Transcribe MOV

Almost every MOV that reaches us was made by an Apple device. iPhone and iPad write .mov when the camera is set to "Most Compatible"; QuickTime Player on a Mac writes it for every screen and audio recording it makes; Final Cut Pro and DSLRs export it by default.

Getting the file off the device

1. From an iPhone or iPad: open the clip in Photos → Share → Save to Files. AirDrop to a Mac keeps the original untouched; sending it through a messaging app usually re-encodes it and loses audio quality before we ever see it.
2. From QuickTime Player: File → Save writes a .mov straight to disk. Screen recordings capture system audio or the microphone depending on what you picked when you started.
3. From a camera: copy the card contents as they are. Do not convert first — a re-encode costs a generation of audio quality and buys nothing here.

Drop any of them into the box at the top of this page. MOV is 4.4% of everything uploaded here, and the median one runs 2 minutes 16 seconds — these are mostly short clips, not features. The first five minutes need no account.

These are medians measured on our production cluster, expressed as time per hour of audio. A video file adds a little on top while its audio track is extracted.

Scaled to the MOV files people actually upload here: the median one, 2 minutes 16 seconds, comes back in about three seconds. Nine uploads in ten are under 21 minutes — roughly half a minute. Ninety-nine in a hundred are under 85 minutes, about two minutes. Queue time at peak hours sits on top of all of these and has nothing to do with the model.

Note what does not appear in that table: resolution, codec and bitrate. The video track is discarded before transcription, so a 4K ProRes clip and a 720p H.264 clip of the same length take the same time.

No, and the reason is historical. MP4 was standardised from the QuickTime file format: the two containers share the same atom structure, and most tools read either without noticing. For transcription they are interchangeable.

Three things follow from that:

• Renaming .mov to .mp4 changes nothing. It usually works, because the bytes are nearly the same — and it is unnecessary, since both upload here as they are, along with .qt.
• Quality is not a property of the container. "MOV is higher quality than MP4" is a claim about what people typically put inside them, not about the wrapper. An H.264 clip is identical whichever one holds it.
• The one real difference is what Apple puts in MOV. ProRes and uncompressed PCM audio are common in .mov and rare in .mp4. Neither affects accuracy; both affect file size, which is the subject of the next section.

MOV is the format where size binds before length does. Across the MOV files uploaded here the median bitrate is 4.7 Mbps, which puts an hour of footage at about 2.1 GB — so the 5 GB ceiling arrives at roughly two and a half hours, nowhere near the 8-hour one. ProRes is denser again by an order of magnitude.

• Export the audio on its own. This is the case where converting first genuinely helps: an hour of MOV is about 2.1 GB, and the same hour as audio alone is about 70 MB. Nothing about the sound changes, and the duration limit becomes the only one left. In QuickTime Player: File → Export As → Audio Only.
• Split at scene or take boundaries, not by the clock. Cutting between takes costs you nothing; cutting mid-sentence costs you the sentence, and no transcriber recovers a word split across two uploads.
• Keep the original. Whatever you upload, keep the untouched capture — a transcript can be re-run, and a re-encoded master cannot be un-re-encoded.

For reference: the largest MOV processed here so far was 4.9 GB, just under the ceiling.