trouble opening video files

[blade9818]

hi, i am new to the video editing world. i am trying to edit some video clips that i made with a canon s230. the files are avi files. when i try to open these files in adobe premiere, it says "unable to open that file. file uses an unsupported compression format." can anyone tell me what that means? i have tried to convert the files to an mpeg with a couple different programs with no luck. do i need to convert them?

thanks for any help you can offer.

 

[icrf]

The .avi file was encoded somehow so the video would take up less space (and not look as pretty, but it's a trade-off). To be able to play or edit the video (or even convert it to something else) you'd need to have the codec the video was originally encoded in.

If you captured this video yourself, you can check the capture software and see what it did it in. Otherwise, you can use a program like GSpot (

http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Editing/gspot21.zip)

that should be able to determine what the codec is (check with documentation for usage). Then you need to find this codec somewhere on the internet, and download and install it (try

http://www.google.com)

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