Hi all,
I (unsuccessfully) tried making a DVD of a kids' basketball highlight video this weekend; the project turned out fine within Premiere (6.0.1) but I had problems exporting the movie.

I could not find an mpeg2 encoder (does 6.0 even have that, or is there an patch for it?), so I tried exporting the movie to the hard drive in .avi format. It physically did it but upon playback some of the audio layers became unsync'd, i.e. song clips I'd inserted over the main song no longer matched the beat. I replayed the timeline in the monitor window and everything was still sync'd up fine, so I exported to DV (Canon GL-1 via firewire) and it still sounded fine.

Did I do something wrong with the settings maybe that caused the timing issue with the .avi movie?

Are you exporting to the same drive your source files are on? Have you mixed audio formats/sampling rates in your timeline? Is toggle sync selected at the bottom of your timeline? What are your system specs?
You can buy a plug in for exporting MPEG-2, or you can create a working AVI and use TMPGenc's paid version to convert. OR, you can upgrade to Premiere 6.5 and get the Main Concept mpg encoder (version 1.3) included, plus a great titler and some other improvements.

David Hurdon

Yes, I am exporting to the same drive, different partition, haven't gotten a second hard drive yet. I'll have to check the sampling rates, but the formats are the same (MP3). Not sure about the toggle sync, but I did read something about having to separately render audio in the timeline which I didn't know or do (rendered work area). The system is a 2.4 GHZ P4 with 512 RAM, 120 GB HDD (30 and 80 GB partitions) with Radeon 8500 LE video card, Soundblaster Audigy w/Firewire, and a non-working DV500 DVD card (a WHOLE other story). I am looking into the software options you mentioned and I'll try the toggle thing and audio render and see what happens.

Thanks,
Jeff K

Premiere 6.0 doesn't have MPEG2 out indeed. You need 6.5
or Pro for that.

The problem with sync issues is that it can be very hard to
determin if the problem is in the actual encoding or in the
playback!!

Changing sample rates (from 48 khz to 44.1 for example) or
other audio properties may introduce such issues as well. I've
had numerous problems with Premiere's audio algorithms myself
in the past.

Yeah, this is the first time I tried beat-matching from within Premiere; for critical placements I usually mix the wavefiles separately in Cool Edit, then import it and line up scenes as needed. I checked the encoding and they're all 44Khz/16 bit, so I'm also going to try that TMPGenc for MPEG2 encoding and convert the audio file separately to AC3 with some programs I've seen mentioned and see if that helps. Adobe doesn't seem to offer Premiere 6.5 anymore, so maybe I can get an upgrade at a good price with Pro already out for awhile.

Actually, I read shortly after I bought the card that there was a free 6.5 upgrade if you purchased a DV500 after June of 2002, which I did, but I could only find reference to it in Europe. Does anyone know if this is still available from Pinnacle in the US??

Thanks,
Jeff K

Hey David, regarding the toggle sync button at the bottom, when is it on? When there's just the = sign or when it looks like 3=?

Also Rob, on that motherboard that you recommended, that isn't listed on the compatibility page but there's a similar one: the Intel D850GB. Is that just a variation of the one you recommended?

Thanks,
Jeff

Now I'm going to have to look closely enough to find out what that "3" or "8" or whatever it turns out to be actually is! And when you see it the sync is locked.

David Hurdon

How can the sample rate be 44.1 khz? DV is 48 and so is DVD!

<How can the sample rate be 44.1 khz? DV is 48 and so is DVD!

The audio clips that came from the video are, which I think were okay, but I'd also added some background music with additional music samples mixed in using multiple audio tracks. Those were 44.1 KHz MP3 files according to the Project window's audio properties field.

Jeff

Still your DVD output should be 48 KHZ. And since your video
source is also 48 I would have upsampled the 44.1 source to
48 instead of downsampling the 48 sources to 44.1 and the
upsampling it all to 48 for DVD.

abjuwha-huh? Sorry, got all mixed up there for a second, haha. Is there a way to convert the sampling rate in Premiere or do you mean re-recording the 44.1 KHz samples? I _think_ that I chose maximum bitrate when recording the CD music samples to .wma and converting to mp3, so I'm not sure if I actually can record to 48 KHz.

Jeff K.

If you're going to mix audio sampling rates on a timeline you should select "good" or "best" in the audio settings "enhance rate conversion". I can't recall for sure if that choice is available in version 6 now that I've been running 6.5 for several months.

David Hurdon

You can also export your audio tracks as a wav file, selecting 48 KHz 16 bit as the export setting. Then import the file and replace your existing audio tracks, but mute them first to be sure you're happy with the new file before you blow them away.

David Hurdon

Personally I would do all audio conversions in another program
then Premiere. I've had very bad results with it. A dedicated audio
application should have no problem upconverting your 44.1
sounds to 48 khz.

Why did you record it in MP3? That only introduces compression
noise and other problems to your audio. Yes, even at the highest
bitrates. Why not simply go with uncompressed WAV? I mean,
the audio shouldn't be a problem since the files are relative
small compared to DV! An hour uncompressed audio runs at
around 600 MB (depending on 44.1 or 48 khz) where the DV file
(which also includes the same amount of audio by the way) will
be 12 GB!

Rob, it's amazing how different are the experiences of editors doing essentially similar work on different systems. I've converted a lot of audio for Premiere in Cool Edit and a lot within Premiere via export to wav, and haven't noticed any difference. But, I seldom use more than three audio tracks and don't have anything approaching a pro audio environment - audigy platinum sound card, inexpensive flat panel speakers- so my judgement of results might be very different from your own. Certainly I'd agree that anyone spending many hours editing, whether for fun or profit, should be aware of and try alternative approaches. You never know when what you learned that way will be important to accomplishing something you can't or don't have the tools to do any other way.

David Hurdon

If it works for you then stick with what works. I always had cracking
and plopping sounds when converting sample rates in Premiere.
I don't know how or why. It definitely wasn't audio card related
or anything.

Just convert your 44.1 khz tracks to 48 khz before adding them
to the rest of your project. Use whatever you like working with.
Use WAV.

The songs I initially chose were Windows Media Player recordings on my computer already, so I just converted to mp3 for file size. Sounded fine so I went with it, especially since most of the video clips included crowd sounds from the basketball game shots, so if there were any compression artifacts they were unnoticable.

I used to do the music in wav format with Cool Edit Pro before I got Premiere and when Cool Edit didn't have MP3 capability. Now that I've got both, high quality MP3 works well for me and saves on disc space, but if it was in wav format to begin with I probably wouldn't waste time converting it.

I'll try exporting to Cool Edit and converting it up to 48 KHz and see if that helps.

Thanks,
Jeff