D3200 video files won't play properly in Vista

Hi,

I can't figure out this problem. I recently got a D3200 and shot some video. When I connect the camera to my laptop or insert the camera's memory card into it, the .mov files play fine, as long as I'm playing them from the memory card. But as soon as I copy the files to my laptops hard drive, the files get distorted and are unusable. I'll try to describe what happens. Regarding the audio, it has these frequent bursts that sound kind of like really bad radio static. Regarding the video, it doesn't play smoothly and there is this distorted color band that frequently occurs. I want to use the video files in Sony Vegas so I need to get them on my hard drive. I tried importing them directly into Vegas from the memory card but Vegas doesn't recognize it.

I'm running Windows Vista with QuickTime installed. I recently installed the K-Lite codec pack but that didn't fix the problem.

As far as I can tell it's some kind of codec problem. When I open the .mov files in VLC media player they look fine but there is no sound. When I open them in QuickTime or Sony Vegas they are distorted. Upgrading to Windows 7 may solve this but I'm unable to do that right now.

Thanks for any help you may have.

Have you loaded the software that came with your camera to the computer? What happens if you use Nikon's software to edit/play the video?

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Thanks

Hi Fred. I just installed the ViewNX 2 software. I can open the .mov file in there and it looks fine. Unfortunately that program isn't sophisticated enough to edit a music video.

I noticed that when I exported a .mov file from ViewNX 2 it didn't play as smoothly in QuickTime as when I viewed a file directly from the camera's memory card.

Anyways, I'm back to square one, but thanks for your suggestion.

Sounds to me like the files on your hard drive are getting corrupted during transfer. I say that because you say you can play the movie from the SD card, which tells me this is not a codec problem since you need the proper codec for the file to play on your PC, regardless of where that file resides. The problem manifests only *after* you've transferred the file to your hard drive. I would make sure you've associated the .MOV file type with the application you want to use by default and then try using a different USB port to do the transfer. Is there a different computer you could transfer the files to just as a test? I'd be curious if you had the same problem on a different computer.

....

Hi Horoscope, I just tried to import the .mov file using ViewNX 2 but that didn't resolve it. I've also tried attaching the camera directly to the firewire port as well as using the card reader on the front of my laptop. In terms of file associations, .mov files are native to QuickTime so when I import a movie file it automatically assigns it and puts the blue Q icon on the bottom right hand of the video thumbnail.

So I reinstalled Windows Vista and did the updates. This fixed the distortion and no sound problems, but the files were still not useable in Sony Vegas because they were so choppy.

The solution I found was to convert the video files from the D3200 using GoPro Studio, which is a free program available here (GoPro Studio Edit Software). It allows you to convert the files to either the .avi or .mov format. I'm using .mov, and even though this is the same extension as the native files, there is a noticeable improvement in Sony Vegas. Once converted the files are much larger but this is actually a good thing because the original files coming out of the camera are heavily compressed.

Here is some useful info from the GoPro Studio manual:

All consumer-level cameras and many professional-level cameras record in highly compressed video formats designed to capture large amounts of data very quickly and save that data onto an SD card or other portable media format in as small a file as possible. This is great for recording a lot of data onto a small space, but these compression formats are not designed nor optimized for maintaining image quality during editing or color correction processes. Because these formats are so compressed, they often require an ultra powerful computer to decode (playback) the files without performance degradation (choppy playback or dropped frames). Because of this, many professional filmmakers and consumer-level videographers use what is called a Digital Intermediate (DI). A DI is an exact copy of the data from the original video file saved in a file format that is specifically optimized for higher image quality and fast playback on modern computer systems. This makes for a much better editing experience.