Since everyone seems to be having trouble finding a definitive way of Windows users using this without transcoding (which is lossy), I dug around and found this on another forum. It explains how Windows users can either transcode or DEMUX and get a (supposedly) LOSSLESS conversion. I'm still eons away from getting the footage finished downloading, but I have way more than enough drive space and a brand new i7 beast that I've already used on some AVCHD 1080p videos and it works great. So I plan on using the demux method to get it to a point where I can just pop it into Premiere CS4.
Only thing that sucks is, Premiere will only let you do a 4-cam edit easily. I wish there was something that'd let me do more than than on a PC. With the comcast limits, it's going to be months before I have all of this downloaded, though.... sigh.
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forums.atomicmpc.com.au]
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Apple are bastards.
HDV is MPEG-2.
QuickTime Pro 7 on Windows comes without the MPEG-2 plugin, it sells for $20 last time I checked.
Once you buy the MPEG-2 plugin, it still does not allow decoding of HDV in Quicktime container.
If you are unfortunate enough to have footage in Quicktime/HDV, or were silly enough to capture with FCP into HDV (you can capture in ProRes HDV with FCP - which QuickTime for Windows will decode, thus work in Premiere), do not worry, there is help for you.
You have 2 options of getting MOV/HDV footage working in Windows.
1. You transcode it.
2. You demux it back to an MPEG stream.
The best method is obvously 2, as it doesn't recompress/re-encode, you will not lose quality.
[Note - I (mike) deleted Option 1, cause who cares about the transcode? Link is above if you want the lossy way]
2. Demuxing
This method has been tested with both Premiere Pro CS3 and Premiere Pro CS4.
Download AviDemux, Avanti and FFmpeg (choose latest) for Windows.
Install AviDemux.
You will need WinRAR or 7-Zip to Extract the Avanti and FFmpeg packages for Windows.
Extract Avanti, put it in C:\Avanti or a preferred place, before running Avanti, extract ffmpeg (all files in archive) to the ffmpeg sub directory in the Avanti directory.
Run Avanti
In source one, click browse and locate your craptime MOV file, click browse on destination and type file name and press enter.
Change the codec for audio to demux audio, same with video, change it to demux video and change the drop box next to it called container to ES.
check enable for video, click start, uncheck video then check audio and click start, this will generate a .mpg and a .wav
Your .mpg and .wav files are now ready to be used in Premiere.
However, for best performance in Premiere I recommend an extra following step.
Run AviDemux, click file and open and locate the newly created .mpg file, and open it, when it asks to index click yes.
Set the video track to copy, and the audio track to WAV LPCM, change the format to MPEG-PS (do -not- use MPEG-TS).
Now click the Audio menu and click main track, change source to External Wav.
Then hit browse and locate the newly created .wav file and hit open.
Now go to File->Save->Save Video, find a location to save in, type a file name and use the extension .mpg or .mpeg
Now you can import this file in Premiere, it'll take a few seconds to import and then to conform it after importing, but once it's done, it'll act and behave nicely, and performance will be fast (or at least normal) rather than doggedly slow as it would be if you captured to ProRes.
You can do batch conversion with FFmpeg via command line.