Earlier this year, I purchased my first tapeless camera, the Canon FS11. I purchased it to be able to keep an ultra compact video camera with me that will not weigh my shoulders down too much and at the same time I wanted something that would not lighten my wallet a whole lot. The FS11 seems like an ideal candidate because it is reasonably priced and has the expanded built in storage with a possibility for expansion via SDHC cards. It is also nice and compact in size. As a nice bonus, it also has a microphone input.
The problem with these types of cameras is, as I later discovered, was that it encodes the video into an mpeg2 stream, which is then stored inside .mod files. After a few trials and errors to find a good process, I finally settled with using VLC to process the files. Here’s the process that I use:
- Download the files to the computer’s HDD and then manually change the extension to .mpg. If you try to play the files without changing the extension, VLC won’t play the files because the extension is associated with an entirely different file format which is to do with audio. So, if you double-click the file to open in VLC, it will not show you anything. By renaming the extension to mpg, VLC will try to read them as mpeg streams.
- Because in the .mod files the audio is encoded in AC3 codec, some video players and editors will not recognise the audio in the mpeg stream. To alleviate this problem, I use VLC to encode the audio from the mpeg stream into separate wav files.
- In the video editor, the mpeg gives the visual and the wav file will give the audio.
If you are shooting straight for DVD, then most of DVD authoring software will be able to handle the AC3 audio inside the mpeg stream, so step 2 above is not necessary (tested with Adobe Encore CS3).