I recently bought my first DSLR, the Nikon D90, which I have been having a blast with. One of the cool features of the camera, is that it supports creating HD video clips (of up to 5 minutes) (view an example here). However, the way the clips are created seems to confuse Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, which 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 tweaks and fixes), I have put together a bash script that will “fix” all of the Nikon D90 AVI clips in a directory so that Premiere Pro will recognize them.

Usage:

d90topremier [dirWithClips]

The “dirWithClips” argument is optional, and if not specified will assume the clips are in the current working director.

Requirements

The script requires the “setfile” command, which is available in the free Mac OS X Developer SDK.

Script

#/bin/bash

oldExt=mov
newExt=AVI
d="./"
if [ -n "$1" ];then
        d="$1"
fi
if [ ! -e "$d" ]; then
        echo "$d does not exist"
        exit 0;
fi
for filename in "$d"*.$oldExt
  do
        if [ ! -e "$filename" ]; then
                continue;
        fi
 setfile -t "VfW " "$filename"
        newFileName="${filename%$oldExt}$newExt"
        mv "$filename" "$newFileName"
        echo "$filename --> $newFileName"
  done

Just place this into a file called “d90topremier”, place it in your path, and make sure to chmod it like so:

chmod 755 d90topremier

If you run into any issues, or have any improvements for the script, post them in the comments.

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