Final Cut Pro & .mov incompatibility...

[Hidden Driveways]

Hi everybody,

I'm trying to make a video in FCP 4.5 using a screen capture video I made in Quicktime 10. Let me elaborate a little...

I have Final Cut Pro 4.5 on my old G5 tower. I have a new MacBook Pro, but I don't have FCP loaded on it yet. I've have FCP on my old G5 for years. The G5 is on Tiger 10.4.11. My new MacBook Pro is on Snow Leopard 10.6.4. I plan on upgrading to a newer version of Final Cut Pro soon, and loading it on my MacBook Pro. But for now I'm still using the old version (4.5) on my G5.

I shot video on my MiniDV camera and loaded it on my G5 in FCP 4.5 as I normally do. I'm making a tutorial video of new software that I'm using on my MacBook Pro, so I also recorded a screen capture on the MBP using Quicktime X.

The file that Quicktime X made of my screen capture is a .mov, and it plays back fine on the MBP. I brought the .mov file over to my G5 with a USB jump drive. The G5 can play the screen capture back in Finder, but, when i try to import it into FCP 4.5, I get an error message saying that the file format is incompatible, and it fails to import!

It's a total drag. My tutorial video will really suffer without bringing this .mov file into FCP 4.5. Does anyone have an idea why FCP 4.5 is not recognizing this .mov file?

Many thanks,
Sam

[stonee]

open your movie in quicktime, then go to veiw and video properties. check what codec it is.

it sounds like your mov is a codec that fcp doesn't like.

all hope isn't lost though, if something can play it, something can encode it.

you may have to use something like mpeg stream clip to convert it to something that fcp does like.

[djsynchro]

it just works?

[ekwipt]

It will be a compatibility problem between the different versions of quicktime.

Can you download and install the latest version of quicktime on the G5 (i'm not sure if you can on Tiger)

If this doesn't work i'd download: Mpeg Streamclip

Convert the video to an Uncompressed 8bit

All version of Final Cut can open up uncompressed Quicktimes, it will be big!!

[luddy]

Compressor can also convert between a bunch of codecs. You might try it on your MBP.

-Luddy

[Hidden Driveways]

Thanks for the tips! I ended up figuring out a solution with some advice I got from the creativecow.net forums. Someone suggested that I convert the .mov into a DV .mov file. So I imported it into iMovie on the MBP, which allowed me to export it as a "DV/DVCPRO - NTSC" file. The DV/DVCPRO - NTSC version of the .mov (which was a much, much larger file) turned out to be compatible with Final Cut 4.5 on the G5.

If you want to see the video of the project in question, you can click on the link in my signature.

These little issues are really annoying. I really need to upgrade to a new version of FCP for my MBP.