Lossless conversion to apple friendly format?

[bpetruzzo]

I recently migrated over to Apple. All went well except I have a great deal of raw footage AVI files that were imported in Adobe Premiere back in the PC days. MacOS will play the audio, but won't display the video. So I'm trying to find a way to convert these files to an Apple friendly format without losing any of their quality. I want to make sure that I've got the highest quality editing material should I need to return to the footage in the future.

How can I do this? It seems like most of the conversion options do some kind of compression for various viewing applications.

Sorry for my ignorance. I appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks!

 

[spinnerlys]

1. You need to find out which codec the AVIs are using.
Otherwise the conversion will help nothing as the converter app will not know what to do with the video.

2. Find if the codec can be installed on a Mac (Matrox RT2500 for example has nothing to offer).

3. Which app are you using to watch the AVIs? QT? Download VLC and see if it can read your AVIs.

4. I don't know about the standard codecs, that Apple delivers, as I have Final Cut installed, and with that came a lot of codecs.
Maybe if you buy a QT Pro license (20$) you get some of those (lossless) codecs.

5. From what source comes the footage? Tape (miniDV, HDV, ...Beta)?
If it is DV, it would be simpler to get a DV camera and just import the footage again, as DV already uses compression, and going lossless after that is a waste of space.

 

[MrLatte23]

try 10-bit uncompressed quicktime

Premiere should be able to output it and it won't recompress the footage. File sizes will be huge.