This seems to be the big issue that no one knows how
to do easily. Everyone who has ever asked this on the Newsgroups
will either get the age old sarcastic remark: "just buy Quicktime"
or "Premiere does a great job!" And this is usually from people who
pretend they actually bought the products instead of going to
astalavista.box.sk and cracking them! Well dargsarnit! Who wants to
buy Quicktime just to convert from its crappy uneditable format? Or
spend hundreds of bucks buying Premiere for the same reason?! In
that case try my method that doesn't require illegal software or the
need to shell out megabucks!
I won't lie to you, though, there is no easy way to
convert every Quicktime movie. So this is just the easiest method
(other than Quicktime Pro) that I have found.
Install Bink and start it up, you will then get the
following window. Select your Quicktime movie and hit the 'convert a file' button.
Up will appear the conversion options. First tell it
where to save your final AVI file (A). Then all you need to do to start the
conversion is to press 'convert' (E).
But there are a few other options you may wish to use
before you convert. You can crop the image to a certain size (C) - it doesn't support resizing
unfortunately. If you need to resize or edit the video in any way I
suggest you convert it and then do so in VirtualDub. You can also
select how much of the video is to be converted (B) by selecting what frame to start the
conversion from and what frame to end it. Finally we have the Audio
Samplerate conversion (D). This is
not really needed most of the time because it may cause synch
problems if we change it from the original. The only time you may
want to use it is if you intend on converting straight to VCD which
requires you use a 44100Hz samplerate. But I'd prefer to prepare my
audio with VirtualDub instead. Anyway, you can experiment with the
rest of the settings if you find the final video doesn't look as
good as you hoped.
Once you click on the Convert button you will be asked what format
you wish to convert the video into. If it is a short clip and you
intend on editing it in VirtualDub, you would probably be best off
using Uncompressed AVI i.e.:
If it is quite big but you still want to do lots of
editing I suggest you choose MJPEG because this offers the best
editing. The best quality MJPEG is the uncompressed Huffyuv format.
But this sometimes has framerate problems so check your final
file.
Another alternative is the PICVideo MJPEG codec which
is a good trade between compression and quality.
If you don't want to do much editing or you just want
to convert straight to Divx just choose the Divx codec you like
best:
After you have decided press OK and you will see the progress box below:
That's it! The audio is always uncompressed PCM as far
as I can tell, so you will need to recompress it using VirtualDub as
usual. See my multiplexing guide for details of that.
Troubleshooting
The audio is out of synch, what can I do?
Make sure you are using the correct samplerate used in the
original movie. Then use my AVI synching guide to put things
right again.
Bink will not convert the MOV file at all?!
It is not a guarantee that Bink can convert every kind of
Quicktime format (there are a few kinds). But I have tried it
on a few including the best format i.e. Sorenson and it worked
fine.
There is no audio, why?
Quicktime movies sometimes have copy protection installed
which will disable the audio. If you have Total Recorder you
can get it with that after and then multiplex it to the AVI
using VirtualDub (see my multiplexing guide for details of
this).
Getting the audio with Total Recorder is easy
enough:
Open your video in Quicktime or Media Player depending
on what plays it. Then press the red recording button at the bottom
right of the picture below. It shouldn't start recording until you
play your video file. Start your video file playing.
If the format supports it, you can speed up the
process using the following method: Go into Options > 'Recording source
parameters...
Choose the Software accelerated
recording/converting option and also check the Max Speed
option. This will speed up the conversion to many times the speed it
would normally take.
When you are finished save the wave file and you are
done :-)
Note: if it starts to work fine and
then you get nothing but garbage for sound this is because you have
a messed up cracked version of Total Recorder. You need to fully
register the version of Total Recorder which requires a serial
number for it to work correct. Most cracks will cause this security
measure.
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