Re: Can't convert Kona QT in Windows

Jeremy,

I also suspect that they were captured to a different codec than Kona. Not having worked in Final Cut, Seems crazy you could do a batch capture from 8am to 8:15, then do another one from 8:25 to 8:45am (using the same tape) and the format and codec get changed.

KMPlayer is a universal media player made by a Korean software engineer. It's free and is quite an amazing program. It will play almost any file format known to man. I don't know if it's doing what you say to play the file, but you're probably right as it shows the QT codec as being Apple Native MPEG 4, which I know for a fact it isn't.

KM Player is just a player so exporting from it isn't an option.

Recapturing isn't an option either. The footage came from an ad agency in NY that essentially "washed" their hands of this particular client. They literally used the phrase "we're trashing all the assets and dumping the footage onto a drive" when they sent us the footage. The company that shot the footage was also unceremoniously "dumped" by the client and refuses to release the raw footage tapes without the client paying a rather large fee, which the client isn't willing to do.

The files are huge, too big to post. Most are at least 300MB, and some are over a gig. The average is in the 500MB range for each file.

And we've already contacted a couple of local colleagues that use Final Cut, so we're probably going to just take the drive to them and let them output to DVCPro50 tape or transcode to Quicktime Component format, which we know we can transcode in large batches to our .dps format.

Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy though! I wasted hours today trying to convert a bunch of files that SHOULD have taken me about a half-hour to transcode.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair] "The files that will open show that the codec is Kona V2.10 or something like that."

Yep, that makes sense.

It would seem to me that some of those files were captured to codecs that quicktime does not support in windows namely dv50 or DVCPro HD.


[Chris Blair] "Even MORE bizarre is a generic media player called KM Player"

WIthout knowing what that is or what is does, I bet it's some sort of real time decoder that is smart enough to know what to do with the files are at least smart enough to transcode them in to something watchable.

[Chris Blair] "The editor swore he captured all the files using the same codec, project dimensions, capture rates etc."

Yeah, I'd hook them straight up to the polygraph...or actually they could have easily made an honest mistake. It's easy to screw that up if you don't know what's going on in FCP and especially if you are bouncing around to different formats in between captures.

Any chance you can export from the Km player thing?

Any chance you can recapture the offending tapes?

Do you have a Mac with FCP on it for a bit of a diagnostic or in an even further reach can you post one of the problem files to look at?

Jeremy