[John H. Gewalt]

Sony DSC T1 records videos with sound. No problem importing to iPhoto. However, audio does not accompany video when imported into iMovie HD/FCE/FCP. How do I extract audio in some format to dub it in? Quicktime plays both video and audio then a mysterious thing happens and audio vanishes on QT's way to digital editing.

[Uncle Skeleton]

QuickTime has a quirk that it treats MPEG-1 and -2 files as one ginormous sample (instead of each frame as a separate sample). The result of this is that you can't edit these files in QT-based apps, and you can't convert the audio from them in QT-based apps (I don't really understand how this relates, but it's true). You can use any other engine (like ffmpeg or MEncoder) to decode the sound separately into a format that's not MPEG (like wav). Or you can demux to mp2 (bbDemux) and then decode that to aiff (iTunes (although it never works for me personally for this) or MAD).

Barring all that, MPEG StreamClip is a very handy app for dealing with MPEG files. It's our (MacOS's) only (free) native MPEG editor (well, not editor, trimmer, but that is much much better than nothing), and it can convert straight to DV or QT, including audio (including ac3). Or it can decode the audio to aiff.

[John H. Gewalt]

Uncle S.: I found your note and got my sound by reading QT with StreamClip, exporting to AVI. Thanks!!! You did what many others could not.