Problems producing Blu Ray discs with Premiere Pro and Encore CS3

[David L Lewis]

I have captured and edited an HDV PAL project using premiere pro CS3 I have also succesfuly produced standard definition DVDs of the project using encore but have had enormous problems producing a Blu Ray copy of the same project.

To try and sort out my problems one at a time I've gone back to basics and produced a short 5 minute HDV PAL video and tried to see if that had the same problems. Its less frustrating to find something has gone wrong on a 5 minute project than on an hour long project

so first problem.

My 5 minute video appeared to export to encore OK using 1440x1080 high quality and MPEG2 presets but on closer inspection I have found 1 clip which displays as a bright red frame for a number of frames and then pixelates between the original picture and the red

any Ideas what causes this and how to avoid

[Tripp Woelfel]

PP CS3 inserts red frames where it has a problem with the video from the source tape. The infamous HDV dropouts are typically the culprit. This may be the source of your problem.

You have three options that I can think of. First, you can try re-rendering that section to see if something went all ropey in the transcode to Encore. Second, try to edit around the bad frames in PP. If you can't do that, then recapture the dodgy footage from the source tape. You might have better luck with the footage on the second capture.

As and aside, I went to MK years ago on a business trip to Harmon Audio and was shown the original 4 track recorder used to record Sgt. Pepper just sitting in the lunch room. I mean, I could just walk right up and touch it. Pretty surreal.

[David L Lewis]

Tripp Thanks for the response and suggestions.

Ive been playing alot with thsi problem over the last week or so all to no avail.

I have a couple of projects where this happens so I have opened up a new project in premiere pro and recaptured the offending clips so I now have a pretty small project with just two clips.

Ive re-encoded each clip seperately wih the same results. I have tried different quality settings and different bit rates all to no avail.

What is so frustrating is the problem only seems to exist when I want to produce a blu ray version of my project standard def is fine.

I think I can get arounfd the problem in my present project by , as you say editing around the offending clips but thats becuse thety are non critical but I'd hate to think what would happen if they were critical.

woul;d really love to get to the bottom of what is causing this to happem.

[Tripp Woelfel]

I'm going to guess that your problem is somehow systemic and related to the Media Encoder's transcoding to BD. You might want to uninstall and reinstall the Media Encoder and perhaps PP and Encore.

There's no guarantee that this is going to fix the problem, but if there's something wrong in the wormworks this will give you a clean basis to start from. I think this is important to consider because systems change over time with OS, software and driver updates. These can, and do, cast a sabot into gears. I know this from personal experience.

[Don Blish]

Originally Posted by David L Lewis

My 5 minute video appeared to export to encore OK using 1440x1080 high quality and MPEG2 presets but on closer inspection I have found 1 clip which displays as a bright red frame for a number of frames and then pixelates between the original picture and the red

any Ideas what causes this and how to avoid

I have been using DVDitPro HD not Encore for Blu-Ray projects, so this is just a guess on problems other than droppouts:

HDV at 1080x1440 is not a BluRay legal stream in mpeg2, so DVDit ProHD has been doing the transcode from my Cineform .avi files of HDV material. Does Encore do this for you?

FYI to dropouts, I haven't seen a single one capturing from my Sony HDR-HC1 using the Cineform plugins

[Tom Roper]

HDV at 1080x1440 is not a BluRay legal stream in mpeg2...

1440x1080/60i mpeg-2 is a legal Blu-ray compliant stream. No re-encoding is required.

Edit:

1440x1080 is not mentioned as legal per the original 2005 Blu-ray public specs which were subject to change and state 1440x1080 is for AVC or VC-1 only, but I think that was changed. In any case, before switching to the EX1 native 1920x1080 streams, I authored a number of 1440x1080i HDV mpeg-2 streams without rendering any of them to 1920.

You can purchase from the Blu-ray association the full specs, rely on the outdated 2005 public specs, or trust in anecdotal evidence that 1440x1080 mpeg-2 authors, burns and plays fine, which it always did for me.

[Khoi Pham]

Originally Posted by David L Lewis

I have captured and edited an HDV PAL project using premiere pro CS3 I have also succesfuly produced standard definition DVDs of the project using encore but have had enormous problems producing a Blu Ray copy of the same project.

To try and sort out my problems one at a time I've gone back to basics and produced a short 5 minute HDV PAL video and tried to see if that had the same problems. Its less frustrating to find something has gone wrong on a 5 minute project than on an hour long project

so first problem.

My 5 minute video appeared to export to encore OK using 1440x1080 high quality and MPEG2 presets but on closer inspection I have found 1 clip which displays as a bright red frame for a number of frames and then pixelates between the original picture and the red

any Ideas what causes this and how to avoid

After you have finish authoring and before you encoded or build disc image, go into
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Encore CS3\Plug-ins\en_US
and drag the file ImporterFastMPEG.prm to desk top then start to encode, this should fix any glitches during encoding, be sure to drag this file back to where it belong before you start another project.

[Jack Lang]

This is most likely due to HDV drop out. Make sure Premiere doesn't report any files with dropped frames or problem.

Originally Posted by David L Lewis

I have found 1 clip which displays as a bright red frame for a number of frames and then pixelates between the original picture and the red

any Ideas what causes this and how to avoid