What Video by Zaweba can import, from MP4 to OpenEXR
The video, sound and picture formats Video by Zaweba opens, including transparent video, HEIC photos and animated GIF, and why your originals stay untouched.
Getting footage into an editor should be the least interesting part of a project. Cameras, phones, screen recorders and graphics programs all save in different formats, though, and the first question on any new job is whether the editor will open what you have. Video by Zaweba opens a wide range of video, sound and picture files, and it never changes the originals.
This guide goes through what it reads, a few formats that need a little thought, and how importing fits into the rest of the editing.
Video formats
The everyday ones are covered: MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MTS, MPG and 3GP. That takes in most phones, action cameras, camcorders (MTS is the format many of them record), screen capture tools and files downloaded from older devices.
Later versions added more broadcast and archive formats. VOB opens files copied from DVDs. TS and M2V cover transport streams and MPEG 2 video. MXF and DV open material from professional and older tape based cameras. AV1 and APV are newer codecs, and they open too.
If you are digging through an old family archive, it is likely that VOB, DV, MPG and 3GP will between them cover most of what you find.
Transparent video
Some video carries transparency, usually graphics, lower thirds or animated logos rendered from another program. Video by Zaweba opens ProRes 4444, WebM with alpha and QuickTime Animation files and keeps their transparency, so the clip sits over whatever is on the track below rather than arriving with a black box round it.
That makes it practical to build titles or animated elements elsewhere and drop them straight onto an upper track. When you get a graphic from someone else, ask for one of these formats if it needs to sit over footage.
Sound
Many sound formats open, and later versions added AC-3 and E-AC-3, which are often found in surround soundtracks from broadcast and disc sources. Sound from video files comes in with its picture as linked sound, and separate sound files from a recorder land in the bin like any other media.
Pictures and stills
PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and TIFF pictures all open. Later versions added Targa, DPX, OpenEXR and Radiance HDR, which turn up in visual effects and animation work, and HEIC photos from phones (tested with single image files). Animated GIF and APNG open as moving pictures rather than as a single frame.
Stills are useful for more than slideshows. A logo as a PNG with transparency, a scanned photograph, a map or a screenshot can all be placed on the timeline, scaled and animated with keyframes.
Your originals stay as they are
Video by Zaweba only ever reads your original files. It never rewrites them, converts them in place or moves them. When a file is imported, the app builds a smaller proxy in the background so the preview stays smooth, but that is a separate file it makes for itself, and the final export is always rendered from the originals.
This matters most when the files are precious. Footage from a wedding, an interview you cannot reshoot or a family archive should never be at risk from the editor, and here it is not.
Getting import right
Keep your media in a sensible folder structure on disk before you import, because the bin will show names, and clear file names help later. Copy camera cards to a drive first rather than importing straight from the card, so the files are still there when the card is reused.
Bring files into bins as you import them, so interviews, cutaways and music start out apart. If you import the same folder twice by mistake, the tidy command can merge the duplicates later.
Finally, check the list view in the bin after a big import. It shows each file's kind, pixel size and length, which is a quick way to spot a clip recorded at the wrong size or a sound file that is much shorter than it should be.
