ppro1.5 24pa capturing problem
 

hello all,

I have a problem capturing 24pa from my DVX100a with PPro 1.5. I am not sure if that's because of the 24pa or something else. My understanding is that 24pa is still converted to 29.97 so this shouldn't be the issue. Then what?

The funny part is that PPro 1.5 indicates that the device is online and DV control actually works, that is camera starts, stops, rewinds by pressing buttons in PPro1.5 capture window. But there's no output to the computer and at the top of capture window it says "Can't activate camera. Try resetting it" or something like that. I am about to edit a 24pa short in a few days and I desperately need help.

Hope to hear some great advises. Thanks.

Thanks, Glenn! I'll try that!

How to splice on the exact frame?
 

I know this is a newbie question but when using the slice tool it has proved inaccurate. It is not a matter of finding the right frame, it is perhaps a program setting or I am not using it right. Because I will find two our three frames on the joining splice where they are not suppose to be. Suggestions welcome. I am splicing from the monitor window using the "step forward (right)" and "step forward (left)" to find the exact frame. What silly thing am I doing wrong?

Hi Edmond,

Is there a reason for you to do this? It would make your life much more easier if you record straight to 16:9.

Most 16:9 TVs can detect whether the footage is letter boxed or not, it will then try best it can to get rid of the black bars.

The thing about cropping image and then enlarging it is that you will loose resolution.

What you can do is start a project that is 16:9 import you 4:3 footage into this project. Drag clips to timeline (it will appear horizontally squished. Right click on the clip in the timeline and choose video options> maintain aspect ratio. Then right click on the clip again and choose advanced options> pixel aspect ratio... From the list select D1/DV NTSC 0.9. This might then need to be rendered. What will happen now is that you will get black pillars either side of the frame.

I think that there are hardware solutions that might help?

Try a search, there are many threads on this sort of subject.

Cheers,

Hi Scott,

What version of premiere are you using?

To cut at the edit line (should then be frame accurate):

For Premiere Pro (depending on what keyboard layout you are using): Ctrl+k
If you have it on Avid keyboard layout then its: H

In Premiere 6.5 press F10


Hope this helps,

OK, the first step is to capture your raw mpeg footage as clips on the computer - probably these will be .mt2 files (depending on what software you use to capture). Ideally you should capture as a few longish clips rather than many short ones.

Then load the m2t files into some software that will allow you to convert them to avi files. Procoder, TMPGEnc XPress and Premiere (with the Mainconect MPEGPro plugin) will all do this, and there are probably other options too.

I use XPress, as it has a nice batch processing facility: I set the source as the m2t file and the output at "avi file". In the output screen you can specify any avi codec you like - huffey, picvideo mjpeg, morgan mjpeg, etc etc - it doesnt matter because these small, low-quality avi files do not get used in the final render.

Tell the software to encode the files (this happens at realtime speed with my Pentium 4 2.8GHz). Then load these newly created avi files into Premiere and edit as usual.

When you are happy with your final edit, go to Premiere's project window, right-click on the name of each avi file used in the project, and select "Unlink media". Then right-click on each unlinked filename and select "link media" - a browser will pop up that lets you select the original m2t file that corresponds to each avi.

Then render your project, and Premiere will use the original high-quality HD clips as it renders.

Be aware that to do it this way you MUST have the Mainconcept MpegPRO plugin installed, as Premiere has to be able to decode the m2t files.

A workaround (which adds an extra step but avoids the need to purchase the Mainconcept plugin) would be to use XPress to initially encode the m2t's to full-resolution uncompressed avis. Then make your small proxy avi's from these BIG avis, and then link back to the uncompressed avis (rather than the m2t's) prior to rendering.

Hope that makes enough sense to be helpful.

Just a little comment...

MPEG4 has taken a long time to become standardized, so there are a lot of different "flavors".

WM9, DivX, XVid are actually all different MPEG4 variations (with different quality)

you can also make a white still (whatever duration you need) and cross dissolve to it...

capturing time lapse with premiere pro
 

i seem to recall being able to capture time lapse footage using older premiere versions(ie: single frame every 10 seconds and the like) .... am i dreaming or just missing something in premiere pro? anybody have a solution if its not possible? (i can do it with my canon digital still camera but its not very efficient)

thanks,
marc

Video Rendering Time/HW Upgrades?
 

Hey there,

Here is my current configuration:

ASUS P4CDELUXE Motherboard (i875 chipet)
Intel Pentium 4C 2.4GHz Cpu
1GB DDR 400 RAM (2 x 512 matched pair)
2 x 36GB SATA 10,000 RPM drives (raid 0)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Video
Windows XP Pro
Use Premiere Pro 1.5 most of the time

Everything works great, no complaints EXCEPT for the time it takes to render or transcode video to DVD. Forget about it. A hour's worth of video is going to take about 2 hours to put onto a DVD.

I'm willing to upgrade but only if I'm going to see a marked improvement. Going from 120 minutes to 109 minutes isn't going to be worth it. A 50% improvement would be great of course.

If this is as good as I'm going to get then ok. I just thought I'd check.

Any recommendations?

but recording straight to 16:9 reduces vertical resolution by 120 lines. I'm certainly no pro but have heard others suggest that if you want to have 16:9 footage from a camera that houses a 4:3 ccd, then you should always record in 4:3 and then you can either just NLE it straight as 4:3 and let the monitor detect and compensate ( this gives the viewer much more control) or NLE with a letterbox.

crop
 

well this may be a stupid question but i am using premiere pro to crop and image so i can be in the same shot twice. i get the video of me on both sides then move the camera. so i was hoping this would work so i captured my first bit of footage and in the preview window looked great so i export it as mpeg 2 and there was a black line through the center where the 2 met (i croped both 50%) so then i tired leaving track 1 full size and laying 2 croped 50% on to and still a black line. if i export as mpeg1 it works fine i think just because it is set to a little lower quility. anyone ever try this before or know how to make it work. please reply with any suggestion i got alot of footage and am willing to try anything!

ps. if i got to export and export a frame it dosnt show the black line

Strobing and the value of DV Info
 

I'm very new to all this and having shot some footage for my first project and captured it into PP 1.5 I placed a few clips on the timeline, added some transitions and exported it to DVD.

Full of high expectations I dropped the DVD into the player and settled back to be wowed. The sequence looked awful. It was of a fellow playing old time fiddle music and was shot from a few feet away with plenty of closeups of the sawing bow and the musician nodding backward and forwards. There were bad ghosts, strobing and ugly stair-stepping.

Zounds. A quick check playing the material from the camera reassured me that the dough was well spent on the DVX100A. But how could this problem be? I'd used all the defaults in PP for capturing and encoding and that ought to do the trick.

A quick search in the forums revealed that if you capture one field first then you need to encode the same way. I remembered noticing that the program defaulted to capturing the lower field first and a quick check of the default settings for the codec showed that by default it was using progressive scan. Lots more things can be set in this program than I have the slightest understanding of but I found the place to set lower field first for encoding and re-exported the sequence to DVD.

Beautiful!

Thanks DV Info.

So how come the defaults aren't compatible?

29.976, 24 or 23.976 for DVX file Setting
 

What fps should I output from after effects to include with the DVX file setting in PPro 1.5

For example I have 24p normal footage shot with the DVX and I want to add a clip rendered from after effects. Should I render the file 29.97 fps, 24 fps, or 23.976 fps.

How will PPro1.5 know? Will it do the pull-up for the 23.976 footage from AE?

Help! "The Project Appears to be Damaged" error message
 

Help! "The Project Appears to be Damaged" error message

I have been working on a full length movie with credits, transitions and music for weeks and I finally finished yesterday. When I went to load the project file into Premiere Pro yesterday to do a few more tweaks it gave me a "The Project Appears to be Damaged" error message. I only have a much older (much less complete) alternate project file, which does still load.

I tried connecting the external hard drive the clips and the project files on are to another Win XP computer that has Premiere Pro and it gives me the same error. I still have all the titles that were created between the old version and the new, but re-editing all the transitions and sound and music will be hours of more work.

I believe that I have eliminated the obvious things that are likely potential cuplrits. For example, other projects load fine on either system, and I checked for viruses and my two computers seem to be working fine otherwise. The only other thing I can think of was that I installed a pc card firewire hub into my my Win XP notebook that I often edit on to try and send the signal to my mini-Dv camera and on to my 13" tv. But I took that out of the slot when that experiment was over and still the same problem.

Has anyone experienced this before? Is there any hope of me recovering the more complete project file?