Hi David.

Yes, the external tool HDlink recognize the camera and i
can capture 1080 25f.

Maybe it´s something weird whith premiere?
I haven´t been able to take the captured HDV materials from HDlink
and editing in premiere, it just turns green in the preview window.

But i have no problem capturing regular DV in premiere and editing that.
it´s just HDV materials that won´t work.

Try to install this:

Thanks, but already have that istalled.

Sounds like you are missing the CineForm importer within Premiere. If a re-install does work, please contact CineForm support.

Reinstalled premiere, now it works! thanks for the help! ;)

No initial preset, but....
 

There is no initial preset for 24fps in HDV, but it correctly interprets the footage as 23.976fps and you can export to 24fps. There is a preset for 25fps that may reduce render times... I'll check it out and let you know. I have not had any problems yet, but I have only exported short clips. 60i works fine also.

I have attached a screen cap of the preset dialog at startup as an FYI.

Oops, and now for the Screen Cap
 

Forgot to upload...

XH-A1 + Premiere Pro CS3 = Impossible Capturing?
 

Hey Everybody,
This is one of my only posts here, but I've been lurking for some time and I must say that I have learned a lot!! I'm hoping that all you experts out there will be able to lend a hand and get me up and running!

I've had 2 Canon XH-A1's for about 9 months now, and have basically shot everything in SD because I mostly do weddings and events and everybody pretty much wants it on a standard DVD. I've used the CS2 Video Suite from Adobe for about a year. I recently upgraded to the new Adobe CS3 Master Collection, and have been very happy with everything except that I can't capture from my XH-A1! Weird huh?

Today I shot some footage in 30F HD, and I went to capture. I shot it only to test the capabilities of the camera and the new adobe collection. When I plug my camera into my computer via a firewire cable, load up Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and go to the capture window -- it says:

"Can't Activate Recorder. Try Resetting the Camera"

Well poop. That's no good! So I reset the camera. Turn it off, turn it on. Close PP3, turn off my computer -- basically I tried every combination of things to try to get it to recognize my camera. I mess around inside of the camera menu when I'm in VCR/PLAY mode. Nothing seems to work.

Something else that's weird -- for some reason, my computer isn't recognizing the camera at all!! I plug in a cheap little DV camcorder, and I can capture fine. But it doesn't even recognize my XH-A1 now!! When I plug it in, it doesn't make a sound at all. Usually when I plug in hardware, the windows sound comes up and it asks me what I want to do with the hardware -- but when I plug in the XH-A1....no such luck.

I'm really discouraged right now, and I'm hoping that someone out there can help me. Anything that you can recommend would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your help!

In that case the problem is not adobe cs3, it could be the way you connect your camcorder, try it in this way.
Turn everything off
first connect the firewire cable to your computer
connect the firewire cable to your camera
turn on the camera
turn on the pc

if that doesn't work, try connecting the camera to another pc, if that doesn't work either, the problem might be with the firewire connection of your camera.
If it does recognise, then the next step could be to replace the firewire cable.

The problem could be something completely else but you might try this first.

This is not CS3. I have had the same problem with XP Pro. All of a sudden XP recognized the A1 and - for now - it works. Unstable working situation. Like you, I also found that my very cheap (Panasonic) tourist model is *always* recognized correctly.

I've had no trouble at all capturing from XH-A1 to Premiere CS3- it worked perfectly the first time and every time since. Knock on wood...

i have had the same problem connecting my xha1 tried every way suggested here and later found out that the firewire port on the camera was not working ....good that the camera was only 1 week got it exchanged and now everything works well....

Also, the playback in the camera has to be set for HDV. It could be on SD.

Hi Jordan.
I had the same problem and it turn out that is was the camera with the wrong set up. Look carefull at SIGNAL MENU set Signal to HD. Comp out to 1080i. Recording set up to 1980/480 In sinal set up comp out 11080/480
HD down convert off. Good lock.

Not CS3, check you camera settings. Sometimes you may have to play the tape from the camera's transport controls to force the camera to recognize and set itself to SD mode. Get's stuck in HDV mode sometimes.

From your description my money is on the fried firewire port. These small 4 pin ports are joke and don't take well to heavy cables, twisting and torquing on thinly insulated contacts. One wrong pull with a live camera and Zap it's off to the repair shop. I've had a few casulties. (My latest was an HC1, to the tune of $400 in parts and labor).

It would serve you well to get an HV10 as a ingest deck.

I love my A1, but....
it has been the most problematic of any cam I have ever owned in terms of capturing to the computer. I run two Sony VAIO's on XP Pro, and a Fujitsu laptop running Vista Home Premium and always had a problem until I installed CS3 Master Collection. Now it works (???) just fine, but will sometimes on occasion not be recognized. My Sony VX2100 and Panny GS400 NEVER have any such issues.
It's the cam. It's much more sensitive than other makes, for some reason. I have not bothered to get a Canon HV10 or HV20 yet, as I am concerned that it too will have the same connectability issues as the A1. Why the Canon A1 seems so finicky and my Sony is such a model of excellence when it comes to being recognized by the computer that I am using, I will never understand. It seems to be an area where Canon needs to do some more homework.

In terms of fixing it, mine did start to recognize the A1 after I had a friend help clean out a lot of old files, add Norton Anti-Virus, tack on a couple external drives for backing up to, etc. Somewhere along the way we fixed the problem--cannot say for sure why, but now all works well. The CS3 was done about the same time.

I have almost never had the problem on PP2, once or twice it took turning the computer off and then on and then the camcorder. However I have done all of my projects in HDV and run well over 60 tapes through without incident.

I should be installing CS3 as soon as I finish the latest project, hopefully next week.

Bill in Ohio

capture from a1
 

I also ran into problems. It was the firewire port on the A1. One day it worked and the next day it was dead. Camera has to go back to canon to fix.

Thanks everybody for their replies -- I guess there is no easy fix for this problem. However, I fiddled around with the camera for a good while, switching it on and off, unplugging and plugging and finally windows picked it up and it asked me if I wanted to capture with Premiere. I said yes, and it took me to the capture screen where i was able to capture some stuff.

However, HDV is still giving me trouble. I got it to capture a little bit, but I'm not sure that I'm using the right settings. I know that they came out with some A1 presets for 2.0, but do they work is CS3 as well? If you don't recommend me using those presets to capture HDV footage, what do you recommend?

Thanks everybody for their help, I really appreciate it!

Premiere CS3 and Canon XH A1
 

I have to render in CS3 after importing HDV from the Canon XH A1. Am I doing something wrong?

Don't have this problem with Premiere 2.0 as they have a plugin for Canon 30F codec.

I can't speak much about bad firewire ports (yet!), but did have my A1 "revert" one time (somehow), but I dug out the manual to reset things like Mike Quinones suggested earlier in the thread, and all was groovy again.

BTW, I use the CS3 suite, also. But I never use PPro's capturing, since it doesn't do scene-detection. The wonderful and FREE HDVSplit application splits up all my shots into m2t files that I can review, rename, delete the bad ones, etc. then drop them in my projects. It probably saves a bunch of time on the heads than my old "log and batch" method. Just an FYI...

HTH,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions
www.browncowvideo.com

Capture.
 

Brian;
Just out of curiosity, do you use On Location to capture HD or do you use another program for this?

Mike, I just purchased the CS3 upgrade last week and loaded it on a new quad-core 64-bit Vista system I built... so, I've yet to try OnLocation. But, I will definitely use that app with my laptop for my studio-type shoots.

I'll keep you posted on how it works,
Brian Brown

Premiere Pro CS3 HD to SD turns out crap?
 

Hey everybody,

I've been watching these forums for a while, and I finally bought my A1. I love it! I recently shot some footage, captured into Premiere Pro CS3, edited everything, and it looked beautiful on the screen. HD is awesome!

Then when I exported it to SD, trying various methods within CS3 (Adobe Media Encoder or Encore, etc.) my footage looked like garbage. I was pissed, 'cause it ended up looking like some amateur's footage. Detail was lost, even when using high bitrates. I know the down-convert won't be as sharp as HD, but I thought it was supposed to be noticeably sharper than shooting is SD.

What am I doing wrong? Any advice on getting the sharpest image possible for SD would be fantastic!

Thanks!

I know this used to be an issue with CS2. The solution most of the time was either to export it in HD, import it into a SD timeline, scale the footage, then render. Lots of extra work sadly. I personally encode most of my videos in multiple formats so I normally render an HD file, then use Squeeze to do a batch job in a few different formats which produces nice videos.

I have cs2. I usually export a full-quality file out of premiere (usually an mpeg2 with a bitrate of 50mbps, sometimes uncompressed) and then scale it with virtualdub and encode to a dvd etc.

Capture onto Adobe Premiere CS3
 

Hey I just got a chance to use my schools Canon Xh-A1. Now i'm the first person to use it at my school and i need to some help on how to work somethings.

For starters I can't get rid of the grain on the footage. I have the gain at the lowest setting but the grain is still there.

Also when i uploaded the footage on my computer instead of up loading it 24fps it came out 44.96 fps so is there a special pull down i have to do, because when i tried the edit the audio was off sync and it was a big mess.

This is also my first time using HDV

Have you installed the Canon F-mode presets for Premiere?

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloa...jsp?ftpID=3408

Did you turn off agc? First thing you learn ;)

Thank you for the link so that is installed.

And how do i turn off the agc and what does agc stand for?

AGC = automatic gain control. It automatically increase gain in the analog video input amplifiers (reading signal the CCD) to provide "normal" image brightness. When shooting in low light conditions this can result in additional gain and corresponding increased apparent grain and video noise.

To avoid AGC, do NOT use the Green Box (easy recording) mode, and turn off the AGC switch. Set the AGC level selection switch to a level you can live with. See page 60 of the manual.

BTW: do not confuse video AGC with audio AGC, aka: Automatic Audio Adjustment described on page 49 in the Canon manual.

Canon 30f editing in Premiere CS3
 

What is the best/correct set up for editing 30F clips in CS3?

There is no Canon 30F preset in the stock installation for CS3.

Adobe offered a 24F and 30F preset for CS2. It allows you to drop 30F clips straight into the timeline and not have to render.

If you copy the same set of CS2 presets into CS3 and drop the same 30F clip into the timeline, CS3 will take time to render the clip. The 24F and 30F does not appear to work efficiently with CS3.

On the other hand, you can drop a Canon 30F clip into a HDV60i timeline and not have to render the clip. A close inspection of the preview shows the "progressive" look intact and there is no interlacing introduced. There appears to be an advantage to this method if you mix an interlaced 60i clip; both 30f and 60i seem to coexists fine.

You can take the same streamcliped .mov 30f clip into FCP 6 with either 30p or 60i setup. FCP seems to be happy either way and reads the file natively.

If you are shooting Canon 30f what presets are you using to edit in CS3?

60i and it will be fine.

That seems to confirm my suspicion that 30F is actually 60i with some behind the scenes processing to make it appear progressive. Appearantly PP CS3 and FCP can read it as 60i and not reintroduce interlacing.

I have tested a mix of 30f and 60i in a CS3 HDV108060i timeline. You can easily see the differences between the clips. When it is ultimately rendered out as progressive (H.264), the 30f clips retain their progressive look and the interlaced clips are deinterlaced to make a continuous progressive movie.

Are you guys sure that your transtitions are not interlaced???

DEFINITELY you should be using the 29.97 PROGRESSIVE preset for "HDV". DO NOT use the 60i interlaced... that is wrong. Use the 29.97 progressive (it may be read as 30P, but really it's 29.97 progressive frame).

Confirmed - 60i will generate interlaced effects. This is a title with zoom

http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/h...nterlaced1.jpg

So the question remains. Is there anyway to avoid rerendering 30F when dropped into a PP CS3 1080 30p timeline?

I wouldn't get too concerned about rendering clips to view them (the red line on the timeline). It's something I rarely do, since it doesn't affect the real rendering you have to do to export a sequence. Rendering the timeline (hitting Enter key) just renders transforms, effects and transitions for viewing purposes only. I suspect that progressive footage in PPro requires rendering to view in order to be compatible with viewing devices, Firewire output, etc.

Today's jingle, "Don't sweat it.. edit in 30P." (okay, 29.97, to be exact)
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

1 meg segments of 24f footage????????
 

Say,

I just tested 60i, 30f, and 24f and noticed that the 60 and 30 came in fine ( a continuous image on the timeline representing 30 seconds of continuous footage) to my timeline but the 24f came in in one meg segments and about 175 of them? WTH? I am using Sony Vegas Pro 8 and currently wondering if I want to shoot in 24f?

Can I still achieve a film like look in post with shooting 60i? Is 30f a good compromise (which seems a bit softer than 60i)?

Tony