On Video Conversion

Ever tried to watch a video on your computer, only to get piles of error messages telling you that you have the wrong format? I sure do. In fact, it happened to me today. So I thought I’d talk a bit about one of my most-favorite-ever pieces of software, FormatFactory.

FormatFactory can pretty much take any video you have and convert it into any other video format you need. It’s fast and easy to use, and it saves my bacon regularly. For example, today I was editing video clips for some folks. One of the videos was a Flash movie. My current PC isn’t powerful enough for video editing (am I allowed to say that on here?) so I needed to get it onto my (borrowed, alas) Mac. I used FormatFactory to change the Flash movie into a Quicktime movie, which the Mac liked. When I was finished editing, I saved the video as an MPEG. Then I moved that file BACK to my PC, and converted it to a WMV, so my colleague could put it in her Powerpoint. Okay, it sounds complicated, but the important thing is that I could get any type of video file I needed, and I needed a LOT of them.

It will do this to sound files too! Here’s a link to FormatFactory: http://www.formatoz.com/

My second favorite conversion tool is Zamzar. This one runs on the web, so it’s great of you get stuck on an unfamiliar computer with a bad video file. Seriously, it does happen. Also, you don’t have to download anything. Load your video on Zamzar, and it’ll email you the converted file. Zamzar is here: http://zamzar.com/

Happy conversion!