Help with reclaiming resolution after converting avchd to mov files possibl

[davedorsett]

HI folks, I'm writing with a question about video resolution after converting video files from avchd to mov. My daughter has
a big high school project wherein she is doing a documentary and has shot many hours of interviews; she's dedicated and is
a pretty good amateur techie but still hasn't burrowed into the guts of video codec and containers and is thus at the mercy
of her high school advisors, the equipment she loans from her high school, and the limited time her professional documentary
mentor can give her. She shot many hours of interviews and got great content and now it appears that the video quality
has really suffered from the conversion that she and her tech person at school thought was necessary. She shot in avchd,
but didn't fully understand that our version of iMovie could indeed import/use the avchd format. Hence the tech person at
her high school converted all to .mov's and presumably threw out the original avchd wrappers/containers. The mov's (I believe)
are bigger files and the res is not nearly as crisp as the original avchd's. I'm wondering if the data that made the avchd res
higher is still THERE somewhere in the newly converted movs and if it can be regained somehow. Can she "unconvert"
the movs back to avchds now that she knows iMovie is ok with avchds? I'm guessing that higher res raw data is gone but
don't know if I don't ask. She has put tons and tons of time into this and any ideas would be highly prized. Thanks very much.

[smrpix]

You can't add back what's been thrown away. If the original cards still exist that's what you want. The conversion in iMovie was probably done to ProRes, which is fine, but it should have been done to match the resolution and frame rate of the original footage. It sounds like it wasn't, which is a shame.

[Cornucopia]

Depends on the version of iMovie - could have been ProRes (best choice, but doubtful), Apple Intermediate (aka AIC, more likely) or even DV (if it is quite an old version). Actually, the OP doesn't say WHAT did the converting, so it could be anything. Use mediainfo to tell us.

But as smrpix mentioned, you cannot "unwrinkle aluminum foil after it's been crumpled". If the data is lost, it's truly lost. And the only way the data would not be lost would be if you still had the original media, or if you lucked out and transferred to a lossless or near-lossless intermediate codec (such as ProRes).

Scott

[newpball]

The bad news is that you cannot restore that what is gone.

What happened to the raw camera files?

Rule number one: Never ever, under no circumstances delete the raw camera files! Always save them, no excuses, buts and ifs!


Best thing to do now is to work with the .mov files, please do not convert things again and repeat the same mistake.

[smrpix]

Rule number one: [B]Never ever, under no circumstances delete the raw camera files! Always save them, no excuses, buts and ifs!

This isn't always possible in an institutional setting -- and you, of all people, would seem to benefit greatly from being in one.

@davedorsett -- what your daughter can do going forward is to get a portable hard drive so her originals can always be safely backed up.