Premiere Pro CS3 acting strange when editing WMV's

[Russ Holland]

I've decided to capture an hours DV footage shot of a car show in Windows Movie Maker (yeah, I know...) to get smaller files for editing, then I'll recapture just the bits I need later, but Premiere Pro keeps crashing. The debug message I get is

Premiere Pro has encountered an error.

[..\..\Src\PPixHandleUtilities.cpp-114]

The program doesn't close, I can just click OK and I can continue work. It's never done it before, would it be due to using wmv's to rough edit, or is it something else?

Has anyone else had this problem before, should I use wmv's to edit with?

Thanks!

Russ

[Harm Millaard]

Just capture regular DV using PP with scene detection.

[Russ Holland]

So is it because I'm capturing wmv files and not DV?

I usually capture DV but space is at a minimum so I'm trying to space save.

[Harm Millaard]

Get another bigger disk. They are cheap nowadays.

[Russ Holland]

Right, so still my question hasn't been answered. Not being funny but the answer for everything just seems to "buy a new one" or "why do you want to do that" and frankly, I'm a bit fed up with it. Perhaps I'm not in the "in crowd" by that I mean I always see the same people chetting away to each other in this community, helping each other out, but as soon as someone new joins, that's it. I get stupid answers. Yes, this would be the natural thing to do, and I probably will do but my question was does using anything but dv files, in this case wmv, affect the way premiere reacts, or is it another problem?

Is that so hard to understand? This just buy a new one attitude really stinks, and if we could all do that, then we probably would. I find that these forums have two kinds of people; great people who will genuinely assist you, give you new ideas to try and show an interest in what others do, and then there are other folk who just tell you to buy a new one. Perhaps if you can't answer my question Mr. Millaard, don't bother replying.

Without prejudice,
Russ

[Adam Gold]

Perhaps you are misunderstanding or misinterpreting the tone of the responses to date.

WMV files are not meant for editing, and certainly not in Premiere. WMV is a display format, not an editing format. Most likely your problems are occurring because you are trying to "outsmart" the software and trying to save a few pennies. But there is sometimes a case of being penny-wise and pound foolish.

Harm knows more about this stuff than almost anyone on this board. I personally found his advice to be invaluable in setting up my new system. I believe he was just trying to get you to the simplest solution, the quickest. It's not inappropriate for someone to ask "Why do you want to do that?" when you present a methodology that isn't designed to do what you want to do and there's an easier more straightforward way.

So to just answer your questions:

"should I use wmv's to edit with?" No, unless you want to do the whole process in WMM.

"So is it because I'm capturing wmv files and not DV?" Yes, probably.

"my question was does using anything but dv files, in this case wmv, affect the way premiere reacts, or is it another problem?" It's probably the files, but certainly could be something else as well. You don't provide enough info (system specs, settings, workflow) for us to know for sure.

"Is that so hard to understand?" Not at all. Chill. You'll get better responses if you do. And you might want to try the Adobe Forums and Adobe tech support with your error message if you haven't already done so.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[Ervin Farkas]

My experience with Premiere is similar - as soon as you feed it something else (other than DV or HDV), it becomes unstable. I edited a project where the source files were filmed with a hard drive based camcoder (is it AVC?) and I was able to import a few files, then it would crash... restart, import a few more (save after each import)... crash... drove me nuts! Same with mpeg files.

Unfortunately Premiere is not a very stable application. This is why, among other things, I switched to another NLE.

[Harm Millaard]

Russ,

In video editing there is ONE rule: AVOID converting one format to another as much as you can.
If you do not adhere to that simple rule, you will pay for it in work flow, end quality and problems.

You stated you start out with DV tapes. DON'T convert these, capture that unconverted and use scene detection (or use Scenalyzer), so you can throw out whatever shots you don't need. When you have finalized your editing and are ready to convert, only then go to WMV.

Sorry if you don't like the message, but that is your best approach.

[Russ Holland]

EDIT: Harm, Thanks for the reply, and Sorry.

Adam,
Thanks for the info, that is what I was after. At least I know there is nothing too much wrong with my system, as it's never let me down yet but I'm experimenting.

As for trying to save a few pennies, I suppose I am, doesn't everyone want to. I'm not usually as arrogant as I came across in my last post, why I couldn't just get the answer you gave me straight away, ie "No because that's not the best format" would have settled it.

Harm doesn't know me, and I am sure now he won't want to, if he's trusted and knows his stuff, he certainly didn't show it. Again, sorry Harm but it was an answer I was after, not to answer more questions myself. I was frustrated. Personally I didn't think my original question didn't need any more detail; Should I use wmv's to edit with? The answer is No.

Ervin, thanks for your response also. I'm glad, yet sorry, you had the same trouble, at least you've confirmed it was me doing something wrong with the footage and the compression. I never knew that it wasn't suitable for editing, my thought that footage is just 0's and 1's regardless is obviously wrong and I shall now recapture it.

Thanks,
Chilled...
Russ

[Harm Millaard]

Russ,

One of my major shortcomings is that often I tend to be brief, sometimes too brief. My apologies, but as I frequent a number of different fora and regularly see similar questions, it often makes me wonder how come that people do not know the basics of editing and ask (at least IMO) rather dull questions, that could have been answered by a basic search on these issues. My apologies for the very short reaction I gave you, but maybe you can understand my reasoning. OTOH, you may not have read as much as I did on all these topics and I should have given you more leeway and a better explanation.

I understand your reaction, but with video editing you have to take into consideration that it takes large amounts of storage. For DV/HDV around 13 GB per hour, but luckily the price of a 750 GB disk is only around € 80 nowadays, so that was the reason I said to get a new and bigger disk.

No hard feelings.

[Russ Holland]

Harm,
I know that much at least by working it out, so I'm cool with that. just with the 3 projects I've got on going at the moment things are temporarily short of space.

I did do a quick search, but patients for reading websites isn't exactly up in my top things to do, and I refer now back to your reply to Marco Wagner's post "where's ultra" you gave him a two word answer "other disc" which was fine. If Marco had done a quick search or even looked at his retail box, he would have found it, did the simple question from a long-term forum member make you wonder as well?

With regards to basics, we all have to start somewhere and if we don't exactly know what we are doing we may not know we've found the answer even if we glance over it in the seach results - that is why we ask the guru's for help.

Thanks for clearing this up Harm, and again Apologies for my initial reaction, I meant no offense.

Regards,

Russ

[Ervin Farkas]

Russ, here's the Video 101 you need in order to understand what is going on, why is your approach wrong.

What you tried to do is called proxy editing - capturing at lower resolution, editing with those files, then replacing the low res files with full quality ones. The reason it doesn't work well is that wmv is not an all I-frame format (you might want to Google around and try to bring yourself up to speed on what an "all I-frame" format is and how interframe compression works).

There are legitimate situations where you have no choice, you have to use a proxy; a classic example would be a videographer traveling only with a laptop. For a variety of reasons, he might want to start editing right away after shooting, so he would ingest at low resolution, do the editing, then when getting back home, transferring the project onto a powerful workstation and recapturing all the video, at full quality this time.

But in order to make this really work, you need to work with an all I-frame low res format; most NLEs will have issues with interframe-compressed video.

I hope this helps. Unfortunately skipping the basics will often get you in trouble - like with anything else, you need to sit down and do your homework if you would like to excell at what you do. Here is a good starting point: Adobe has some excellent free information on the basics of DV and HDV editing:

www.adobe.com/motion/events/pdfs/dvprimer.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/products/premie...s/hdprimer.pdf

and another must read on compression: http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/pr...ion_Primer.pdf

[Russ Holland]

Ervin,

That's exactly what I want to do and why I want to do it. I'll have a read. Thanks.

Russ