The PostOp Blog » convert http://nycpostop.wordpress.com Tips, tricks, ideas and just any cool thing you'd like to share. Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:40:44 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ en hourly 1 http://www.gravatar.com/blavatar/036fdbe9f25caceca14451d4407f08f2?s=96&d=http://s.wordpress.com/i/buttonw-com.png The PostOp Blog » convert http://nycpostop.wordpress.com VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac. http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/visualhub-the-universal-video-converter-for-mac/ http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/visualhub-the-universal-video-converter-for-mac/#comments Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:43:19 +0000 Philip http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/?p=337 ]]>

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.

]]> http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/visualhub-the-universal-video-converter-for-mac/feed/ 0 Philip asf_codec1 When to stay in the native codec http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/when-to-stay-in-the-native-codec/ http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/when-to-stay-in-the-native-codec/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:05:58 +0000 Philip http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/when-to-stay-in-the-native-codec/ ]]>

Good article on when to stay in your native codec and when to convert to something else.

]]> http://nycpostop.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/when-to-stay-in-the-native-codec/feed/ 0 Philip