Cap in Windows, Process on a Mac.. huffyuv = bad idea?

[nopk]

Damn. Just had an unfortunate "20/20 hindsight" moment..

Having just captured several hours of video off some 40+ tapes on my XP machine with VirtualDub and huffyuv .. I was to hand off these 70 gigs of .AVI's to my brother in law who was going to drop them into iMovie on his fancy high end mac to create a movie out of them..

it didnt even occur to me until now that perhaps a Mac can't read a huffyuv codec'd AVI..

does anyone know if my fear is correct?

If it is.. any suggestions as to what fairly lossless codec I can use that will allow Mac editing.. and I'll just have to re-compress all this stuff in it..

thanks,

nopk

[redwudz]

It seems questionable if HuffyUV will work with all Macs. I see Perian may be able to decode it. However, it can only decompress RGB formats of the codec, apparently. You would need to check with your Mac buddy to see what capabilities he might have.

But for something a bit more compatible, you might try DV-AVI. It's a bit higher compression, about five to one. Still not bad. The files will be a bit smaller, but still decent quality most times.

And DV is very easy to edit and usable on most OS platforms.

You can use freeware encoder programs like VirtualDub or VD Mod to convert to DV. You can use the Cedocida DV Codec or the Panasonic DV codec and output as DV from the HuffyUV files. You might also use WAV format for the audio, depending on what formats your Mac user has available. The files will be large, but smaller than HuffyUV.

Better info, ask a similar question in our Mac forums.

[Soopafresh]

It's possible it can:

http://perian.org/#detail

[nopk]

Better info, ask a similar question in our Mac forums.

Ah ha! That one escaped my notice before.. thanks for pointing it out.

and thanks to both of you for looking into that for me.. I spent quite a bit of time googling "mac huffyuv" and "imove huffyuv" as well as others and didnt see notice of perian..

.. ahhhh.. on a 4th or 5th reread of your post .. I noted the "only rgb" wrt Perian.. I take that to mean it'll do the video, but not the audio.. or is the problem deeper than that?

cheers,

nopk.

[redwudz]

Perian use is beyond my understanding at present. I see you have posted in our Mac forum and they may be able to give better advice. The 'RGB' part with Perian was just something I saw, no personal experience. Good luck, though.

But DV isn't a bad choice, if it comes to that. And Macs understand that format well.