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

Hmm. Tried exporting it directly from Premiere to an .avi using DV compression. I figured I could then use the .avi clip instead of the huge .flm clip.

The saved .avi shows the same bands however. It seems that sending the movie through the video server, apparantly cures the problem in the final result. Still have no clue what is going on...

Hans Henrik

I still say you are seeing interlacing. Either that, or it is just a "quick" preview, not a finished view.

Thanks for the reply Keith

As for the preview it is quite "finished". Even if select "print to video" and view it in fullscreen, the same banding effect is there.

I am not quite sure what you mean that I am seeing interlace. Any idea of some test I could do to see whether this is interlace related?

To better show what it looks like in motion, I put an .avi illustrating the effect here:

http://home7.inet.tele.dk/hhb/redtest/pettertest.avi

Sorry it's a bit large. 8 megs or so, but would rather not introduce other compression than DV in order to keep things simple.

Hans Henrik

This is extremely strange.

I think if it was an interlace issue, you would not see black bars a couple of pixels think. That sort of thing is only seen when you are doing a quick pan/ tilt.

Thanks for the great pictures and video that show the problem.

Ed

Hmmm. Maybe I should consider upgrading to Premiere Pro when that comes out, and see if that solves the problem.

Apart from that, I am pretty much out of ideas about how to try to solve this.

Hans Henrik

Hi Hans,
Hope nobody laughs at me but want to point something.

On you first jpeg with the black screen on right I saw you are running Interent connection. There were some information at other forums/treads this might lead to problems whil doing export to tape in Vegas for example.

Try the hole process free of unneccessary opened software.

Actually, you have a very valid point. While it is unlikely the culprit, it isn't to be laughed at. Sometimes it is the silliest stuff that gets you.

Bogdan, I certainly will not laugh at you... At this point I am ready to try the export at midnight during full moon, swinging a dead chicken over my head, if I thought that would help :)

The suggestion was a good one, unfortunately it didn't help. I yanked out the network, shutdown any unneeded applications and retried it. Still same result...

Hmm. Maybe that chicken.....

Hans Henrik

Just keep in mind, for the chicken thing to work, you can't just pick up a frozen bird at the grocers :)

PROBLEM SOLVED!

Just a follow up from this problem that I never really figured out.

The problem disappears if I use Premiere Pro in stead of Premiere 6.02.

Cannot really say what the problem was, but since it belongs to an old version of Premiere I will think of it no more.

Besides, I decided that using "lightning" effect in AE is about 10% of the work of rotoscoping i Photoshop. It looks a little bit better with manual rotoscope, but not really enough to justify the many many hours.

Thanks for all the input from you.

Hans,

Glad to hear that you have sovlved the problem. Thats probably the reason why I could not re-create it in P6.5????

I'm thinking of buying Premiere Pro (video collection edition with AE, Encore etc) what have you found good about it, can you tell me more?

Cheers,

Ed

Yes maybe 6.5 would have solved it too.

I figure that perhaps 6.02 was too old and got a bit confused by my new XP PRO and P4 with hyperthreading and "800 MHz" FSB. There might have been some timing problem that never occurred on hardware back in the 6.02 days.

Cannot tell you much about Pro yet. Just did that one test and haven't had time for much else. Interface looks a bit more spiffy though, but you should probably go look in the dedicated thread for Pro opinions better than mine.

Hans Henrik