damage to a lot of people, and I've been spending way too much time on this file format crap. VLC rules!

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the files are wrapped as .mov

Re: FCP HDV codec - works in VLC! How?

Posted: 23 Nov 2008 13:21
by Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Just take the file and transcode it to something more standard like mp2v, mpga in TS muxer.

Re: FCP HDV codec - works in VLC! How?

Posted: 24 Nov 2008 10:42
by noveltymc
Thanks for the advice - I downloaded tsMuxer but unfortunately the files can't be read as input (they're in a .mov container). It wasn't shot on a P2 card or anything like that, its straight from the HDV tape logged into FCP (meaning it's in the proprietary apple intermediate codec as a .mov). Am I doing something wrong here?

Re: FCP HDV codec - works in VLC! How?

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 10:40
by VLC_help
Not tsMuxer, mux those as TS.

So Media -> Convert/Save, select file, press Convert/Save then from Encapsulation select MPEG-TS, from Audio select MPEG audio and tick the file and choose filename and then press Save. From editing point of view, .TS isn't the best format (many editing programs don't support it).

Re: FCP HDV codec - works in VLC! How?

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 11:08
by noveltymc
THE FILE WORKS IN SONY VEGAS!!!!! I could --please stay polite-- kiss you!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THANK YOU VLC!