Long CF files rendered from AE not viewable in Premiere?

[David Botkin]

I'm having a problem with very large/long Cineform files in Premiere.
I'm running Win7, CS4.1, and ProspectHD version 219 (latest).

We are shooting on a Canon 5D MkII. Some of our takes are up to 11 minutes long. Footage is loaded onto a computer, renamed, and converted using HDLink.
These Cineform files play correctly in Premiere and work just fine.

We then take these video files, load them into After Effects for color correction, and export them again as Cineform files with the same name to a folder called "Graded". In the process the files grow a little in size. If these new files are small/short, they work just fine in Premiere, but if they are longer than a few minutes they dont' work at all. A three minute clip works. Five doesn't.
By don't work at all, I mean this: They load into Premiere and sit in the bin, but no icon is ever generated for them. They can be dropped into the timeline, but still no frame is shown. Any attempt to scrub through the clip will result in a "Not Responding" for a few seconds in Premiere. Also, the properties of a clip are viewed in Premiere, the broken clips don't show the data rate graph.
Attached image shows what this looks like in the Bin.

The "broken" rendered files still view properly in Media Player Classic. Playback modes have been tested in Quality and Fast.
The only thing that I can see that has changed is the data rate, which went from about 6.8-7.0 MB / second to 8.1-8.5 MB / second, but there must be more to it that that.

Any idea what might be the problem?

[Marty Baggen]

David... I have a similar setup here with CS4 and Win7. I will attempt to replicate your scenario and see if I have the same issues.

In the meantime, can you tell me if you are able to create a trimmed project (which includes CFHD clips) via the Project Manager in Premiere CS4?

My finding is that CS4 does not find the CFHD clips and therefore, are excluded from any collection of clips in the newly created trimmed project.

[David Botkin]

Thanks for the help Marty!

I actually already checked the "trimmed project" question on my rig, and it doesn't work. The CFHD files don't copy.
Other than that, and this new problem, I've been very happy. Performance isn't bad and the 5D footage looks GREAT. Yes, all these quirks are annoying, but this is the cost of playing with the latest video hardware; I still remember the early days of editing DV. And linear editing, for that matter.

Another problem, which I haven't reported yet, is that HDLink is rate changing the audio more than is needed, so the audio attached to the video loses sync after a few minutes.
I don't really care, though, because I have a separate WAV file for all the takes. I use the batch tool in Audacity which takes only a few seconds per file to change speed. I've attached an image showing the "chain" I created to create perfectly synced audio.

[David Newman]

Which export module are you using? Adobe are somewhat broken for Video For Windows based exports, as they seem to be limited to 4GB. For use the CioneForm AVI export module all should be fine.

[David Botkin]

Aha! There are so many different export modes in AE that I didn't notice one for Cineform. That solved the problem; perfect Cineform exports from AE are working now. In fact, since the HDLink audio is broken anyway, we might just do the MOV to Cineform conversion in AE as we color correct and replace the unsynced audio later.

[David Newman]

Discuss your audio issue with support, as it is not broken as far as we are aware. That audio over compensation was fixed in the 219 build.

[Marty Baggen]

That's good news. I had just output an AE/CFHD clip and was about to give you the "bad" news that it works fine here....