How To Transcode .MOV files - Updated & Improved

[skanter]

I totally agree, and will continue to use Pinnacle 14 until Sony, Adobe and others figure out how to use MOV files, or until I need more capability than Pinnacle offers. I see no difference between original and rendered files.

I used to do professional video editing, and I still feel this way. I want to start editing immediately without jumping through 1000 hoops before starting. That said, but current projects are pretty simple, and don't require multiple audio and video streams.

All these codecs and formats seems a bit over my head, but I find it pretty easy to edit and export a MOV file using Pinnacle 14. My workflow for 1080 files is:

• Drag the original MOV files into the timeline.
• Add transitions.
• Set the file to MPEG4, 1080, 25fps and 12Mb/sec (I have to set this manually every time).
• Save file.

Maybe I'm loosing some quality, but I took a screenshot of the original MOV file and a screenshot of the exported MPEG4 file, and I can't see any difference in quality.

I'm in PAL land, so 25fps is the one to use, but I also tried setting the fps to 29,97, and it worked fine. Not the same quality as the original 25fps (of course), but I found no problem to export to this framerate. By the way, Pinnacle will set the framerate of the project to the same as the first frame added.

So I use only one program to do this, plus the Windows Media Player to play the movies.

I'm writing this because when I wanted to start editing movies, I was overwhelmed by all the codecs, conversions and expressions in this area. For people trying to get into this, they might give up because of all this technical talk. Sure, Pinnacle 14 is a 32bit program and not the fastest, but, like I said, I can't see any difference from the original MOV files, and that is good enough for me.

Probably something I didn't understand, but there is an easy way to do this.

Ludvig

--
Sam K., NYC

 

[englishman]

I wrote another tutorial showing this method . . . it's pretty much identical to my youtube video, but it incorporates the bugfixes discovered by other users in this thread. It's also more detailed and gives a few more hints / tips to make it easier for everyone. Thanks everyone for helping to make this method even better.

http://buildyourown.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/how-to-transcode-mov-files-using-matrox-codecs/