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vmpaul · Jul 30, 2003, 06:15 PM

I have some EyeTV files that I've exported from the program opened them in QT Pro and the edit controls are greyed out.

What gives? I thought all .mov files were editable. Do I need to convert them to something else?

Weezer · Jul 30, 2003, 08:43 PM

cause they arnt really .mov files I don't think. Why dont you just edit them in EyeTv...? MPEG-1 is a notoriously bitchy format to edit, and ElGato has made it as easy as humanly possible.

vmpaul · Jul 30, 2003, 09:17 PM

I already (stupidly, I admit) exported them out of EyeTV. I don't think I can bring them back in.

Any ideas on my options?

Nap · Jul 30, 2003, 10:19 PM

Originally posted by vmpaul:
I already (stupidly, I admit) exported them out of EyeTV. I don't think I can bring them back in.

Any ideas on my options?

Mpeg multiplexed (Muxed) files have the video and sound combined in one stream. QT does not by itself demux such files and will only export the video portion. To preserve the sound you can find (on VersionTracker) a freeware program called BBDemux. Run BBDemux. You will wind up with two files; a video file with a m1v or m2v extension and a sound file with an m1a or a m2a extension. Use iTunes to convert the sound file to AIFF. Convert the .m1v file to an uncompressed video by using a lossless video compressor such as component video or NONE. If file size is a factor you can also try MotionJPEG A set for 100% and a single field; that option is located in the Options window you see by clicking on that button.
Open both this file and the sound track file in Quicktime, copy the video data to the clipboard, switch to the audio file document, be sure the time slider is at the far left, and then use Add Scaled from the Edit menu to add the video to the sound.
You now will be able to export both sound and video to the formats of your choice or save as a new quicktime file to be used by other applications such as iDVD.
If you have trouble using iTunes for the conversion of the sound file the following Classic application will do the job:
http://www.spies.com/~franke/SoundApp/

vmpaul · Jul 31, 2003, 01:39 PM

OMG, what a pain that was.

Thanks for the detailed instructions though. It actually worked. The video wasn't quite as rich in color as the original but that isn't such a big deal to me. I used the MotionJPEG A setting you recommended.

One question though. Once I have the video and audio combined again and I'm ready to export to one file. What is the best setting (video codec) to use so that I can edit the file? At that point I would like it to work as a normal .mov file where I can delete or add portions of the movie.

Uncle Skeleton · Jul 31, 2003, 04:10 PM

the reason the color looks different is because QT changed the colorspace from YUV to RGB. The codecs that accept YUV input are Component, JPEG2000 (I think), 3ivx, and possibly DivX (and probably a few others, but I don't think the older JPEG ones do). In order to make sure the video is never converted to RGB (and then back in some cases), you can use DiVA (MPEG 1 or 2) or in QTPro be sure to apply no cropping or scaling or other filter. With MPEGs this is difficult because they often have non-square pixels and it's unclear which of the various possible resolutions (if any) would avoid scaling.

anyway regarding your last question, why would you want to recode again? Anything except MPEG (1 or 2) will be fully editable. If you have it in MotionJPEG you'd best keep it there until your final edit, then compress with something like 3ivx at the end

vmpaul · Jul 31, 2003, 07:09 PM

Ok, I'll try those video codecs. I assume that they're loseless just as Nap suggested?

It wasn't a big deal but it would be nice to conserve the video as much as possible.

As for recoding...I found that after I combined the audio and video again I couldn't select a portion of the combined video and create another video. That is, I couldn't do the type of edits that I originally wanted to do. I would just get video frames. So, I assumed that it needed to be saved off.

Uncle Skeleton · Aug 1, 2003, 12:14 AM

Originally posted by vmpaul:
Ok, I'll try those video codecs. I assume that they're loseless just as Nap suggested?

no. neither is {motion, photo}JPEG (or DV if you're wondering). The only lossless codecs are Animation, Component, None, Sheer, and Pixlet. The way I see it, as long as you're sacrificing losslessness for disk space, you might as well use better compression (3ivx/mpeg-4). The advantage of the JPEG/DV codecs is that editing is much faster because there is no temporal compression.

As for recoding...I found that after I combined the audio and video again I couldn't select a portion of the combined video and create another video. That is, I couldn't do the type of edits that I originally wanted to do. I would just get video frames. So, I assumed that it needed to be saved off.

double check that you're not still using either the original MPEG audio or video. After that, I recently had a problem exporting aac audio to another format (no, it was not protected aac). But aiff worked. If you still can't edit with aiff audio and QT video, I would be very surprised and interested to help to find the problem

vmpaul · Aug 1, 2003, 11:25 AM

UncSkel, I'll try the recoding the video in Component today. I'm not too worried about disk space. I've got gigs and gigs. I'll let you know how that looks.

As for the recoding/edit problem, I followed Nap's instructions to the letter. I ended up with an AIFF, and a video file (in MotionJPEG A). I opened both files, copied the video to the clipboard, pasted into the AIFF file (using Add Scaled). It worked perfectly.

At that point, I used the sliders to isolate a scene and then tried to copy and paste that scene into a new player. Didn't work. That's why I assumed that I had to export off my combined file. Is that not true?

Uncle Skeleton · Aug 1, 2003, 12:54 PM

well it should have worked. The only other thing I can think of is to Add (not scaled) instead. Let's hear how it turns out with Component (btw, component will be very very very large. how long is your movie?)

PS. as long as we're nit-picking, I'd like to add something to Nap's instructions. You should always try Add first, and if it's not in sync (it should be), try Add Scaled. Add Scaled lowers the precision on something (the track or media timescale or something) from a double to a float, which could cause small sync issues on a very long movie. Also, Add introduces the track at the playhead, but Add Scaled scales it to the selected section (or to the whole movie if nothing is selected), so to make sure the playhead ("time slider") is at the far left only applies to Add, which you should be doing anyway.

Nap · Aug 1, 2003, 02:19 PM

How long is long? I find video and audio I get with my Interview USB digitizer and the OS X Interview drivers (by EchoFX) are never the same duration and so I routinely extract the audio, delete the sound from the video and then use Add Scaled to put the sound and video back together. So far 60 minute videos are then in perfect synch. Maybe it is one of those things where theory and actuality don't agree.

Uncle Skeleton · Aug 1, 2003, 02:38 PM

sorry, not Float, Fixed. Anyway, I've not experienced this myself (I almost always use Add), but here is where I read it (towards the bottom)

http://lists.apple.com/archives/quic...imescalesb.txt

here's the relevant text, for the lazy:

Very long QuickTime movies are beset with sync problems of all kinds. Much
of that comes from the use of Fixed for the media rate (used in Add Scaled)
and similar precision losses. We need InsertMediaIntoTrackD(...,double
rate) just like we needed GetMediaSampleReferences64.
The Sequence Grabber also needs to be fixed. I suspect it is not keeping
track of accumulating roundoff errors. Setting a video channel's time scale
equal to the sound time scale may help but applications shouldn't need to
do this kind of workaround.

it was answering the question here:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/quic...imescalesb.txt

I would guess it would become apparent after about 90 minutes or so, and that it is just a playback problem so VLC would not show it. But those are just wild guesses.

If you do come across this error, I'd be interested to know if Sync Hole has the same problem. Sync Hole uses the API function ScaleTrackSegment (as does QTMutator); I don't know what QTPro uses.