Convert MOV to WAV

This is where a MOV differs from the video files people usually pull audio out of. A phone writes AAC, and so does anything intended for delivery. A camera frequently does not: Canon, Sony, Panasonic and Blackmagic bodies commonly record linear PCM into the QuickTime container, at 48 kHz, at 16 or 24 bits, because a camera is a recording device and compressing the reference track buys nothing on a card that is already fast enough.

That changes what this conversion is. Where the source is PCM, going to WAV is a move between two uncompressed representations rather than a decode-and-recompress — nothing is thrown away except in the one respect described in the next section. Where the source is AAC, the WAV is a faithful copy of what the AAC decoded to, which is not the same as the original sound and is the best that exists.

The output is 16-bit PCM in every case. A camera set to 24-bit — which most are, because it gives headroom against a badly set level — produces a WAV here with eight bits per sample fewer than it started with. Nothing warns you at the time, so it is worth knowing before a batch.

For most of what this file is used for, it does not matter. Syncing does not care, a dialogue edit does not care, and 16 bits is the delivery standard for everything short of a mastering session. Where it does matter is if the WAV is the copy you intend to keep: for that, the FLAC path on this site writes 24 bits when the source has them, which puts the compressed format ahead of the uncompressed one on faithfulness. That is unusual and it is worth two minutes of your attention.

WAV stores every sample as a number, so the size follows directly from arithmetic: sample rate times bit depth times channels. Two channels of 16-bit audio at 48 kHz is 192,000 bytes a second — 11.5 MB a minute, 691 MB an hour — regardless of whether the recording is a symphony or silence.

That is the trade you are making, and for editing it is the right one. There is no decoding cost, no artefact to argue about and no format negotiation with the next tool. It is also why WAV is a working format rather than a storage one: an archive of interviews kept as WAV is roughly twice the size of the same archive kept as FLAC, with no audible difference.

Whatever the camera recorded at is what the WAV holds. Video is almost always 48 kHz, and it stays 48 kHz rather than being resampled to the 44.1 that music tools default to.

That is a bigger deal on a video job than it sounds. A file that has been quietly resampled and then laid against picture is one of the harder problems to diagnose, because it looks correct at the head of the timeline and drifts progressively — the classic symptom is lip sync that is fine for the first minute and visibly wrong by the tenth. Nothing here resamples, so that particular failure is off the table.

A WAV file holds exactly one audio track. A camera MOV can hold several, and on a real shoot it often does: an on-board microphone on one, a radio mic on another, a feed from the desk on a third. Only the first survives.

Convert one file and listen to it before processing the rest of the shoot. If the first track is not the one you need, this page cannot select a different one — the practical answers are to export the track you want from the editor, or to work from the separate recorder’s files and use the camera audio only for sync. Neither is a workaround, they are what a post workflow does anyway.

Sync tools compare waveforms, so what they want is a plain audio file per camera with the same timebase as the video. A WAV extracted from the camera original satisfies that exactly: the samples are the ones the camera wrote, at the rate it wrote them, starting where the clip starts.

Two habits make it reliable. Keep the filename identical to the video’s, so that a matched pair is obvious in a folder of forty. And do not trim the head — the clapper, the hand slap or whatever transient exists is the anchor the matcher uses, and removing the first two seconds because they look empty is the most common reason a sync fails on files that were otherwise fine.

The picture is discarded, which is the point. So is the timecode track a professional camera writes, along with chapter marks, subtitle tracks and any metadata the body recorded about the shot. The WAV is samples and a header, with no tags at all.

Timecode is the one to plan for. If your workflow conforms by timecode rather than by waveform, a WAV extracted here carries none and the match has to be made another way — by audio, or by keeping the MOV alongside. On a job where that matters, the extraction belongs in the editing software, which can write timecode into a broadcast WAV.

The limit is on the file you hand over. Camera originals are large: 4K at 30 frames a second from a phone is about 170 MB a minute, and a professional codec is several times that. In practice this page handles takes and clips rather than full recordings.

For a long interview or a multi-camera day, the extraction belongs where the media already is. Every editor exports audio, and doing it there gets you track selection, timecode and batch processing at once. This page is for the moment when one file is on the machine in front of you and the next tool wants a WAV.

The MOV is read, decoded and written out to WAV entirely in this browser tab, on your own processor. Nothing carrying the recording goes anywhere, and the network tab will show that during a conversion.

On paid work that is more than a preference. Material under embargo, a client’s premises, an interview that has not been cleared and anything covered by a non-disclosure agreement should not pass through a converter nobody has vetted. The practical benefit follows: a large file converts at the speed of the machine rather than the speed of an upload.