MPEG to Quicktime movie

[Moving]

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone might be able to help me.

I have been give some footage that was used on Television to edit that has been compressed. I need to edit this footage but cannot seem to get any audio when I export it as a quicktime movie (to used in FCP4). When imported into FCP, both the QT movie (as well as original MPEG) does not have any sound files.

When I try to extract the audio files from from the original MPEG there is no audio files to extract, only the MPEG track.

I have even tried to export movie as an MP3 but still no luck.

If anyone has any ideas, or if I am doing anything wrong, it would be a great help if they replied,

Cheers.

Dennis

[Jude]

Probably the easieast way is to use a nice, free little program called Mpeg Stream.

http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

Also good for conversions from DVD.

[Moving]

Thanks very much,

I will give that a try.

Dennis

[rachelw]

I hope you have resolved your problem. In general, when I am having any troubles I go thru a sort of 'nerd checklist' to see what may be causing the problem.

If you are not capable of pulling audio my first thought would be to play the original file and ensure it is playing with audio. (And of course to make sure it plays on your system.) Sounds stupid but you know there have been times when the trouble is that there's no audio to start with,or that the file type is not happy with your system...Also see what program your system launces automatically to play the material. You could find that there is a software or hardware conflict, either launched by handling the native file or creating a new one, and you could find that somewhere in the background there's some damn thing running making your audio inaudible. It's rare, but I've had that happen once upon a time. But usually that makes all the audio inaudible, so it's pretty easy to notice and fix. This sounds different.

Next would be to check your settings for bringing in the file. And what program are you using to bring the file in as well. Some systems just dont' like certain file types, and this can cause problems. Importing the file a naturale might not do too much for ya. I would suggest using cleaner or toast or similar to recompress the file into something that works nicely with your edit suite. If that is giving you troubles, you could go the tedious but usually cool way of rendering in after effects, which should read and export the audio. It's not the fastest thing in the world depending on the settings, but as you'd just be rendering out with certain settings rather than messing about with the footage it should be fine. although you could give it a rough grade while you were there....

what kind of system are you running? There could be conflicts based on the version of quicktime you are running also. Sometimes a quick ring to tech support (if youse gots some) can fix everything.

I am sure you've already fixed it, but thought that I would post this regardless, it's the sort of thing you hate to go thru and so I thought i'd share so my fellow sans-gloves-techno-editors could possibly benefit from many incidents where heads have been scratched, time has been lost, files have been imported, etc.

Another handy tip - if you are relying on a file such as this for an edit, you may want to dump it to tape as a master (or a backup), so that you can redigitise the file if you suffer the indignity of file corruption after all your hard work bringing it in. I may seem paranoid but you'd be surprised how damn shaky these things can be. (I once had an engineer trash my drive by accident, and lost two days of work to digitising 8 cameras worth of iso for a two hour program...)

All the best,

Rachel