Techie: Importing D90, D300s and D3s dmovie video into Premiere Pro
Edit: Apparently this also works on the D300s and the D3s! Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.
Edit2 -The non-techie way… OK this subject appears to get an awful lot of attention and some people are having problems following all the steps/not liking using the terminal. As such I’ve decided to be nice to you all and package up an automator script which does all the heavy lifting for you. No need to use the Terminal with this method. Check out the method section for details.
So this is the first of a couple of techie posts to my blog. I know, I know you all come here for the pictures of Orcs but hey this is my way of helping other professional photographers save a bit of time and hair pulling.
The D90 is a Nikon camera used by Holly and myself which allows the recording of HD video. What makes it special is the fact that it has a large sensor and can use any nikon lens, this in turn means you can get truly cinema like depth of feel. If you don’t have a D90 and Premier, I suggest you bail out now, else..
The D90 unfortunately shoots a bit of a bizarre format which premiere claims is an unsupported compression type. However it lies! Thanks to Jean-Luc for helping me to figure it out but I think the main problem is that Premiere is an old Carbon based application and can’t quite understand the D90 file type.
Method1: The non techie way:
- Download your movies as per normal and place them in a directory on their own
- Download this zip file
- Extract both files to your /Application directory (Note that SetFile must be in this directory or else the script won’t work)
- Double click to run SetFileApp
- Select the directory with all your D90 movies in it which need to be changed
- Profit!
Method2: For those who like the gory details:
- Download the movies as you normally would and make a note of where you’ve stored them.
- Either install the Mac Developer tools or visit this page to download the setfile application
- Fire up the Terminal application (yes I know this is scary and I may try and automate this for people in the future…)
- if you downloaded setfile rather than installing the developer tools, cd into the directory where is it located eg: cd downloads/setfile – tip: if you press tab twice the terminal will autocomplete things for you!
- In the terminal run this command to set the correct file type
SetFile -t "VfW " pathtofolderwithyourmovies/*.AVIeg (SetFile -t "VfW " movies/test/*.AVI) - In the terminal again run this command to rename the files to .mov:
rename -v 's/\.AVI$/\.mov/' pathtofolderwithyourmovies/*.AVI - You should find all of your movies have now been renamed to .mov and will now all open in premier!
So there you go, that’s how you open D90 movies in premier for editing. If anybody has any problems hit me up in the comments.
Alex 
Great post!
Thanks for these tips. I’m running into similar problems, but I’m running Premiere on a Windows machine, so I’ll have to dig a bit deeper…
Cool! Let me know if you figure it out and I’ll update the post. Alex
[...] won’t open or import the clips without a little work on your part. I found instructions here on how to use the terminal to get Premiere to understand the clips, and based on that (with some [...]
Nice. On my machine, with the latest dev tools installed, there is no “rename” command (although there is a man entry for it). You can use “mv” instead.
I created a bash script based on your post, which uses “mv”, and allows you to batch process all of the AVI files in a specified folder:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2009/08/02/convert-nikon-d90-videos-to-work-with-adobe-premiere-pro-cs4/
Thanks for figuring this out…
mike
Ah cheers Mike, I’m always switching between Linux and Mac these days and sometimes take for granted commands on one OS… My bad! You’re right though mv does the same trick. I’ll update the post to point to your script.
Alex
hi i’m having the same problem with d90 and premiere on macbookpro.
how do you install mac developer tools?
i’m a novice. thanks,
jac
Hi Jac,
You either need to go here:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/
and install the tools or simply get the setfile binary from here:
http://corz.org/osx/su/setfile.php:
Hope that helps.
Alex
[...] Beckett zeigt, was man machen muss, damit die Videos von der Nikon D90 von Adobe Premiere korrekt erkannt werden. Mike Chambers hat ein Batch-Skript erstellt, damit man die Umwandlung nicht händisch [...]
hey… thanks for sharing….
I’ve just got the Nikon D90 too… And this one was one of my biggest problems…
Now I’m downloading the Depeloper tool….. I’ll check this… I don’t know if it works… but thanks for the tip… that’s the important part….
Hi Alex,
I have OS X 10.5 and installed the Developer Tools per your instruction. When I run the first command, nothing happens (but I get no error msg, so I guess this is good). When I run the second command, I get an error mgs reading the rename command is not found. I am a complete newbie at this. Can you please help? Thank you.
Andy
new-host:~ andrewpark$ SetFile -t “VfW” /Users/andrewpark/Pictures/Kaylin/*.AVI
new-host:~ andrewpark$ rename -v ’s/\.AVI$/\.mov/’ /Users/andrewpark/Pictures/Kaylin/*.AVI
-bash: rename: command not found
new-host:~ andrewpark$
Hi Andy,
Yes looks like I got a bit ahead of myself and rename doesn’t exist on a vanilla OSX. You’ve got three options, you can either rename the files in the finder, use the mv command or use the script kindly created by Mike Chambers and linked above. Good luck!
Alex
Hi. I have just got the Nikon D300s – and testing the video find that the AVI files will play in Quicktime but will not import in to CS4 and play. I am using a PC 64bit can any one help on how to get these files to work on the PC – yes I know everyone says get a MAC – but then I have to buy all that software again. Thanks
Updated, this now seems to work for the D300s and the D3s
[...] http://www.alexbeckett.co.uk/blog/2009/07/02/techie-importing-d90-d300s-d3s-dmovie-video-into-premie... [...]
[...] D90, D300s and D3s dmovie video into Premiere Pro Nice writeup. Click here to find [...]
Worked Great!! Thanks!!!!!
Just came across this after searching the forums http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/nikopre.html
Although I think Adobe should have handled this problem, leave it to mac to clean up their mess. Thanks Mac.
I’m running CS4 on a MacbookPro