A learning opportunity

A Videomaker/Canon Short Video Contest contestant from the wine country of California sent us some entries as DVCPRO HD in a QuickTime wrapper. In the minutes that followed, I puzzled over why we could get audio but not video from the clips. The DVCPRO HD part was what wasn’t supported by anything we were currently using.

A furiously quick round of Googling led us to a bunch of shots in the dark over codecs that turned out to be little more than leads. We finally found something that works great, and as advertised: Calibrated Software’s Calibrated{Q} DVCProHD Decode. If you’re going to be exchanging footage with someone with a Panasonic AG-HVX200 or other DVCPRO HD camcorder, Calibrated{Q} DVCProHD Decode is your friend. There’s no waiting, either–even with our somewhat-old P4 system that we’re using to encode all of our clips with, scrubbing on the contestant’s 720p clips was silky-smooth.

You can try out the software for free, but the software will add rectangular watermarks to make sure that if you’re going to get any serious use out of Calibrated{Q} DVCProHD Decode, you’ve paid your $70 for the license. But it’s absolutely worth it if you need access to any DVCPRO HD footage–it does what it says and it does it well.