Work with Apple’s proprietary MOV on Windows PC
UPDATE 06/17/2009
The following article is almost a year old and Apple has since issued Final Cut Pro updates that make my workaround not possible any longer. If your AIC footage was captured with Final Cut Pro prior to version 6 you can try this. However, if it was recently captured it will probably not work. Feel free to send your hate mail to Apple.
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Apple’s Final Cut Pro (the newer versions) captures HDV footage not the normal way (straight as MPEG2) but wraps its proprietary MOV container junk around it. The codec Apple uses for this is the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC).
MOV itself is similar to AVI in that it’s not really a codec at all. Think of it as a wrapper. What goes inside the wrapper varies. How the wrapper is created by the software varies too. So in this case, MOV is the wrapper, AIC is what’s inside.
So for the rest of this tutorial when I say MOV I mean the Quicktime MOV that contains Apple Intermediate Codec based footage.
Here’s the problem:
This particular MOV version is created by Final Cut Pro so that it doesn’t work on anything but Macs with Final Cut Pro installed.
The workaround here describes getting those AIC/MOV types working on a Windows PC.
I did this workaround with PREMIERE PRO CS2, not Elements. This workaround may or may not work with Premiere Elements, Avid, Sony Vegas or whatever else you use. Also, make sure you have all necessary codecs installed. A corrupted M-JPEG codec on your system will make this workaround pointless.
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So somebody has been capturing HDV footage via Final Cut Pro’s Easy setup and because Apple captures HDV footage with the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) instead of just straight MPEG 2 you, who is working on a Windows machine, can’t work with it.
But you really, absolutely must import that MOV-encoded footage into Premiere Pro.
Can’t be done?
Yes, it can be.
I found a way to work with AIC on a Windows based PC.
You don’t have to buy a Mac.
You don’t have to buy any software at all as a matter of fact.
First a warning: your footage will likely not be perfect. It will work and look okay, however. Depending on your PC system you may experience some crashes with Premiere Pro as well. Depending on the quality of the original footage, your resulting new footage may have some issues such as unsightly blocks, or other issues. I don’t suggest doing what I’m suggesting here for super important projects. For those you really want to use a Mac with FCP and Compressor installed to convert the footage to format you can work with.
Here is how to convert Apple proprietary footage so that you can work with it on a PC
We’ll take the footage and convert it to something your Windows machine can work with.
We’ll use free software to do that.
One amazing little piece of encoding software is SUPER from eRightsoft.
It’s free and can convert most any format to almost any other format. So go ahead and download SUPER now.
1) Drag your Apple-raped footage into SUPER.
2) Select OUTPUT CONTAINER: AVI
3) OUTPUT VIDEO CODEC: M-JPEG
4) select either FFMPEG or MENCODER as your encoder
5) if possible, don’t change the size or aspect ratio or anything else. Do check the “TOP QUALITY” option. Set the bitrate as high as SUPER will allow.
6) Right-click your soon to be converted MOV and select “OUTPUT FILE SAVING MANAGEMENT” to select where you want the new encoding to be saved.
7) Click “ENCODE”
Wait. Wait some more. When it’s done your footage SHOULD play on your PC.
ADOBE PREMIERE PRO and MJPEG NOTES
If Premiere Pro keeps crashing or you are having problems playing the M-JPEG based footage smootly, you might need a better M-JPEG codec.
Go to Morgan Multimedia and download the Morgan M-JPEG Codec V3.
You have a 60 free, unrestricted trial to make sure it’s what you need.
Chances are that once the Morgan M-JPEG Codec is installed, your M-JPEG footage will not crash Premiere Pro (as much) and play quite smoothly.
The good news here is that not only should you now be able to play and edit your footage that was originally encoded with Apple Intermediate Codec, you’ll also have your new footage in the M-JPEG format which is intraframe based (AIC is too but again, …useless for PC at the moment.)
This means each frame contains all the image’s data, unlike HDV’s MPEG2 formats which employ the Group-of-Pictures (GOP) encoding scheme.
UPDATE: Check the comments for more possible help. I get lots of emails about this and if I have time I try my best to help. But please keep in mind that this simply may not work for you because there is a variety of variables that can make this workaround impossible for your particular case. Try it and play with the settings, feel free to change them from what I have recommended here. Also download the free VideoLan (VLC) Media player. If you can play the Apple footage with the VLC media player AND you are able to convert footage to M-JPEG (see above) you should have everything you need to successfully convert the Apple Intermediate Codec.
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