Premier Pro CS4 won't play AVI
 

Part of a project I'm currently working is to extract interesting parts of a twenty minute, sit in front of a camera and talk to it sort of footage. This is DV captured to AVI. I thought I'd like to use a PP feature to transcribe the speech into meta-data so I can search it. I fired up PP and alas it won't play the AVI files. The audio plays but the video stays at a single frame. I can scrub the video and have different frames appear but it won't play.

What drives me crazy is Bridge plays the file with no problem.

Any clues?

I'm running on Windows 7 Pro - 64bit with 24G of RAM and plenty of scratch disk etc. so I'm sure it's not a resource problem.

How was it captured and what codec is used inside the AVI. Use G-Spot to identify it. What sequence settings are used?

I don't believe sequence settings are relevant since I'm trying to view in the source pane.

I didn't know about G-Spot. I'll give it a try.

This could be helpful since I was handed the footage with no other information.

So, I'm guessing I'll need to transcode. Correct?

Ok, I ran G-Spot (that was easy). Here's what it told me:

FILE_SIZE 1,327,355,100
CONT_AUDIO_STREAM_COUNT 1
CONT_BASETYPE AVI(.AVI)
CONT_BYTES_MISSING 0
CONT_INTERLEAVE_ALIGN
CONT_INTERLEAVE_PRELOAD
CONT_INTERLEAVE_TIME
CONT_SUBTYPE Multipart OpenDML AVI (2 parts),
CONT_TOTAL_BITRATE 0
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_AVI1
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_AVI2
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_CVD1
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_CVD2
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_DVD1
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_DVD2
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_SVCD1
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_SVCD2
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_VCD1
VIDEO_ASPECT_CONVERT_VCD2
VIDEO_ASPECT_SOURCE_MATCH
VIDEO_ASPECT_TYPE_NTSC
VIDEO_ASPECT_TYPE_PAL
VIDEO_BITRATE 12056
VIDEO_CODEC_NAME Motion JPEG
VIDEO_CODEC_STATUS Codec(s) are Installed
VIDEO_CODEC_TYPE MJPG
VIDEO_DAR 1.333
VIDEO_DURATION 13:52.025
VIDEO_FIELDS_PER_SEC
VIDEO_FRAME_COUNT 24961
VIDEO_FRAMES_PER_SEC 30.000
VIDEO_H264
VIDEO_MPEG2
VIDEO_MPEG2_3X2
VIDEO_MPEG2_BFF
VIDEO_MPEG2_I_L
VIDEO_MPEG2_PPF
VIDEO_MPEG2_PROG
VIDEO_MPEG2_TFF
VIDEO_MPEG4
VIDEO_MPEG4_BVOP
VIDEO_MPEG4_GMC
VIDEO_MPEG4_NVOP
VIDEO_MPEG4_QPEL
VIDEO_PAR 1.000
VIDEO_PICS_PER_SEC 30.000
VIDEO_QF 1.308
VIDEO_SAR 1.333
VIDEO_SIZE_X 640
VIDEO_SIZE_Y 480
AUDIO_BITRATE 706
AUDIO_BITRATE_TYPE
AUDIO_CHANNEL_COUNT 1
AUDIO_CODEC PCM Audio
AUDIO_CODEC_STATUS No Codec Required
AUDIO_MPEG_STREAM_ID
AUDIO_MPEG_SUBSTREAM_ID
AUDIO_SAMPLE_RATE 44100

You need either the MainConcept or Morgan M-JPEG codec.

Thanks.

But I'm still puzzled as to why Bridge can play no problem but Premier can't. Premier has to use its own set of codecs independent of what else is installed?

Another thing that puzzles me is I can scrub frame by frame but can't play. Is is possible the codec being used is simply too slow on my 8 core machine to play in real time?

Playing and editing are different beasts with different requirements.

You can play in a house, but to build a house is a different matter.