Premiere/Canopus Codec/Render Issue
 

I'm asking a lot of your patience in reviewing this problem. Working on my first long form video, an interview with long clips and occasional photoshop titles, other psd images made at 720X534 and saved at 720X480 without constrained proportions, and sound fx. I've been editing on this system for a year, and another year on an older PC. I run W2KPro SP2 on a P4-1.8 with an Asus board, 512 MB of DDRSDRAM, Maxtor drives (2) at 7200 rpm (DMA enabled), NTFS file system, Premiere 6.02, Pioneer 103 DVD-R, Canopus softMPEG codecs and a DV Raptor card. I'm used to the vfw file size limit in Canopus and I've tried and failed to use the Canopus software to get reference AVIs that work around the capture limit so I just use Premiere and batch in 9:30:00 segments. No problem there. I can export any size file. Tonight I exported to MS DV AVI a 37 minute segment from the timeline. Plays in WMP, requires rendering when brought into Premiere. Render time is around 26 minutes per 9.5 minute work area, using the project settings. After the first segment render I thought I'd try the Canopus DV Converter, hoping it would create a file that didn't require rendering and cooked faster than the series renders. The resulting file also required rendering so I dumped it and carried on with rendering the MS DV AVI original export (audio plays without render in both cases but not video). Perhaps should mention that I exported the audio to WAV, normalized it in Cool Edit 2000 and used it to replace the multi-track audio clips in the timeline (by turning off the other tracks, not deleting them). The exported/normalized WAV was 48 KHz/16 bit.
I can understand a file size limit in capture with Canopus Raptor. I can't understand the render file size limit in MS DV AVI, can't understand why the render is 3 times RT when so small a % has effects/transitions/still images. Mostly I can't understand why the export, when imported, has to be rendered in the first place when the codec is native to the Premiere environment that created it.
In case it matters I should also mention that a few months ago I fell victim to the Windows Explorer freeze on opening problem. I've researched it and tried most of the remedies I'm comfortable with but still have it happen 3 times out of five when I reboot. Until tonight booting into safe mode and then normal boot solved it. Tonight, of course, while wrestling the other beasts, safe mode didn't solve it for the first time. This is probably a red herring in regards to my main concern but just in case they're related I mention it. Sorry for the length of this but this is the only forum that gives me optimism about an answer to a detailed problem description.

Not a definitive answer, but I'll give it a whack...
 

You seem to be asking, why does Premiere want to reencode a video clip that has had no changes made to it? Without knowing more, it seems to me that it needs to do so because it wants to insert the new WAV audio streams into the DV-format video file. Replacing the audio track counts as a change. It may be that Premiere isn't smart enough to know it doesn't need to reencode the video data as well.

Premiere's Smarts
 

Your observation about Premiere's lack of smarts makes sense to me, Robert. And it sure has a price. I chose to export the avi to let me dump source clips, free disk space and carry on with the edit. What I got was an 8 GB file, which is fine, and 8 GB of temporary files out of the render, which is not. Had I exported to DV tape from the timeline and recaptured from tape I'd have an 8 GB file that required no pre-rendering to work with. Do you see any flaw in that logic, or any better way to do it? Replacing the entire audio portion with a WAV file required no rendering for playback on the timeline and would have gone to tape in RT. The combined time to export to tape and capture again wouldn't have been much different than the time it took to export then render the export, less if anything.

Are you 100% sure you are exporting in the EXACT SAME settings
you imported the footage in? The export in Premiere is pretty
crap and it can default to some strange settings sometimes. I've
been bitten by that a couple of times. I had footage in PAL
720x576 @ 25fps and it had exported it in NTSC 720x480 @ 30 fps.
This ofcourse required a hell of a lot of rendering. As soon as I
made sure the output settings where the same as the input
it required no rendering.

If you cannot solve your problem I suggest to try the path of
elimination. Eliminate factors until Premiere doesn't renders. That
might give you a clue. Things to try are: keep the old audio and
don't use a new WAV, only use DV footage and remove the other
photoshop stills etc.

Good luck!