SGI: Video

I've been using my Octane2's compression option to take some old 8mm tapes and move the video over to DVD for archival purposes. I have dmrecord grab the footage at 30Mbit/sec, then use dmconvert to convert the resulting movies to something my MacBook Pro can use, and finally Toast on the OS X side to burn the movies to DVD. I couldn't be happier with the resulting quality. Playback from the DVD is essentially identical to plugging my 8mm deck into the television directly.

Anyway, I'm trying to avoid the dmconvert step, because as you can imagine, it takes a pretty substantial amount of time, especially since dmconvert is only using one processor. Ideally I'd just copy the .mv straight to my Mac, and have it encode into the DVD format in one step. But I can't seem to find any tool on the OS X side that'll directly read the .mv generated from dmrecord. I don't think it's a codec issue - my understanding is it's simply an SGI format vs. Quicktime format thing. But using dmconvert to merely change formats, as given in man, eg:



results in a huge uncompressed movie instead, and with the lengths of video I'm dealing with - are simply too large. Is there something I'm missing? Either a fast way to convert the jpeg compressed .mv file to something my Mac can use, or something on the Mac side that'll read the .mv file directly?

Thanks! I did a bunch of searching for this, but came up short.

converting it into quicktime animation worked for me but it's gonna be LARGE

How about using ffmpeg with the "-ao copy" and "-vo copy" options, but selecting a different container format that the Mac is happy with?

I'd personally just save it out as an image sequence, transport it to any other system, from there just re-encode it to something else with whatever codecs at your disposal.