Wrapping AVI with RGBA channels in a MOV file?

Question

I'm very new to this honestly

I'm trying take a rendered sequence with an alpha channel that I exported from HitFilm 4, and import it into Davinci Resolve. Resolve doesn't support AVI (I didn't know that AVI was an archaic format) but HitFilm cannot export to any other format with an alpha channel EXCEPT AVI.

I'm not even sure if any of this is realistically possible but I don't want to give up. Mainly, I'm trying to wrap the AVI file into a MOV container, or something of the sort, while keeping the alpha channel intact.

Is there anything I can do?

Answer 1

You can use ffmpeg, a free command-line tool to do this.

The command is

ffmpeg.exe -i in.avi -c:v copy out.mov

This will copy the video stream over without transcoding or dropping the alpha. The caveat here is that if MOV doesn't support the codec of the AVI video stream, then ffmpeg will fail. But, then you can simply run

ffmpeg.exe -i in.avi -c:v qtrle out.mov

This will losslessly transcode the video, keeping the alpha. The size may increase.