No support for .DV files?

Fleabag · Post by **Fleabag** » Tue May 09, 2006 11:07 pm

Hmmm. I downloaded the trial version of Studio 10 plus tonight. I'm very impressed so far...

...except...

...is there no support for .DV files?

I have some videos from a friend's digital camcorder. They got downloaded from the camera via a Mac and they are all in .DV format. If VideoStudio can capture pure raw DV right from a camcorder on firewire, why can't it read DV files from hard disk?

Am I missing something or being naiive??? I'm new to the whole video thing, I am a musician and recording engineer and I'm looking to fit high quality audio recordings back over camcorder video to get some nicely polished DVD results for a local choir.

I don't want to have to use Quicktime or somesuch to convert DV to another file format ready to load into VideoStudio, because surely that is an extra conversion step during which quality can be lost? Or am I wrong there?

Any advice welcome, thanks very much

Thanks in advance.

Fleabag.

Portsmouth, UK.

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Tue May 09, 2006 11:20 pm

It's probably a MAC format.

If you hook-up the camera to your PC, you can "capture" the video to AVI/DV format. That is the original DV data in an AVI "container" file. (The file will have a .AVI file extension)

Or, maybe the MAC software can save the file as AVI/DV.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue May 09, 2006 11:37 pm

As I understand it, Macs use the extension '*.dv' for DV files, whereas in PCs, they have the .AVI extension. They should, in theory at least, be otherwise identical. You could always experiment by simply changing the extension of one of the files to .avi and see if VS can now 'see' it (making sure you also back up the original file so you don't lose it if something goes wrong).

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Tue May 09, 2006 11:38 pm

Try renaming the .dv extension to .avi. If it doesn't work you can always change it back again.

EDIT
As often happens two users both submit the same suggestion at the same time. O well at least we're both looking at the same songsheet!

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue May 09, 2006 11:47 pm

"Lah dee dah dee dah, lah dee dah! I'm pickin' up a good vibration..." Not to mention that it keeps us on our toes to see how often these coincidental posts occur!!!

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Wed May 10, 2006 12:24 am

I have a feeling that won't work.

Macs generally use QuickTime for DV, so you probably have to rename the files to .MOV instead of .AVI.

tyamada · Post by **tyamada** » Wed May 10, 2006 12:55 am

There use to be a conversion utility to convert files from MACs to PCs file format and visa versa. I used to have the utility but I think if you do a search on the internet you can find it. Files can't be read directly without the conversion.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Wed May 10, 2006 1:53 am

You could perhaps try the FREE utility "Super" that claims to be able to convert anything into anything!
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... 9741#59741

Fleabag · Post by **Fleabag** » Wed May 10, 2006 6:35 am

Thanks everyone for your supportive comments. I like the tone of this forum, seems friendly round here

Fleabag.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:27 am

Thanks for the kind comments. Yeah, it's a good forum. And please let us know if any of the suggestions work so we can add that to our sum total of knowledge. I have looked a little further into the literature, and believe Torsten (THoff) may be right -- namely, that you should try changing the .DV extension to .MOV. Anyway, see if that works, and if not, then try the .AVI suggestion. Good luck!

tyamada · Post by **tyamada** » Wed May 10, 2006 1:36 pm

This link has information about the differences between MAC and PC files and how to convert them.
http://accurapid.com/journal/mac_pc.htm#2

I did a Google search on MAC file conversions, got all kinds of hits.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed May 10, 2006 10:42 pm

Thanks for doing the research, tyamada. However, off the top of my head, I am not sure about the applicability of the article you provided the link for, to video files. The .MOV format was originally invented by Mac for Mac platforms, but later was re-developed to be a cross-platform format i.e. that would also work on PCs. Ditto with the DV format which is cross-platform par excellence. The only difference is in the extension used, and as Torsten has suggested (with me agreeing in retrospect), in the case of a file captured on a Mac and using the .DV extension, is should probably only be necessary to change it to the Mac cross-platform standard .MOV extension.

(I personally continue to believe, however, that since the DV format -- as opposed to the .DV extension -- was specifically developed to be cross-platform of itself, it should only need a change in extension direct from .DV to .AVI for it to work on a PC. At least this is worth trying if changing it to .MOV doesn't work. And come to think of it, even if it does!! Trouble is, I don't have any .DV format files to play around with, and don't know any Apple munchers from whom I could get some...

)

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Wed May 10, 2006 11:36 pm

To add to the last post, both .AVI and .MOV files are just containers for audio and video data. The data can be compressed/encoded, but do not have to be.

In either case, the container format will add a header that is written to the file on disk to describe what is in the file. Because AVI and MOV files use different headers, you cannot take a container of one format containing DV video, rename it to have the extension of another container format, and open the file.

As I wrote in my previous post, the most common way of dealing with DV on the Mac is to use QuickTime as the container format, and since VideoStudio comes with QuickTime (it's needed for SmartSound, among others), you should have no trouble opening a DV-containing QuickTime file.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed May 10, 2006 11:40 pm

Thanks, Torsten -- I had forgotten about those headers.

Fleabag · Post by **Fleabag** » Fri May 12, 2006 4:57 pm

I can confirm that a straight rename to .mov or .avi does not work, but thanks for that suggestion anyway, it was worth a shot.

I am now going to try a number of things, as suggested here and elsewhere:

1) SUPER on the PC
2) Quicktime or Apple iMovie on the mac resaving the DV files as another format eg AVI or MOV, preferably lossless
3) um, er, maybe there wasn't a 3... Perhaps I'll go for a beer and a curry

Thanks...