ot: best format for windows movie maker?

ushere wrote on 10/18/2009, 8:21 PM
i know, i know, but it's what i use to teach my 'beginners'.

have a student who's shot 6 hours on a jvc - .mod files - so i'm going to have to convert them.

what would be the best 'reasonable' format to convert them to? this is not for anything more serious that a 'home' dvd.

would .wmv be easier on mm2, and take less space relative to dv (at 576 X 720)?

tia

leslie

Comments

InterceptPoint wrote on 10/19/2009, 5:02 AM
You should look into using SDCopy to go from .mod to .mpg. This worked quite well on my grandson's JVC camera. Very fast. No quality loss and you get Movie Maker compatibility. There is also a flag to set for 4:3 or 16:9 as I recall. This may be more of a re-naming process and not a conversion since .mod files are MPEG2. Do a Google search for SDCopy. It's free.
farss wrote on 10/19/2009, 5:15 AM
I vote for vanilla DV. File size is a tad large but you can't go wrong with that. A 350GB portable USB drive is AUD 85.


On the other hand:
Oh yes you can. I thought I would be safe saying that to a client and he rocks up with a 4GB AVI file on a thumb drive. Vegas near chokes on it. Lord only knows what audio codec was in it but finally Vegas coughed out a proxy and I was working, sort of. I checked the video stream and (drum roll please) he'd rendered what started out as 16:9 PAL as 4:3 NSTC!!

Should I mention this project started out being shot on Betacam SX and has been going south ever since. Thank you Sony for making the J30.

Bob.
ushere wrote on 10/19/2009, 5:43 AM
thanks guys,

i'll go with bob for this (without his hassles hopefully!). but i'll also d/l sdcopy and give it a whirl - might be useful to both him and some of my other students who seem to acquired .mod footage.

thanks

leslie
musicvid10 wrote on 10/19/2009, 7:35 AM
According to another poster, you can sometimes simply rename .mod to .mpg and it will work. I haven't tried this.
InterceptPoint wrote on 10/19/2009, 11:20 AM
Yes. Renaming is about all that is happening. But SDCopy does make some changes to the files so you end up with two sets, .mod and .mpg. Also it allow you to set the flag for 16:9 which I think you need to do to make things right for widescreen in Movie Maker. In any case it is not rendering the video to a new format so it seems to me that this has to be the optimum solution since there is no possibility of degrading the original video.