Adobe Premiere & Premiere Pro discussions from 2005

[Shaughan Flynn]

My short film has an opening that includes my company logo "blah blah blah presents" and it builds this logo over the course of about 100 frames and then holds for about 25 frames while some music builds to a cresendo. At about frame 130 there is an electric guitar that starts the movie's theme and when the first CRASH of the guitar's power chord is struck, the whole logo blows apart and transitions into the film's opening title sequence.

Now, during that 25 frame hold period, I have a starburst that flashes quickly off of the corner of one of the letters in the word "Presents".

All of this stuff was created in a CG application called Lightwave 3D. The starburst is created by putting a point light on the letter where I want the effect to occur. I ramp the light intensity from 0 to 100 and back to 0, add a star filter to the light and a lens flare ring.

I render this crap out as uncompressed AVI in HDV resolution (1440x1080 Pixel Aspect 1.33).

I drop it into premiere and it looks killer...Except that I get no starburst. I can see that the light blast has affected the other items in the sequence (since lightwave ray-traced all of that) but I do not see the burst.

So I load the sequence into media player (It's uncompressed - about 1GB of data) and it plays it - Albeit VERY slowly but I can see each frame and sure enough, there is my starburst in all of it's glory...

Does anyone have ANY clue why Premiere would do this? I overcame it by re-rendering the sequence as a series of TIFF files and dropping that into the timeline. When I did that it worked perfectly...

[Selim Abdullai]

When I try to capture HDV footage in Premiere, it never works. I use CapDVHS and it works perfectly. You should give it a try.

http://hdvforever.com/hdv/hdrhc1/fre...re/default.htm

[Jim Gunn]

It's real easy with Scenalyzer Live. Download the new version and install it, and go thru the settings to select the option to capture second audio channel as a .wav file. You then capture your footage to a folder with the app thru firewire from your DV camera or mini-DV tape deck and then import the resulting .avi files (containing the primary, on-camera mic's audio) and the corresponding .wav's also. To edit your dual-audio footage you just drag the .wav's into the timeline on audio 2 below the .avi on video1/audio 1 and they will line up properly to keep it all in sync. It is easiest to trim the clips in the timeline and use the on/off buttons on the left to listen to one or both audio channels this way. I actually sometimes have three channels of audio when I film with my XL-1- incl. stereo audio from the on-camera mic and up to two mono channels from my two handheld Azden mics that transmit into my dual antenna Azden receiver plugged into the audio inputs on the side of the XL-1 handle. Works pretty good for an inexpensive audio kit.

[James Llewellyn]

It's generally well known that Premiere and Divx don't get along for god knows what ever reason it may be. Similar problems occur with Premiere with some other codecs. If you want to encode to divx, you may have to export to a lossless avi format, I use HuffyUV, and then compress it to Divx/Xvid* in VirtualDub.

*I'd recomment Xvid over Divx being it's free, and open source (there's always new builds comming out every month or so)

One thing that boggles me some is the fact you spent money on Divx? It really isn't worth paying for, at least not for any reason I could possibly concieve since the features on he free version is all you'd really need.

Anywho, I hope this helps. Hopefully someone else may be able to provide a more technical reason or solution to your problem.

[David Newman]

The free HDV tools that come with Premiere Pro do require a 3Ghz PC with an 800Mhz FSB do function correctly. 2.66Ghz is a little underpowered and is likely running on a slower (533) memory system. Aspect HD will likely work for you, maybe even for Premiere based capture, if not you can use the HDlink tool to capture and convert to AVI in two passes (completely avoiding the glitches you are now getting.) The trial verison is available from www.cineform.com

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

[Wes Coughlin]

I've been having to use premiere pro 1.0 to capture from minidv because 1.5 does not reconized the device. But, latley for some odd reason, when i go to capture in premiere 1.0, it captures for about 10 or so minutes and then automatically stops no matter what tape it is or camera. I reinstalled premiere 1.0, and that did not fix my problem. So i was wondering if you have any suggestions on what to do next, and mabye know about any updates for premiere 1.5 that would allow me to caputre there. Thnx

[James Llewellyn]

Try making sure premiere didn't mess with the transparency settings when you loaded the clip into the timeline. I've had premiere auto assume that a clip should have a transparency before, though it rarely happens.

[Jerry Tomljenovic]

Should this be in a different category? Anyone?

[James Llewellyn]

So you ripped the mpeg2 footage from the dvd, converted it to MS MPG4 V1, threw it into premiere, then exported it out using the same codec again? If this is so, then it's easy to explain the quality loss. Never use MS MPG4 V1 (aka Microsoft MPEG-4 V1), ever. What happened is you used a bad mpeg4 codec to compress your footage, then imported it into premiere, which is a no no, cause premiere doesn't like working with mpeg4 "anything", though it can if you fight with it. Then you exported, compressing the footage again with a bad codec, thus ultimately making your footage look snafu.

Now incase I read you wrong, and you only used the MS MPEG-4 codec when exporting from premiere, then it isn't as bad as I thought, but still bad.

DISCLAIMER: Some information below may be wrong, out of place, or possibly just too damn confusing for both the reader and the one typing this. If errors are made (which is very likely) and found PLEASE by all means correct or suggest an alternative method, there are certainly plenty out there.


Now here is a process that might work for you.
1. Will involve DVD2AVI, AVIsynth, and VirtualDub.

What you do is load the mpeg2 footage you ripped into DVD2AVI (Without converting the footage to anything other than what you just ripped off the dvd). Go to File, and select "Save Project" and let it make a d2v file

Then you go d/l Avisynth. Not quite sure what the newest version is now.

You then open up Notepad, and type in:

LoadPlugin("C:\AVSFilters\MPEG2Dec3.dll")
MPEG2Source("D:\xx\xxxxxxx.d2v",cpu=1,interlaced=true)

Now the locations and file names will be different obviously, so correct as needed. Also you may be using a newer version of Avisynth than I do, since I can only use v 2.0 without my pc crashing on me. If you are using 2.5 or above please use the following:

LoadPlugin("C:\AVSFilters\MPEG2Dec3.dll")
MPEG2Source("C:/yourfolder/yourprojectfile.d2v",ipp=true,cpu=4,upconv=true, info=true)

ipp=true - means that you are telling the plugin that your DVD footage is interlaced. If it is not, change it to false.

cpu - this settings designates the strength of the post-processing. The values are from 1 to 6 with 6 being the strongest. I find that 5 and 6 blur the material a lot but 1 to 4 simply improve quality, so I almost always use setting 4 to reduce mpeg2 blocking and ringing.

upconv=true - this outputs YUY2 footage instead of YV12. This is HIGHLY recommended if you are going to make clips or edit with interlaced footage as this will guarantee that the chroma in the image is upsampled correctly depending on whether it is a field-based or a frame-based encoded image.

info=true - this prints useful information about the decoding of a particular frame, good for debugging.

Whenever to you get the settings right, save the file as MyVideo.avs. Make sure the extention is .avs or else it won't work right. Open the avs file in Virtual Dub. From there you can select what portion of the video you WANT. When you have it selected, you can save as AVI.

Now I dunno what your intensions are exactly for this clip. If you want to make it so you can burn it back to dvd, I suggest you save the avi in an uncompressed or lossless format. If you thought 300+mb was big, using a lossless codec (like HuffyUV) will make this file end up roughly 8-9gb, about 1gb every 2 min, but there will be no quality loss, and quality loss is bad.

You can then covert this file to mpeg2 using Tmpgenc's encoder, found here: http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_main.html

Or what ever mpeg2 encoder you like to use is up to you.

There should be a 30 day trial period where you can encode to mpeg2 with the Tmpgenc encoder. I certainly hope you can do that on your own since this post is getting a little bit big as it is. After you make the mpeg2, you can burn it back to dvd.


NOW if you are wanting to make some small avi file to show to your friends or whoever, then don't make the uncompressed, or lossless avi file. Instead, use Divx or Xvid. The most simple way is to use the CQ or Constant Quality feature (Xvid has this, not sure on Divx anymore), set it to somewhere around 80-100% (may take some experimenting to get the filesize right) and you should have a decently sized video file with good quality. Also consider resizing the footage to lower the filesize some.


I hope this helps, and like I said, if anyone sees anything wrong, do not hesitate to correct it, since just about everything used in that process I use older versions of (haven't the need to update yet). So the steps and settings are a little iffy for me.


PS. You can also edit AVS files in premiere if you like, just make sure you have the avisynth premiere plugin installed.

[Benjamin Durin]

It could be a video transition. Look at about 17% if you have a transition and remove it. Then render again to see if the problem disappeared. It also can be transitions on top of other transitions or transitions that are too short.

I had problems when my video finished with only music and no video. I had to add black on top of the music to make the encoder happy. But obviously it is not this problem that bothers you now.

If you still can't get it to work, try to render a lossless compressed avi and convert to mpeg2 in your authoring program.

Hope that helps.

[Pete Bauer]

Follow the links and it should solve your problem:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=53619

If not, let us know!

[James Llewellyn]

yeah I'd check where that 17% ends up at and see if it's some transition or effect setting that's stumping it. More than often you can just make a small adjustment and you should fine.

[Ed Smith]

Hi Josh,

I don't think you'll find any plugins that will magically match your b cam to your A cam, the only plugins that you might find will be colour correction tools just like the ones you already have in Premiere. Your best bet is to fiddle around with the colour correction, plus the use of video effects to try and get them matched - this will take time.

Thanks,

[Chris J Martin]

Thanks for everything Jim. Got it nailed and it works just fine !

[Barry Gribble]

James,

Thanks for the detailed response... very helpful.

I am not an MPG fan, but my customer had asked me to use it because they are loading it on to their network server (IPTV) and that's what they wanted. After digging some more I found that they could take it another way so I am giving them a WMV.

Thanks again.