mpg4 - demux - Final Cut Express? How?!

[Alicepire]

Hey,
Just before I switched from PC to Mac I converted my AVI's to MPG4 thinking it was a great idea. Now I'm trying to edit them in Final Cut Express and it's not letting me. I have MPEGstreamclip but the demuxing option in the file menu is always grayed out. So I tried converting them to DV in the hopes that this would work, but all it does is cut the files into 5 pieces with mix-matched audio, which doesn't help at all. And now I'm beginning to regret buying Final Cut Express. So if you could please restore my faith and sanity by telling me what to do, that would be very much appreciated.

 

[huntercr]

Hey,
Just before I switched from PC to Mac I converted my AVI's to MPG4 thinking it was a great idea. Now I'm trying to edit them in Final Cut Express and it's not letting me. I have MPEGstreamclip but the demuxing option in the file menu is always grayed out. So I tried converting them to DV in the hopes that this would work, but all it does is cut the files into 5 pieces with mix-matched audio, which doesn't help at all. And now I'm beginning to regret buying Final Cut Express. So if you could please restore my faith and sanity by telling me what to do, that would be very much appreciated.

Converting to DV is the right thing to do, theoretically. Did you use MPEG stream clip to do that? Make sure you select 29.97 as your frame rate and 48KHz AIFF as your audio. ( For NTSC anyway )

I'm sorry this might seem a little insensitive, but you kind of shot yourself in the foot converting to MPEG4 before editing. You should always encode to any MPEG format as your final step. It's similar to printing to a PDF file. You *can* go back and edit the PDF, but you're not supposed to. ( work with me on the analogy, if you think about it too deeply it will fall apart, as PDFs are lossless and easily editable under Adobe illustrator, but do you get my point? )

 

[Alicepire]

Converting to DV is the right thing to do, theoretically. Did you use MPEG stream clip to do that? Make sure you select 29.97 as your frame rate and 48KHz AIFF as your audio. ( For NTSC anyway )

I'm sorry this might seem a little insensitive, but you kind of shot yourself in the foot converting to MPEG4 before editing. You should always encode to any MPEG format as your final step. It's similar to printing to a PDF file. You *can* go back and edit the PDF, but you're not supposed to. ( work with me on the analogy, if you think about it too deeply it will fall apart, as PDFs are lossless and easily editable under Adobe illustrator, but do you get my point? )

Oh I do get your point and I regret it a whole lot and have learnt my lesson.

I selected the NTSC preset thingy and I finally got it to conver to DV properly, but when I opened it up in Final Cut all I could hear was beeping. Loud annoying beeping. Instead of the dialogue and MPEGstreamclip won't let me demux the dv file. Is there some sort of program that will let me demux the file?

 

[huntercr]

Oh I do get your point and I regret it a whole lot and have learnt my lesson.

I selected the NTSC preset thingy and I finally got it to conver to DV properly, but when I opened it up in Final Cut all I could hear was beeping. Loud annoying beeping. Instead of the dialogue and MPEGstreamclip won't let me demux the dv file. Is there some sort of program that will let me demux the file?

No, you did it right. The beeping means you have to render your audio. This is an unfortunate side effect of a slight incompatibility between the way the DV video was brought into Final Cut. For whatever reason, some audio codecs need to be rendered.

This will not be a big deal unless you are going to do alot of audio effects because you just render it once and it's done.

Honestly, though, if you're having trouble with this, you should read some of the tutorials and the manual. It's a more than 1000 page PDF, so it will answer a ton of your questions.

Final cut has a big learning curve, but it's very powerful.

 

[Alicepire]

No, you did it right. The beeping means you have to render your audio. This is an unfortunate side effect of a slight incompatibility between the way the DV video was brought into Final Cut. For whatever reason, some audio codecs need to be rendered.

This will not be a big deal unless you are going to do alot of audio effects because you just render it once and it's done.

Honestly, though, if you're having trouble with this, you should read some of the tutorials and the manual. It's a more than 1000 page PDF, so it will answer a ton of your questions.

Final cut has a big learning curve, but it's very powerful.

Ahh awesome! Thanks very much for your help huntercr!