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Canon Camera AVI File Editing

January 14th, 2006 · 1 Comment · technology

Besides the Nikon D70, I also uses a Canon SD450 for quick pictures and movie taking. This is a great camera — compare to my first Canon S100, they have come a very long way.

Finally I decided to publish some of the movies that I have taken with this camera. To my surprise, the “AVI” files created by the camera cannot be edited by any software that I have, including the semi-pro software Vegas Video.

After some research, I learnt that the files created by the Canon and other similar cameras are in the Motion JPEG format, or MJPG. They are basically a series of JPEG images stored together to form a movie. This is why such a small device can capture movies — very little processing is done by the camera. And unfortunately most video editing software does not have the codec built in to handle the MJPG format.

What to do? There are some company that sells codec for MJPG. They include:

  • http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/
  • http://www.mainconcept.com
  • http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm
  • http://www.softpile.com/Multimedia/Video/Review_10792_index.html

Another slightly easier way is to use the current ZoomBrowser (version 5.5) software that came with Canon to first export the movie to a real quicktime MOV format.

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Sam // Jan 14, 2006 at 10:04 am

    I have to agree with you. I bought the Canon SD450 last December and it is far better than my Sony Cybershot DSC-T1; I only need to carry around a USB cable and a small charger instead of 3 pieces of wire and a cradle when I travel. Since the zoom is optical, it takes much better pictures than the Cybershot.

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