just change the extension to .mov.And that makes it compliant with MOV? My latest client needs to have me deliver in this MOV H264 format for their in-house IT guys for their digi screens. Couldn't I also do this with Handbrake, and THEN change the MP4 Suffix to MOV?



Grazie

i'm fairly confident that they're both the same with the exception of the extension suffix.

confirmation should be obtained before tanking my word though ;-)

not sure about handbrake - i used to use handbrake but since i rarely have cause to worry about low bit rate distribution i find there's negligible difference at higher levels.

confirmation should be obtained before tanking my word though ;-)I shall be sending them a "sampler" first.

G

good idea...

i'm so over working with applephiles. my last project a few months ago had me toing and froing usb drives which they constantly reformatting from exfat which we could both read to hpfs (or whatever it's called). i kept pointing out that there was no need to reformat, etc., but they'd read somewhere that you got less errors reformatting before writing. oh, and these guys run a production company!!!!

> "I shall be sending them a "sampler" first."

Good idea but the MPEG4 container is a proper subset of the QuickTime container which is why you can rename an MP4 file to MOV and it will still work. The reverse is not true (ie., the MPEG4 container doesn't support all the richness of QuickTime containers).

> "my last project a few months ago had me toing and froing usb drives which they constantly reformatting from exfat which we could both read to hpfs (or whatever it's called)."

Leslie, if you work a lot with Mac users you might want to invest $19.95 USD in Paragon HFS+ for Windows. It will allow you to read and write HFS+ formatted drives so you don't have to reformat anything or use the "touchy" exFAT format which I agree with them causes more problems than it's worth. It may be compatible "on paper" but in the field it does cause read and write errors.

I use HFS+ for Windows all the time on my Mac Pro to read and write my Mac drives from my Windows Bootcamp partition. It's money well spent of you work across both platforms.

~jr

Good idea but the MPEG4 container is a proper subset of the QuickTime container which is why you can rename an MP4 file to MOV and it will still work. The reverse is not true (ie., the MPEG4 container doesn't support all the richness of QuickTime containers).

John, now I'm confused ? Can I use Handbrake to create that H264 and change the a Suffix to MOV from MP4?

Grazie

jr - i actually have, or at least had some software a few years back (macdrive?) which worked well enough at the time. this project i took on as a favour to an old friend - we're still friends but no more favours ;-)

i don't see myself ever taking on any more cross-platform jobs, well, at least from people who don't know what they're talking about - formatting a drive every time you want to write to it duh!....

btw. what problems have you experienced with exfat? i've used it for many years without any problems?

There have been a few occasions for me where the "change the extension to .mov" has failed a station QC. The one workflow that has never let me down is rendering .mp4 from MC encoder (Handbrake h264 should work the same) then opening in Quicktime Pro and saving as a self-contained movie. It's a small investment in the Pro version of QT, but worth it IMO.

Edit: This will NOT work with the Sony AVC encoder, must be an h264 source.

If you have QT Pro, you can render it from there.

ffmpeg is free, and you can google the conversion command. You would basically render an h264 (sony AVC or MC) from Vegas, then rewrite the codec contents of the h264 container to an .MOV container. ffmpeg will copy the contents and not re-render.

the command looks something like this:
ffmpeg -i old_video.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy new_video.mov


Quicktime locks the h264 encoding through Vegas render, so you have to buy QT Pro to get this ability with Quicktime.

Yes, ffmpeg is a good solution to this problem. You can render to XAVC S, which is an MP4 file with h.264 video and uncompressed PCM audio. Then use ffmpeg to remux to MOV using astar's command. I use Zeranoe builds of ffmpeg.

> "btw. what problems have you experienced with exfat? i've used it for many years without any problems?"

The first problem is where the format takes place. Some version of OS X use a block size that Windows does not like but Windows uses a block size that OS X can always handle so it's best to format the drive on Windows for best compatibility.

I friend I was helping had a problem with their using Windows 7 64-bit and their clients OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard and for some reason the Windows computer kept getting read errors on the drive while the Mac had no problems. So it would read the file and be copying and then blow up with a read error before the whole file was copied. They switched to using HFS+ with the Paragon software and everything worked fine after that.

I agree that formatting a drive before writing to seems like a waste of time. Maybe they had an OS X version prior to 10.6.5 and so the drive couldn't be read and OS X offered to format it?

~jr

> "John, now I'm confused ? Can I use Handbrake to create that H264 and change the a Suffix to MOV from MP4?"

I think you can. As long as Handbrake is making a proper MP4 files you should be able to rename it to MOV and have it continue to work.

One other way as some has suggested is to get QuickTime Pro which will encode to H.264 or re-wrap an existing MP4 file.

~jr

On the topic of Windows Mac file systems. Format external media you wish to move back and forth to EX-FAT (its an option in the windows format utility) The mac will read/write ex-fat just fine, as will windows obviously. No need to buy utilities to read disks. I have not had problem moving files between modern OS X versions, so maybe it was card reader or bad/failing USB device.