How to make Canon EOS H.264 MOV files work smoothly in Avid?


Summary: Don’t want to wait for a long time for the rendering process while importing Canon EOS H.264 MOV video files to Avid for editing? Looking for a way to make Canon EOS H.264 MOV files work smoothly in Avid? You will find what you need in this post.

canon eos camerasIf you are shooting with a Canon EOS DSLR camera like Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EOS 7D, Canon EOS Rebel T5/EOS 1200D, Canon Rebel T5i / EOS 700D, Canon Rebel T4i / EOS 650D, etc., you may probably know these cameras put video files into an H.264 MOV recording format. If you tried to import and edit these Canon EOS H.264 MOV files in Avid systems, you will find that the Canon MOV files needed to be rendered while ingesting and sometimes can not work well with your editing program. Why this happen? That’s because H.264 is a highly compressed format, which is suitable for capture and delivery, but not quite good enough for editing. If you would like to edit Canon EOS H.264 MOV in Avid apps, you will need to transcode Canon EOS H.264 MOV to a format that is well compatible with Avid Media Compose, like DNxHD in a QuickTime MOV wrapper. That’s where Video Converter comes in. This third party converter utility is able to re-encode Canon MOV files to Avid DNxHD with best quality at fast speed.

Download a free trial of Video Converter
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Canon EOS MOV and Avid workflow – transcode Canon H.264 MOV to DNxHD for Avid apps

Follow these steps:
Step 1: Run Video Converter as a Canon EOS MOV to Avid Converter, then click ‘Add File’ icon to load Canon MOV footage. You can load directly from your camera, or load from a card reader or from an achieved folder that contains your Canon EOS MOV media.
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Step 2:Choose output format for Avid MC, Avid Symphony and Avid NewsCutter
From ‘Format’ bar, select ‘Avid Media Composer’ > ‘Avid DNxHD (*.mov)’ as output format.

Step 3: Advanced settings (for advanced users)
If you are an advanced user, you can click ‘Settings’ button and go to ‘Profile Settings’ window to custom video and audio settings like resolution, video codec, bit rate, frame rate, audio codec, bit rate, sample rate and audio channel.

Step 4: When ready, click ‘Convert’ button to start converting Canon EOS MOV to DNxHD that is well compatible with your Avid NLE applications.

Step 5: When the conversion process finished, click ‘Open’ button to get the generated DNxHD MOV files for using with Avids.
Tips: The Canon MOV to Avid Converter is capable of processing batch conversion, so you can input loads of your Canon MOV clips into it to do format conversion at a time (Do remember ticking off ‘Apply to All’ before you start.). If you don’t want to wait for the entire format shifting process, you can tick off ‘Showdown computer when conversion completed’ and go away to do other things.

Also read
Import Canon H.264 MOV to Premiere Pro without quality loss
Can I import Canon H.264 MOV footage into Windows Movie Maker?
How to edit AVCHD files taken with Canon LEGRIA camcorder on Mac?