The other day I was handed a bunch of ASF files. Knowing I would have to convert these to quicktimes for editing in FCP, I went on a long painful journey to find out how to convert them. Of course the first thing I tried was playing them in Quicktime. Audio played but the video was very scrambled.
I then tried our tried and true MPEG Streamclip knowing that almost everything plays in MPEG Streamclip but I got the same results as with Quicktime. What to do. VLC played the files but not in sync and I’m still not certain how to convert/stream out of VLC. What is an ASF file anyway? According to Wikipedia ASF stands for Advanced Systems Format and it’s a Microsoft proprietary digital media container specifically meant for streaming media. Okay…so I thought I could probably plays these files on a PC so I fired up my copy of Windows using VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro. The files played fine of course and I looked for free software downloads that would help me to convert these files to any format I could play. Well of course I didn’t have enough room on my Windows partition to convert any files so I decided to dig around the forums a little more and that’s when I came upon a posting on the Apple forums recommending VisualHub. I already had a copy of VisualHub but never purchased it so I’m restricted to converting the first 30 seconds of any clip. So I load in an ASF file and set it to convert to a DV for for use in Final Cut Pro and voila! Now why VisualHub can play these files and not quicktime I don’t understand. I had always thought of VisualHub as more of a consumer software program great for converting you files to formats to play on your iPod, iPhone or PSP or something. Well now I new found respect for this little app and will make it a part of my arsenal for tackling tricky file conversions. You should too! It’s only $23.32 to enable full functionality and if you have to use it once I think it’s worth it.
