Friday, February 29, 2008

JVC's Evil .MOD and .TOD Files


JVC has chosen for reasons known best unto themselves to use .MOD files for SD footage for their Everio camcorders and .TOD for HD footage (they're Program Streams...shhh). Basically this means on a Mac, with FCP it's a hassle to work with them. At the risk of dating myself, I thought they were audio files when I saw them on the camera.

The other day I had to get some clips off of one of these things so what I ended up doing was tossing the .MOD files into VisualHub and moving on with my life. VisualHub converted them to footage FCP could use.

Granted, the clips I needed were few and were only SD .MOD files but it worked. If I get a chance I'm going to test simply changing the extension of the files to .MPG and so on since .MOD files are really just MPEG2 files in disguise. I'm curious to see how VisualHub handles the HD clips actually.

JVC provides some software to use with a Mac but from what I've read people are less than pleased with it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You are a genius!

On windows XP - The mod files do NOT run in media player - They crash power director before it even imports - and they crash Imovie on the mac --

Rename the .mod to .mpeg and Voilla! Media Player loads it, and power director imports it!

Thanks you so much!
God bless mpeg!