[PeopleLikeFrank]

Hi folks,

I've got a movie I'd like to make some edits to, and it's currently a DivX (DIV3) encoded .avi. What's the best way to tun it into something that FC will understand? Source video not available in this instance.

[Sneaky Snake]

handbrake? I'm not sure if it does DivX but it does a lot of formats

[Janichsan]

Sneaky Snake, on October 2nd 2009, 05:01 AM, said:

handbrake? I'm not sure if it does DivX but it does a lot of formats

Handbrake can read anything for that there's a Quicktime plugin. The question is what format FCP can import. Can it read .m4v? Then you should be fine with Handbrake.

[The Liberator]

I think Final Cut can read most things, they are just not natively supported (which means you will need to render on import and re-render on edits).

Hope this helps, Liberator.

[PeopleLikeFrank]

FCP can 'read' DivX, but it just turns up as a white box with no sound. It complains about the codec if you try to render it. I supposed installing DivX for Mac might help.

Handbrake -> mp4 works, but it's not ideal, since it only gives you a choice between MPEG-4 and H264 as codecs, and they seem to make FCP cranky when working with them. I ended up doing Handbrake->mp4->Quicktime->DV-encoded .mov, which should be horrible for quality, but by jamming all the quality sliders up to 100% it seems to have made it through without a noticeable loss. We'll see how it does when exporting back to a compressed format.

[teflon]

Installing DivX for Mac sounds like it'd solve all your problems. It plugs into QT 7 and then you can happily export direct to a DV encoded .mov in a single step.
Preserve quality, takes less time...

Sounds good, no?

[Janichsan]

...or Perian, which supports even more formats than just DivX.

[The Liberator]

Even though it is a DivX file, it is encoded as avi. Should that not then be able to import, render and play?

Liberator.

[Hansi]

The Liberator, on October 3rd 2009, 09:54 AM, said:

Even though it is a DivX file, it is encoded as avi. Should that not then be able to import, render and play?

Liberator.

AVI is a container you need the specific codec to read the embedded video. Perian is the answer.

[The Liberator]

Ahhh, okay I see.

Stupid question, but then he would be able to import, render and edit it?

Thanks, Liberator.

[PeopleLikeFrank]

Thanks for the advice about Perian. I didn't want to bother with installing DivX at the time, but had forgotten about Perian, which is a bit more of a one-stop solution.

I've done the edits with the previous conversion already, but I'm going to try doing a direct DivX->DV conversion, and remap the timeline onto it, see if the qualiity difference is noticeable.

[The Liberator]

I would be interested to know what the quality difference is like, as I might be doing something along those lines in about a week.

Liberator.

[Greg Gant]

Have you tried using Perian instead of the official DIVX codecs? That may do the trick.

/edit nm, I just noticed it was mentioned above....