Help, my A1 footage is crashing everything!
 

Ok. Rented an A1 for my sister's wedding last Friday. Loved it so much that my own A1 is being overnighted to me right now. I shot in 24f HDV because I couldn't resist, even though I knew it might cause workflow headaches.

And it has.

No matter what I try to do with the footage, programs are crashing, or my PC is restarting.

I installed trials of Premiere Pro 2 (rather than CS3 because it has presets for the A1 that seem to be absent from CS3) and the Cineform Aspect trial. I tried to capture using the Aspect presets in Premiere, and Premiere would crash. Tried capturing with HDlink, and it would crash. Catured with Premiere in the simple HDV 24f preset (not cineform), and it captured the footage as .mpegs (what are these .m2t files everyone talks about? I just have .mpeg's.) . But when I try to convert those .mpeg's with HDlink, HDlink crashes.

I can edit the captured .mpeg's in Premiere Pro 2 without cineform. It's not too slow, but Premiere crashes 99% of the time when I export via Adobe Media encoder (wmv hd, mpeg-2, etc..). I get the old "Premiere failed to return a frame" error, or ""unexpected error," or it just crashes.

I also tried the trial for Edius. I figured I could import the .mpeg's and downconvert using Edius's high-quality DV downconvert export. I can then import the 24f dv footage into my own copy of Adobe Premiere 1.5, and it works, but Edius crashes and restarts my PC when it is trying to export certain mpeg's.

Anyone know what the hell could be wrong? Did I capture the files wrong? Is there some kinfd of widespread hardware or OS problems that I never knew of before?? Help!

My system:
MB: Biostar P4m800=m7a
ram: 2gb ddr 400
Geforece FX 55oo
cpu: p4 3.2 GHz (some programs seem to think it is a dual processor, if true, I didn't know this before).

The only thing I know that handles Canon's 24p footage effortlessly with no trouble is FCP, at least 5.1.2. It's possible Avid's XpressPro now does it too, but I haven't heard for sure. It's a good idea to find out about what your NLE will accept before shooting, but you can't do that now. Probably your easiest, fastest thing to do at this point is use the camera's downconvert feature to output SD and edit that way. You have to unplug the camera from the system and go into the menu and change it, then plug back in (I always shut down the camera before plugging in the firewire cable).

Been working happily with 24f in Premiere Pro CS3 on OSX. Changed an existing HDV 30p preset (no HDV 24p preset available) to a 24p preset and captured A1 footage straight into that project. No problems! No Cineform used.

HTH,
Phil

Good to hear. So you can capture in 24p HDV ok then?

Can someone recommend a way to remove the pulldown from the downconverted 24f so I can author a true 24p dvd?

Premiere Pro 1.5 used to do that crashing thing, then Adobe put out a patch to fix exactly what you are describing. I bet they have a similar solution for Premiere Pro 2, so I would start there.
By the way, I also have CS3, and it works OK with the A1, although I have not tried it with 24f yet,
If there is no patch, don't give up....
Try exporting to tape, open up Premier Pro 1.5 and dump it in a new project file. Then try editing it. If you first upgrade to Premiere 1.5.1, then you can keep it HD. It's a decent upgrade, by the way.
Good luck--

UPDATE: It appears the main cause of my problems are bad captured mpegs. I captured as one long file in Premiere, and then used HDVsplit to scene split. I'm trying to covert those split files to the Cineform intermediate with HDlink and it keeps crashing on the same files.

I'll try to recapture today when my own A1 arrives, but are hdv captures always this unreliable??

i havew never had a bad captured mpeg capturing the whole tape. i dont use hdv split but i would bet that it is having trouble splitting the GOP's.

have you tried importing the whole mpeg into premier to see if that will crash it?

Avid Liquid 7.2 will capture and edit 24F, 25F and 30F without problems, but will not yet write those formats back to tape, AFAIK.

Yeah, the whole file crashes everything, too. That's why I assumed it was certain parts of the original file, because only certain files of the split-up files have been crashing Premiere, Cineform, and edius.

Is it possible to shoot 24f HDV, downconvert to SD DV, and create true 24p SD files in a Windows environment? I don't really need to deliver HD right now, but I would like to deliver true 24p sometimes, and I would like to shoot in HDV so I can always go back later.

So essentially, can I shoot 24f HDV, downconvert immediately since HDV is giving me such trouble, and correctly remove the pulldown?

yes you can shoot in hd and then when you go to capture you can have the A1 downconvert on the fly so that your machine is capturing a dv stream rather than an mpeg. then if it is something that you think you may want to edit in hd later keep the tape and then when you want/need the hd capture it then.

i am not very experienced with removing pulldown so maybe one of the other members can answer that aspect of your question.

There's no pulldown in 24f HDV if you capture it properly into a 24p capture mode and edit in a 23.98 timeline.

Yes, but as I said, HDV capture isn't working well for me in HDlink, HDVsplit, Premiere or Edius. I know DV capture works fine. If I film in 24f HDV, and downconvert via firewire on-the-fly, will I be able to remove the pulldown so I can have true 24p SD DV?

what bill pryor is saying is that, and i just verified this, you can downconvert on the fly and import that standard dv file into a 24p project. with this project there will be no pulldown.

just because you shot in hdv and you want to downconvert to sd doesnt mean that you are required to bring that into a 60i timeline. start a new sd 24p project and import into that.

UPDATE 2: It appears it may have actually been a hardware issue. I had upgraded from 756mb ram to 2 1gb ddr sticks shortly before renting the A1. The system seemed fine (apart from the hdv crashes), and I have never heard of more RAM causing a problem. But when even the SD DV editing and exporting started crashing, I thought the new RAM may be the problem. I pulled one stick out, and DV editing and exporting went fine.

In a few hours, I'll try the HDV stuff that was causing me problems and see if it's any better. Seems odd that more ram would be the problem though. I know a bad stick is also possible, but it would be odd if it only gave me problems during video editing...