Hello!

I hope I don't repeat what someone else has asked somewhere else and frustrate admins by not having searched the forums before hand, BUT i DID search the forums!!

So i got a new Sanyo Xacti E1/ca65 underwater camera. It saves videos to flash cards as quicktime mp4's i believe, at 640x480, 29.97fps. Great, fine who cares right?

The next step is putting em on yer PC and then editing and compiling and making a beautiful montage that you're really proud of and want to share with friends and family around the TV with bucket of popcorn, and maybe the rest of world via youtube.

I have premiere pro 7.0 and have used it in the past to make little vids of whatever using some pretty terrible footage off of P&S digicams. No problems there (except for the P&S =] )


I tried importing my new mp4's into ppro 7 and i get an error (something along the lines of ppro doesnt support that codec or compression type)

My questions to the knowledgeable and wise video editors out there are the following:

1. How should I get my mp4's into ppro without losing quality?

- I realize that the vids I have are not super high quality to begin with, but I want to keep as much as I have. I tried using a free program I found called mp4cam2avi which worked alright I guess except for juicing them up in size by 45% on average (made my mp4's into ffdshow H264 avi's) I also have a program called SUPER that converts pretty much any media file into any other media file with several detailed settings to choose from ( i can never decide what to choose...)

2. What settings should I then use to export my stylish montage for a) posting on youtube for example b) saving on the computer or a dvdr as storage in a high quality format c) DVD (haven't tried making DVD's yet but would like to in the future.)

- After using the avi's that mp4Cam2AVI spat out I tried exporting about 15 different ways
----via the movie... dialog box - avi's with various codecs and quality choices
- quicktime mov's with various codecs

----via the adobe media encoder dialog box - wmv's, quicktimes, RM's

ettcccc

Honestly, I've spent the last week or so messing around with settings and things and I have yet to achieve what I am looking for. Perhaps I am looking for the perfect but non-existent solution?


Any help would be appreciated, I leave for Africa in 5 days and will have drastically reduced internet access so before I go with my new camera (!!) I would like to know how to do something with the footage.


- your humble video editing apprentice, turt3l.

I have quite a lot of experience dealing with this kind of thing, I can probs figure it out for you.

Best first step would be to get me a sample file (doesn't matter how short) - post it on a filesharing site or something not youtube as I need an unmolested file

What is the extension? .MOV? .MP4? .AVI?

If AVI, what is the fourcc? (Use AVIC to tell you)

awesome, pleased to hear it.

here's a link to a short video taken with my camera

SANY0063.MP4 - File Shared from Box.net - Free Online File Storage



the camera compresses them as .mp4's

Unfortunately I do not have PPro with me at this very moment, but I do have Vegas, and that opens it fine.

It reports it as "H.264 AVC"

PPro CS3 supports H.264 AFAIK, but I am not sure that older versions do, and H.264 is not a codec you can go and download like DivX - various people (eg MS, Apple) release their version in their player, but it doesn't seem to be like a DivX codec where one codec install lets it play in multiple players or be edited.

One solution might be this:
Open the file in Quicktime Pro (If you don't have it, and are unsure if you want to buy it not knowing if it will work, google "free quicktime pro 7" as it is v easy to unlock it.)
The player lets you save the file in another container, which often does not affect the bit stream. Click Export and select "Movie to QuickTime Movie". I just did it with your file and although it grew in file size, when I open Quicktime and view the file properties, the "Video Stream" size is identical in both.

Once you have a .MOV, try importing that - as long as you have the latest QuickTime installed, it should include an H.264 codec for QuickTime files, though again you may well want to licence QuickTime for the encoding abilities.

Regarding storage, if you can pull the original files into your editor, and it works, do that. If not, try to convert it to DV AVI (You may need to download Panasonic DV Codec for this) or a lossless / nearly lossless codec such as HuffYUV or MJPEG.

I will see about getting the file into premiere when I get home.

Also try The Official Codec Pack Guide * K-Lite Mega Codec Pack - that has a free H.264 codec in it, I am not sure if it is in a useable state yet though

so i got quicktime pro and ive been exporting a 152mb .mp4 from my camera to quicktime movie and its taking foreeeeeeeever...

chances are it will import once its a .mov so i know it will work afterwards.

if i do get it working like that, when i export the movie do i just use the same settings? ive tried exporting some movies as h264.mov's and they tend to be large files.

regarding storage, i wanted to store the final exported movie, not the original .mp4's or any converted version of them. i dont care that much about the original files if i can put together a montage that i can save in relatively good quality with a decent size, in fact, i would prefer having one version to post online, and one version to save directly do DVDR

should i try to get premiere pro cs3? would that eliminate all of my importing problems? would it give me the options i need for exporting my files the way im looking to export them?

you don't need to re-compress it. just us the File - Save As and save it as a .mov then it should import OK

well, tried saving as a .mov, but it won't import...i installed the new codec pack that is supposed to include the h264/avc codec but premiere kinda gets stuck with the importing window open, but no status bar... so doesn't really work.

Well it imports into PPro CS3 fine for me, even without changing the container to MOV.
Can you download the Vegas Pro demo? Can you import it into that?

i downloaded the vegas pro demo, and it imported the original .mp4's from my camera without any problems. im also trying to get a copy of ppro cs3 if you say that it works there too. so does this mean that ppro 7.0 is out in terms of editing software for my situation?

and what about the exporting settings? in theory, what would i use to export my movie after im done editing it?