MKV to editable format for premiere on a mac?

[Dar]

So pretty much i just made the switch from PC to Mac and i'm a bit confused on what to do now...

I have some mkv files i'd like to use for editing in premiere/after effects but i'm confused on how to convert them to something i can actually use.

Should i just throw everything in quicktime and save as .mov?

Also i'd prefer not to have bootcamp/wine involved in this at all ._.

[Qyot27]

How opposed are you to using the command line? You can use GUI stuff like ffmpegX, but those are generally not updated too often. To make sure it's up-to-date, you can use ffmpeg itself directly (which requires the command line), but fresh builds of it* are rather hard to come by for Mac users. If you know how to compile it yourself it's pretty easy to keep it updated.

*outside of MacPorts' ffmpeg 0.6.1 package, and even that isn't quite 'fresh' (0.6.1 is from last October)

For ease of explanation, though, I've prepared a build already:
http://www.mediafire.com/?m9knju0wlcdy8hw

Download it, unzip it, and place ffmpeg wherever the files to convert are. The file permissions should be fine, I hope.

Open the Terminal and navigate to the place the files are using the 'cd' command. Then, all that's necessary to convert is something like:

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./ffmpeg -i inputfile.mkv -vcodec ffvhuff -an output.mov

Which will mute the audio and convert the video to the YV12 version of HuffYUV (there are advanced options** to maximize compression, but if you're aiming for speed then the default is fine). If you normally convert whole episodes then that should be fine. If you also want audio, then it would look like:

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./ffmpeg -i inputfile.mkv -vcodec ffvhuff -acodec pcm_s16le output.mov

If you want to resize a file to a new resolution, it can do that too:

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./ffmpeg -i inputfile.mkv -vcodec ffvhuff -s 720x400 output.mov

**those advanced options I was talking about are -context and -pred:

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./ffmpeg -i inputfile.mkv -vcodec ffvhuff -an -context 1 -pred 2 output.mov

(the above command is the same as telling ffdshow's HuffYUV encoder to use Adaptive Huffman tables and Median prediction; the first - default - command I listed is equivalent to not using the adaptive tables and using Left prediction instead of Median)

I think telling it to output as .mov should be fine. If it isn't, then you can always repackage them using MPEG Streamclip or Quicktime. Since it's HuffYUV, then it should be okay so long as you've installed Perian.


In all those examples the ./ is mandatory, because Unix security methods typically require a program to be on the $PATH to be able to be used, and since ffmpeg isn't on the $PATH, the ./ acts as an override to allow it to execute. If you want to make it so that the ./ isn't necessary, you can copy ffmpeg to your $PATH by doing this:

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sudo cp ffmpeg /usr/local/bin

Give it your password and it will copy ffmpeg to /usr/local/bin, which should be one of the directories $PATH is set to. In Windows terms, this would be like copying the file to C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINDOWS\system32 - no matter what directory you're in, the system will be able to see and use ffmpeg.

[Dar]

i will attempt this soon and post my progress ^_^