Stumped on exporting filmstrips from Premiere and reimporting them...
 

I am doing a "Star Wars" movie for my nephews. I wanted to rotoscope some lightsabers onto it. I have exported the movie from Premiere to a filmstrip file.

After a lot of rotoscoping, i reimport the footage into Premiere, and I get some weird black horizontal lines (about 20 of them) in the picture.

I went back to doing a simple filmstrip export in Premiere and imported it right back to premiere straight away. It still shows black horizontal stripes in the picture.

I am slightly stumped, since I have done this before under Win ME and it worked fine. Now I am running XP and for some unknown reason it comes up with this bug.

I am using Adobe 6.0.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Hans Henrik

Perhaps I should add that I am running in PAL. Exporting the clip as 576 x 720 and reimporting it as same.

It sounds like interlace problems maybe? Never had it happen though...

I assume you're doing the rotoscoping in After Effects? Make sure you're doing everything in PAL. You also might want to try exporting the rotoscoped footage in another format.

I am doing the rotoscoping in Photoshop, but even if I don't do any rotoscoping whatsoever, if I just export the filmstrip file from Premiere, import it right back in, I still got the stripes, so it should be independant of my rotoscoping tool.

Hans Henrik

A little additional information: There are actually 37 black horizontal stripes (one line wide each). That amounts to about 1 in 20.

Another odd thing is that if I play the filmstrip in Premieres "source" window (ie. the one to the left) everything looks fine. Once I drop it into the timeline and preview in the right window (or fullscreen) I get the black lines.

I tried rendering the project to a finished .avi, and the black lines are still there.

Any ideas (other than reinstalling Premiere, which I will do when I get off work)

Thanks for replies so far.

Hans Henrik

Does it look the same when viewed on a TV screen?

Possibly reset premiere with the old trick Ctrl+Alt+Shift whlie loading premiere.

Edited: Ctrl+ALt+Shift will bring up a properties dialog box.
Ctrl+Shift while opening premiere will reset to default. Sorry.

All the best,

Ed

Good tips Ed.

Will try as soon as I get home. I'll keep you posted.

Hans Henrik

Still stumped on this issue, but I have a few more pointers now. Hopefully someone will be able to help me out.

I tried playing on TV screen, exporting to the camera, the problem remains.

The interesting thing is, that I reinstalled Premiere on my old PC (where it worked last time). It still works there, so it must be connected to my hardware in some way. I am running a slightly old Premiere version (6.02) so I am wondering if it may have problems on newer machines?

I now have a P4 2.4 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 1 GB RAM, 2 harddrives (adobe on 1, footage on the other), Triplex GeForce 4 TI-4200.

My current workaround is moving the entire project back and forth between the new PC and the old one, moved the firewire card to the old one, and I then do renders there. Obviously not very practical.

Does anyone have a PC similar to mine (especially CPU wise) and Adobe 6.02, who can try doing a test for me: Export a clip as a .flm filmstrip, import it back in, and see if it plays ok?

Hope anyone can help, since this is driving me bonkers!

Ps. Showed the kids a preliminary version. They went nuts over seeing themselves duking it out with blasters and lightsabers :)

Hans Henrik

Hans,

I have not got a clue what it is doing. You say that if you export it as a AVI file you still get the same problem. Being that the process of creating an AVI is software based I don't see how this could be hardware related.

Any way I tried what you suggested on my machine (DELL 2.4GHz, GIG RAM, WINDOWS XP PRO, 2 HD - 40Gig, 80Gig - Premiere 6.5, Matrox G450, Pinnacle DV500 Capture card)

Dumped a 10 Sec clip on the timeline, exported out as filmstrip imported in again and no different.

What happens if you import the filmstip back into photoshop and see whether the lines appear there? or even exporting the filmstrip again (using the filmstip that is giving the problem) in premiere and then importing the new one into Photoshop to see if the lines appear?

Good to see that the kids enjoyed what you created.

Hope this helps,

Ed

The plot thickens.....

Thanks for the reply Ed. I tried your suggestions. Exported the filmstrip out of premiere, and it still has stripes. In the process, I got an important clue perhaps... I wanted to show what it looks like to me. I load up Premiere, do a "PrintScreen" to capture what it looks like. This is what I got:

http://home7.inet.tele.dk/hhb/adobeproblem.jpg

The interesting thing is that on my screen, the right side window shows the problem, ie. "jedi" with stripes in the picture. In the screen dump I took (the one posted in the link), the right hand monitor is black... This leads me to believe that I am dealing with some kind of video overlay issue, since it is not captured by a "printscreen".

I cannot think of any other explanation of why the screen dump I took looks different from what I actually see on the screen. Never seen that before actually, but I think I am getting close to the source of the problem. I'll now rummage around in my NVidia settings and see if I can figure something out.

Anyway, thanks for the input. It didn't really solve the problem, but at least it gave me a valuable lead.

If you know something about how Premiere handles previews in terms of video overlays, feel free to comment!

Ill keep you posted on my experiments...

Hans Henrik

Hans,

I thought screen overlays were not captured in print screens?

You don't think its the mesh showing through in the monitor? I know on some sonys/ CTX monitors you can sometimes see the mesh.

Does it only happen on film strips?

What monitor are you using?
What are your display settings? Colour Depth, Screen res etc?

What happens if you attach the monitor from your old PC to the PC giving you the problem?

What Graphics card are you using?

Hi Ed.

You are quite correct that overlays are not captured when doing printscreen. My point was just that I didn't realize that the preview window is an overlay window, until I saw the empty printscreen window.

It is definately not the monitor mesh showing (its a Compaq 1220, on a Triplex Geforce 4 TI 4200 btw). The black lines are too wide to be mesh, and also the error becomes part of the output itself. If I make a final .avi file and play it on another computer, the problem still remains.

To summarize, the problem is not in the filmstrip itself. Filmstrip shown on other machines look fine. However after the filmstrip has been processed by Premiere (ie exported to a movie), the black bands are in the video itself regardless of playback device. Exporting back to tape also yields black bands.

I will try do do a digital photo of my monitor and post it this afternoon, so you may see what it looks like.

Thanks for the pointers so far.

Hans Henrik

This is extremely strange!!!

What is different between your 'old' lower spec machine and your 'new' highly speced system?

Are your settings in premiere on one PC the same as the other?

All the best,

Ed

Ok. First is here an image of what it looks like in Premiere. (I did a still with a digital camera to get overlays included). Quality not too impressive, but you will get the idea. Black bands clearly visible on the preview (right) monitor, while not there in source window.

http://home7.inet.tele.dk/hhb/redtest/DSC01364.JPG

The 2 Premieres should have exactly the same settings. Both are clean installs, and the project is an identical copy.

Old system: AMD Athlon 1,1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Geforce 2 PRO, 1 HDD

New system: P4 2.4 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 1 GB RAM, 2 harddrives (adobe and preview on 1, project on the other), Triplex GeForce 4 TI-4200 graphics card.

Now I tested exporting the finished project to an .avi. That works now. I could have sworn it didn't last time I tried it. Both exporting to an MPEG2 file through TMPGENC and to a DIVX .avi works fine now. Exporting to tape still showed black bands.

I was wondering whether it may be a disk speed issue. After all the filmstrip is 102 MB, and duration is only 2,3 seconds. That is almost 50 MByte/second of throughput required.

I would think that my old disk is slower than the new one though, but who knows...

You think that "underflow" of data from the disk could be the issue? I guess black bands would make sense there (where the preview is "starved" for data)

Hans Henrik