mov files

[richmittel]

We are in the process of making a DVD movie of a wedding using Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11. Most of the video was taken with our Sony non-HD tape-based camcorder, which we have captured as *.avi files.

We missed one segment of the ceremony because the camera was inadvertently turned off, but we were able to obtain a good video clip of that segment that was taken from another camcorder. The file we received is in the *.mov format.

Can we mix *.avi and *.mov files in our Movie Studio editing? Or should we first convert the *.mov file to an *.avi file? I see there are various converters available on line. If conversion is recommended, could you suggest what tool to use?

richmittel

[Steve Grisetti]

Welcome to Muvipix, Rich!

The biggest challenge with MOVs is that MOV files can be any of several resolutions and can use any of hundreds of codecs -- so just knowing it's an MOV doesn't tell us much about the files.

Vegas and Movie Studio do a fairly good job of working with MOVs -- though they sometimes have trouble interpreting them correctly. If you know more about the specs of the file, that would be helpful.

If not, you can try it as is. It might work fine. But if it doesn't, we can certainly advise you once you get more information about the MOV file -- or at least the camera/camcorder that shot it.

[richmittel]

Thanks, Steve. I put the *.mov file on the time line, and it seems to play just fine. We'll see how it goes when we do the rendering.

richmittel

[Kent Frost]

I've noticed that depending on how you have your settings when rendering to MOV makes a huge difference, and may also be influenced by the quality of your hardware. In my case, I find that if I set the quicktime format to render in Motion JPEG-B + Uncompressed Audio that it renders much more smoothly and with very few failures. It makes for some relatively large files, but I use those for my "master" copies when I'm done with a project, and then I'll render my Youtube/Vimeo copies from those masters. Generally, any other setting of the MOV format and my machine will fail right at the beginning of a render, and I've never understood why.

Sidenote: I'm not sure what format you folks use for uploading to the internet, but I have found - surprisingly enough - that the WMV format set to a high MBps setting (such as 10-15MB/sec on a 720p video) holds up really well without large file sizes. I've tried rendering to the MP4 format, but for some reason Vegas like to crush the black levels horrendously, and I'm evidently not alone in that according to searches I've made in regards to that problem.