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.

An update to our favorite FREE app adding the following fixes and features.

Click below to go to download page.

Squared 5 – MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac OS X

Watch out Arnold…The Levelator is here.

Here’s a cool little app that will take your mixes, or other discreet tracks from Final Cut and levelate them.  Or in other words, it will even the dynamic range of your audio.  I think this is especially cool for those times when you can’t have Gerrard mix your work and you really want to even out some dialogue.  Export an aif file of the audio you want to affect, drop the file on to the Levelator app window and it automatically will create a new aif file with nice even audio levels. Download and try it for yourself!

The Levelator from The Conversations Network