Restoring Old Media 100 Clips

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Many eons ago, I worked with Media 100 on a Mac.  I diligently backed everything up, and tucked it away for safe keeping.  Unfortunately, though, I kept the files safe for too long, and they became digitally stale.

A recent attempt to restore the archived video clips sent me down the rabbit hole.

Background

Since I’m a Windows user, I thought it would be ideal to transcode the files into something cross-platform.  A quick Google search turned up someone who attempted the same thing a few years prior.

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/4/864623

I contacted the original poster, Gregg Eshelman, and he was awesome enough to send me the software and several detailed responses.

The transcoder is for Windows. I used it some years ago with Adobe Premiere to convert uncompressed output from Media 100 2.6.2 to MPEG2 for Super Video CD. Despite what the readme for the transcoder says, it will do realtime playback.

The transcoder either doesn’t work with QuickTime versions later than 6.5 or there are some tricky hacks needed to make it work. Probably best to experiment on a box with a clean install of 6.5. I’ve tried it with QuickTime Alternative 3.2.2 and QT Lite 4.1.0 – didn’t work with either with the transcoder file copied to their qtsystem folders.

I don’t have the Macintosh version of the transcoder.

The other attachment is a neat little Windows program that “flattens” a MOV file’s resource and data forks. You need to have some way to dig out the resource fork from the Mac. One method is by copying the MOV to some removable media then use a Windows program capable of copying both resource and data forks from the Mac format media. Copying the MOV files onto a PC formatted disk or USB drive might work too. The resource forks are directly accessible that way but I don’t know if they’re exactly the same as when on Mac format media.

Quicktime for Windows will play non-flattend MOV files if the resource and data forks are in the same folder, with the same name and with the data fork having a .mov extension and the resource fork having a .qtr extension. The same file name arrangement is required for the flattener utility.

If you want to see my fiddling around with an old NuBus Media 100 system in a Radius 81/110, search for NuBus Media 100. My previous ISP has kept my old site up for 8 years.

Media 100 enthusiasts will enjoy his site, found here:

http://members.aceweb.com/gregg1/media100/NuBusM100.html

Important Note

I first attempted transcoding on a Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) machine with QuickTime 7 installed (7.7.1 build 1680.42).  However, I consistently encountered a deinterlacing error during one of the steps.  I’m not sure if it was because the components conflicted with Windows 7, the 64-bit OS, or something else.  I also tried Compatibility Mode (set to Windows XP SP3 with Administrator privileges) with no luck.

Setup

To work around the issue above, I created a virtual machine using VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) and installed Windows Vista (32-bit) and QuickTime 6.5.2.

Instructions

  1. Make a backup of all of your video files!  That way, if something happens to one set, you can restore from the other.
  2. Download the zip file via the link below, and extract the contents to a temporary location. — Media 100 Transcoding Software
  3. Drop the file named “M100WinTranscoder.qtx” into your “C:\Windows\System32” directory.
  4. Copy all video files to your PC.  (I didn’t need to use the flattener software for this step, but you may have to, depending on your files.)
  5. Append a “.mov” file extension to any files that Media 100 may have exported without extensions.
  6. At this point, your old video files should be playable.
  7. Download TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.net) and extract the program files to a temporary location.
  8. Drop the  file named “QTReader.vfp” into the root TMPGEnc directory (alongside “TMPGEnc.exe”).
  9. You should now be able to transcode your old video file into MPEG format.  From here, you can convert your video into any other format using standard transcoding software such as SUPER (www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html), MediaCoder (www.mediacoderhq.com), Adobe Media Encoder (www.adobe.com/products/mediaencoder.html), etc.

Conclusion

All of the information above is provided as-is, and mostly from memory.  Feel free to send any corrections, additions, etc., and I’ll do my best to keep this post updated.  Pay it forward!

Special thanks to Gregg Eshelman for taking the time to help restore some fond old memories!