I have a JVC Everio digital hard drive camcorder and I am trying to edit the video I took with it. Windows Movie Maker says it is an incompatible file. The extension is *.mod and *.moi. The camera came with a "trial" to something called power director and power producer. Everytime I have tried to use them to work on editing, they lock up and quit working. Any ideas what I might could use?

Josh in Alabama

I don't know enough about this camcorder - yet - but from what I THINK I know:

Did you get the docking station with the camcorder? Apparently the camcorder does not have a firewire output but the dock does.

A promo I read says your camcorder has a 30Gig HDD but its' maximum recording (which they call Fine DVD) resolution is only 720X480 which is mpeg2 image quality and not DV quality.

I am not the pro here but you should be able to trasfer from the camcorders HDD to your PCs HDD via usb2 without a problem at 720X480 and you need capture/editing software that supports the camcorder's native file type and usually a new camcorder comes with a bundle of "free" software that should support simple things like pc capture.

It would be helpful to know which model of the Everio line you have purchased which will help with your getting more specific answers.

EDITED TO ADD that there are several free trial editing program downloads and one of my favorites is ULead Video Studio.

Windows media encoder can convert them to wmv so moviemaker can work with them.
The supplied software is not bad, some features are disabled unless you upgrade, It isn't a trial version, what they give you is quite decent.

I'm wondering if your computer has enough processing power, absolute minimum of 512MB RAM needed I expect - with XP.

Greetings,

I have an Everio with 30Gb. The way I use mine is to attach a usb cable to the camera,

Copy the files to a folder on my pc

Then rename all of the *.mod files to *.mpg and then I use the vids as I want.

If you have a load to rename then write a simple batch file.


i.e.

open a text document by right clicking on the desktop

copy and paste this text into the new document

ren *.mod *.mpg
del *.moi


save the file as anything you like.bat

then copy the file into the folder you have save the vids to, it will, do the extension name change and delete the moi files which you don't need.

This might not be uber correct but it's worked for me on countless 100s of vids.

Enjoy.

I'm in the same boat as the op. I purchased a JVC Everio hard drive camcorder yesterday and no idea that these mod files were such a pain in the rear. I tried renaming the file extension which works but audio is lost. Says codec is unknown in Media Player. The software it came with is Power Director and allows you to save the files as avi or mpeg but you have to use THEIR software to do so!
I'm really kind of ticked off about all of this. I spent a chunk of change on this camcorder only to have to search all over the internet for conversion which will interrupt quality.
I think i will return it.

To my knowledge and experience simply changing the extersion of a file doesn't actually change anything about the file.

For example, a standard definition dvd vob file is just a altered version of mpeg2 but changing the extension from vob to mpeg doesn't change the file.

The file has to be processed or transcoded to change it from one file type to another.

There are many programs - as mentioned earlier - that will one-step transcode most any file. Mediacoder is a free and online available transcoder that works well. Some video editing programs will also transcode one file type to another like avi to mpeg or vcd (also known as rendering).

If you try to open your "raw" files from your camcorder to your PC in a program that doesn't recognize or support that file type I suggest you either find a program that does fully support that file type or use a transcode utility to change to file into a supported file format and extension.
goodluck