QuickTime gets the bitrate wrong?

[RichardAshkenazi]

Hi. A friend of mine edited a bunch of DV camcorder footage on her PowerBook G4 (I think running Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar; not sure what her editing program is). She left it all in DV format, but apparently in a .MOV container. We transferred a bunch of the videos to my computer (a Dell running Windows XP SP2) so that I could burn DVDs of the DV files for archival and sharing and not have them in some proprietary Mac format, like her OS burns them. Some of them are larger than the capacity of a DVD, so we've been cutting them up on her computer. However, now she's moved across the country, so it's up to me.

I have QuickTime Pro 6.5.2, and have tried cutting and pasting. However, after trying it out and saving about 20 minutes of a 7 GB file, I found that the resulting video was almost 9 GB. On investigation, I found that on the originals, when I look at "Get Movie Properties" and check out the filesizes and data rates, the files are listed as about double their real size, and the audio data rate is listed as matching the video data rate (in other words, way too high). So for some reason, when I save a clip, it apparently saves the audio at that massive bitrate.

Any thoughts? Any other programs other than QuickTime Pro that can split DV/MOV files without affecting the data itself?

[RichardAshkenazi]

[bump]

[RichardAshkenazi]

Nobody?

[underwurlde]

Hi,

You couldn't have chosen a nastier problem: MOV container for DV, on a PC! Ouch!

Try converting original MOV to something more useable (i.e. MPEG II) using TMpgEnc Express (IMHO, forget everything else when it comes to converting MOVs).

It will take time to convert (but then again, what doesn't) but you won't waste huge amounts of HDD space.

Good Luck,

Andy