DV AVI editing

[Alican]

Hi

I'm not sure if I've misunderstood, but since using FCE I've noticed that when you acquire DV footage, it gets transcoded to a quicktime file - as located in the Capture Scratch folder. What's the advantage of this? Is it used as a reference/proxy file with the original DV AVI file still intact somewhere?

Graham

 

[Peel]

There's no transcoding going on. AVI and QuickTime are both containers files which can contain a number of different codecs (the compression format for the video and audio). DV is simply one of those codecs. Others include HDV, H.264, DVCPRO, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, plus others. It's not readily apparent which codec is contained in any given quickitime file, but if you open the file with Quicktime Player, and get info on the file (command-I), it will tell you all the specifics.

 

[Alican]

Thanks for the info, it helped me understand more. I shall look at the properties of a file when I get home. One odd thing, when I played one of these captured files by clicking on it, it looked bad and desaturated which is what made me think it was some sort of reference or proxy file. Looks find in the FCE timeline though

 

[banjomamo]

Thanks for the info, it helped me understand more. I shall look at the properties of a file when I get home. One odd thing, when I played one of these captured files by clicking on it, it looked bad and desaturated which is what made me think it was some sort of reference or proxy file. Looks find in the FCE timeline though

By default Quicktime flags DV files at the low quality setting so that playback is fast and smooth. You can either go into the movie settings in Quicktime and change this yourself or download a free app called HiQual to drag and drop the DV file on it and change the flag to high quality.