You original post indicated that your OS and Premiere were not freezing. But you think Encore is freezing up? Sounds like hardware.

I don't want to send you on a diagnostic wild goose chase because I have no experience with external drives. But this could be i/o related. If you have a secondary slave ide available, you might try using that as your video drive location with a 120 gig drive. This way your throughput will be faster and less prone to bottlenecks. Granted your source files won't all fit there, but you could use that ide drive as the drive location for the flattened avi_s as well as the export location for your img files from encore.

Have you tried just making a single .avi and burning it (transcoding) with 3rd party burning software? I usually use Nero to make DVDs that don't require a menu and chapters.

In my experience, the Screen and Multiply keyers haven't worked in PPro v1 or 1.5...I don't have 1.5.1 on anything yet, but I suspect the blurs have nothing to do with it...

As far as reporting the bug...I've been reporting it for two years. I can tell you that it made it onto the hot list and chances are 1.5.1 will be the last version that bug will exist...

Have you tried just making a single .avi and burning it (transcoding) with 3rd party burning software? I usually use Nero to make DVDs that don't require a menu and chapters.


I thought about doing that, and even tried it, but I think Nero needs to have the files already converted to MPEG2 with video and audio separated. Because when I open a DVD video project in nero, it has the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders there to drop files into.

you could fit 4 hours of footage onto a dvd if you wanted to... all that you have to do is to set the bitrate correctly... there are numerous bitrate calculators on the 'net that will help you do this... try www.videohelp.com (?)

the freezing problem shouldn't be related to that at all... but you might try exporting an avi and encoding it directly with the mainconcept mpeg encoder that comes with premiere... or is that not accessible as a stand-alone app in the latest version of premiere? 6.5 had it.

The freezing issue sounds familiar - are you using premiere and encore 1.0 or 1.5? Premiere 1.0's media encoder didnt work so hot, and neither did encore 1.0 as a whole - 1.5 added a much improved (and cleaner) mp2 compression in media encoder (which is where you should encode the files, not in encore) and encore 1.5 worked out most of its write failure and related bugs. Of course, if you have 1.5 already, then its something else. So what versions exactly?

The keying works just fine, as long as you don't use any type of blur. In fact, you can use filters such as sharpen and it won't affect the keying at all. It's quite bizarre.

About the nested sequences... I'm new with PPro 1.5 (used Premiere 6 before) so haven't actually tried that yet. I'm assuming it's just a way of implementing several renders in order. First render the scene blurred, and the use that blurred version as a source key?

The most annoying thing is that Premiere 6 allowed you to have as many tracks as you wished with blur, or whatever you wanted and all keying would work just fine. Thumbs down to Adobe. I hope they correct this on the next version.

I've shot some footage that is underexposed, what is the best way in pro 1.5 to correct this (without getting too grainy) The resulting footage will be projected and i'm worried about the grainyness. Might have accesss to after effects. I will consider free plug ins. Thanks

Start with the Shadows/Highlights effect and levels, and see where you might need to go from there, if at all.

Thanks Steve, will try those when I get back to the computer in the next few days, great site by the way. James Lindley

had to letterbox a new project and i think i found the culprit. if i import the 16x9 footage in a 4x3 project, use interpret footage to 1.2 pixel aspect, then scale down to fit the whole frame, i end up with jaggies. BUT, if i import, then use .9 pixel aspect ratio and just scale down the height, the picture is clean.

just wanted to share. this is xl2 24p 2332 16x9 ppro 1.5 canopus storm 2pro

Hello James, welcome aboard (H)DVInfo.net!

Depending on how grainy your footage is, you will most likely get quite a lot
of grain. Not much you can do about that, other then trying to remove this
grain again.

*ALWAYS* (try to) expose for the highlighst. That means dial everything in
so that it is over exposed and dial down till the brighest part is no longer over
exposed or sometimes you may leave small parts over exposed (depending on
the look you are after).

It is far easier/better to stretch the signal out/back to fill (in) the shadows
than it is to fill in highlights and not get any grain!

This is how the digital world works...

The keying works just fine, as long as you don't use any type of blur. In fact, you can use filters such as sharpen and it won't affect the keying at all. It's quite bizarre.


Really?

I just checked v1.5 and 1.5.1 and neither one works for screen or multiply here...with or without a blur.

I've been dealing with PPro since the beginning and these two keytypes have never worked on any system I've used.

You can try nesting a sequence, you would blur first, then key...since the keyer apparently works for you.

Really?

I just checked v1.5 and 1.5.1 and neither one works for screen or multiply here...with or without a blur.

Tim is right (obviously). The screen and the multiply key do not work, regardless of the blur setttings. You version of PPRO might have different bugs. LOL

Hi,

Can Premiere Pro output HD from its timeline? I'm putting together a short time lapse taken from Nikon still images (approx 2400x1600 resolution images) & i'd like to output both SD & HD if possible. What resolution options does PPro 1.5 have? Also since these are a series of still frames, will this make it a progressive movie? (since theres no interlacing from the still images)

Thanks....

After Effects would probably be the preferred tool, but yes, definitely; PPro will export pretty much any standard format, including various Hi Def. I've actually up-rezzed XL2 footage to 720p in both mpeg and WMV from a normal 16:9 DV timeline and it looks pretty nice. Just use File>>Export>>Adobe Media Encoder and choosing your options.

If you have high resolution sources going into the project, you might want to use HDV project settings (PPro 1.5.1 update) so you're editing in higher resolution than DV. You'd just scale any DV footage to 150%. I've never tried this end-to-end before, so don't know if you'll get less or more artifacts from a DV source than using a DV timeline and up-rezzing at export as I've done before. But worth a try, as I'd expect that the hi rez stills would be a lot better done on an HDV timeline...Hmmm, there's another exeriment to add the list of things I don't have time to do! ;-)

Any folks out there shooting DV or HDV and then converting to 24p using DV Film Maker 2.2? If so, I was curious about what project type to start in Premiere Pro 1.5.1. Does one use the Panasonic 24p project settings/timeline to capture and edit 24p converted clips, or can I just use the DV (wide screen) project settings and timeline?

Cheers!

Andrew Stone

Well... it does work on mine... it always did.

Here you go:

http://www.geocities.com/headlesspuppy/stuff/keying.jpg

Maybe it's the graphics card (Radeon 9600)

Hmmm...You are right. I just tried it on my editing laptop with the ATI x300 graphics card and it worked. Even the multiply key works. Weird.

Interesting...

My current laptop system has a 128mb Radeon 9700...my desktop system has a Matrox 550...and my old laptop either had a 9000 or 9600...I'll have to look.

Those two keyers have never worked for me...weirdness.

(Obviously I don't have much insight on the blur problem as you're already way ahead of me... :-) )

thanks Pete...
what about my progressive question?

This is about to drive me nuts.

I have done the batch capture twice now and it still does not line up perfect like the original capture. The whole thing is ending up about a second off. Which with about 2hours worth of cuts ect would take me an extremely long time to go back and re-align.

Does anybody know why in the world it is not lining up perfectly?

It'll depend on your field handling options within the project and upon export. Of course, if you process using "no fields" and export to a progressive format, you'll not have any interlacing even as your still images are moved around in the video.. If you apply motion/scaling for a still within an interlaced timeline, I think you might introduce combing artifact as the odd and even fields see the moving edges within your frame at slightly different times...no problem if your final output is going to be interlaced but might be bothersome for progressive output or display.

For me personally, I make sure everything is in 23.976: DVFilm output, Premiere settings, DVD frame rate, etc.

Btw... check your playback settings as well. If you use GDI instead of Direct 3D for previewing, you won't get any of the image smoothing that the video card is capable of doing (and you'll get noticable blocks, jaggies, etc).

If you're seeing it on a broadcast monitor or DV->TV out or something, chances are it's an interlacing problem.

Hi all,

I am putting together a segment and the subject was flustered while being filmed and hense was sweaty. I didnt think it would show up in the footage but unfortunately it did. I have tried de saturatting and adjusting lvls but cant seem to get rid of the glare caused by his sweaty brow. I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks


Shaun

Show the talent full frame for the first part before he began to sweat. Then use him at 24% pip if it's a talking head documentary and overlay atop b material.

If this is a dramatic piece, you will need to re-shoot.

I was sent a harddrive with video clips capture with final cut pro and I can't import them into Premiere Pro 1.5. Does anyone know how to get around that? Do I need a codec for that? I also have the Matrox RTX100 Xtreme Card and my OS is windows XP. Thanks

Chris

When i capture and i edit in PP with my Canon XL2 do i need to change the project resolution? I know that the XL2 films in 960x480 when its in 16x9 because of its larger CCD's. So does that sound right? I tried this in a 4:3 project by changing the resolution to 960x480 and it automatically captured in widescreen wen it recognized the camera connection... so that went well. And the actual captured file, when i play it with RealOne Player on my desktop is perfect high resolution (960x480) widescreen. However, when i edit it in PP and export it(in 960x480) to Microsoft DV AVI it seems to lower the quality,the image is very pixely and the colors arent accurate.

Could this have anything to do with my attempt to make a 24p video? I recorded 24p with 2:3:3:2 pulldown and captured on a 29.97 timeline. When i exported i exported in 24 frames progressive the video lost tis quality. I think this happened in PP thought because when i edited it it didnt look like the best quality, oh well, ill mess with it more, thx for the input.

To answer the original question, I experienced the same exact problems when i captured my Canon xl2 24p footage into a 29.97fps project. Once I started a new 24p project in PPro and imported the clips into that, the problem went away. Can't explain why PPro behaved this way, but this "fix" worked perfectly--

In this recent post:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=67

The user was achieving 16:9 to 4:3 letterboxing by importing 16:9 footage into a 4:3 project and then using scaling to get the letterbox effect. Something seems wrong about this. Is there a way to explicitly tell PPro to export 16:9 to 4:3 letterboxed or what's the right way to do this?

Thanks,
Aaron

1- Mac uses a different file system than PC. Is the drive formatted NTFS (which Macs can't write to without certain software) or FAT32 (2GB file limit)?

If not, you will need special software to see files on the drive. Do you see files on the drive?

2- Mac uses quicktime-based files, which may be slow in Premiere. You can convert the files to AVI, or you can try to re-capture off the source tapes. Final Cut may be able to export a project file which gives Premiere the timecodes of the clips so you can re-capture.

I think Premiere Pro can import quicktime files. I may be wrong there.

3- You're working with mini-DV right?

Chris,
you could use Automatic Duck tool to import Fcp-footage into Premiere Pro

http://premiere.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=30775

Hey guys. I actully work with Chris.

The exact sitaution is that footage was captured from MiniDV by Final Cut Pro. The subsequent files were stored on an external HDD (FAT32), and that HDD was shipped to him.

When exploring the HDD the files have NO extensions. If we give them the extension of ".mov" or ".mpeg", APP will import the clips, but then must render them...and there are about 20 hours of clips. :(

If we rename them as as any other kind of format, Premiere will simply not import them at all.

Per, as far as I can tell Automatic Duck is for importing an entire project. We just need to iport clips without having to rerender them.

Is there a reason the files have no extensions?

Whoops! That ^ was actually me! (This PC was still signed in under his account)

Mac OS X doesn't like to put file extensions on stuff. I just manually add them in.

I think you'll have to either render/convert the clips, or export an edit list or XML from final cut and re-capture off mini-DV tapes.

I would look at batch converting the clips to .AVI files.

I finally found someone with the same problem as me, only to find their question hasn't been answered either!

I shot a short on an XL2 in 16:9 24p Advanced mode, and no matter what program/computer I use the footage is garbled like you describe. I believe you're supposed to capture at 29.97, though, since 24p Advanced footage is stil initially contained as an NTSC signal - you'll get missing frames at 23.98.

My problem is a little different in that capturing the footage makes it look no better, with digital artifacting and the horrible garbled audio with gaps. The footage plays back fine on any camcorder (besides Sony ones), so my friend who owns the camera is going to exchange it. I am going to get him to call canon's technical support first.

Btw... check your playback settings as well. If you use GDI instead of Direct 3D for previewing, you won't get any of the image smoothing that the video card is capable of doing (and you'll get noticable blocks, jaggies, etc).

If you're seeing it on a broadcast monitor or DV->TV out or something, chances are it's an interlacing problem.

does ppro have this option? anyways, i don't thinnk i can change this setting because of my canopus storm plug-in. thanks anyway.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions for doin optimal 24p DVDs with CCE SP? I have an hour and 15 minuets to get on the dvd. Any suggestions on what settings to use? Thanks! Im new to CCE.

My PPro project is a 16:9/24p project. If I export to DVD, I get great looking video with great audio. If I export to AVI, I get great video and audio as well. If I export to miniDV tape, my audio becomes intermittently garbled and glitchy.

If I export to AVI, and reimport the AVI into a new project, it plays fine in the timeline w/ clear audio - but if I export that single clip to tape, I get garbled and glitchy sound again.

Does anybody have a fix for this?

I'm about to lose PPro for something else. I loved it while editing, but exporting is kind of a big deal to me too :)

Thanks for *any* tips,
Aaron

There is a check box for "scale upon import" (the no-hassle way to do it) or you can scale manually in the timeline, but as far as I know, there should be no difference in the end result. Don't know that there's any other ways to do it. Anyone else?

Derek,

The XL2 oversamples at 960x480, but all miniDV is 720x480, regardless whether it is 4:3 or 16:9, and that's what the camera actually puts out via the firewire port. The only difference between narrow and widescreen is the Pixel Aspect Ratio (ie, nonsquare pixels, either height x width = 0.9 or 1.2).

Unless you have a capture card like a Canopus Storm or something, which might use 854x480 square pixels for widescreen, setting any other pixel dimensions for miniDV will just throw things off. The 24p shoudln't have anything to do with aspect ratios, except that Windows Media Player doesn't handle exported 24pA (aka 2:3:3:2) properly, which is a whole separate issue from either the XL2 or PPro themselves.

Pete,

You said that Windows Media Player doesn't handle 24pA properly -- I just exported a 24p project to AVI and the video plays fine in Real Player but in Windows media player it seems to flicker between 16:9 and 4:3 frames. Is this what you're talking about? And do you know why this happens?

Thanks,
Aaron

Every time I export an Mpeg from the timeline, the last frame of every dissolve or transition "jumps back in," for lack of a better phrase. Also, when I apply any blur effect, i get this really bad kind of interlacing. I don't know how to explain these very well, so here's a clip with examples of both: (the blur effect is at the end.)

http://www.thetimelinepost.com/videos/quiltproblems.mpg

This is a big problem whenever I export to DVDs and when I am trying to export web clips. The only workaround I have found is to export to an AVI first, then export that to an MPG. That will be unacceptable when I finsish this 2 hour project.

Thanks, and this is my first post.

Thanks for the help Glenn and Per.

Try checking the field order when you export. Also, are you using mpegs in the timeline? It may be an issue with editing mpegs instead of dv avi.

they're raw AVI DV files. going ntsc to ntsc

I figured I'd post my "fix" to this in case someone comes searching.

To recap: I shot on an XL2 in 16:9/24p mode. PPro captured the clips from the DV tape to an AVI file at 23.976 fps. (I saw no way to get PPro to capture these clips at 29.97--in fact, I captured the clips into both a 29.97 project and 24p project but the AVI file captured was 23.976 in both cases!)

Anyway, I found that when I edited the 24p clips in a 16:9/29.97 project, I ran into rendering problems--video being rendered at 4:3 for example. So I reimported the clips into a 16:9/24p project and from there everything was great. I edited, rendering often, even previewing the *video* on my TV to make sure it was looking good along the way.

I finished editing and wanted to export my final masterpiece, an 11-minute short, to miniDV. I exported to tape, but when I listened to the audio on the tape, it was intermittently garbled and glitchy. My first attempts at solving this were swapping computer systems, firewire drives, tape decks, firewire *cords* to see if any of the hardware was the culprit. Nope! Still got the glitchy audio.

I was able to export the whole timeline to an AVI file, which played the audio & video great in RealPlayer on my computer. I imported that big AVI file into another project and tried to export *that* to tape. Same audio problems! Aggh!

I'm suspecting at this point that PPro is just no good w/ 24p and my world would be a lot better if somehow I could have captured that original footage at 29.97. Okay how about this then? I'll export the whole timeline to tape (just the video, cos the audio was what was getting messed up--I'll export the audio as a .wav and re-sync it later), then *re-import* that same video into a 29.97 project. Okay, I did this--but here's the deal: when I re-imported that video, PPro re-imported it as 23.976 again! Ka-blooomers!!! I know that even in the 29.97 footage there's a flag or something that says "I'm 24p" (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=43482). But still, it seems reasonable to think that PPro would let me choose whether I wanted to capture it at 29.97 or 23.976!

Anyway, what I eventually discovered was that there was nothing wrong with my audio at all. In fact, I cleared the audio tracks out in my timeline and played that back to tape. The audio glitches were still there! And in exactly the same spots as before!

So here's my thinking: somehow the video signal that PPro was writing to tape was "spilling" over into the audio track and producing audio artifacts. (There's probably a better technical explanation, but my audio tracks were clear, blank, nada, so I don't know how else to explain the audio I was hearing.)

My other thought was to capture the footage from tape into Premiere 6.5, who should know nothing of 24p and should just treat it as a plain, dumb ol 29.97 file. But I didn't get this far.

I took the big video-only AVI file that I had and imported that into a project with my big audio-only WAV file and joined them in a 4:3 timeline (I needed to do this anyway, cos I needed to produce a 4:3 letterboxed version). The audio glitches on "export to tape" were still there of course *until* I shrunk the big 16:9 clip 75% to get the letterboxing. When I rendered and exported to tape *this* timeline, *finally* the audio glitches were gone.

My theories are these (I'm too tired to run the experiments now):

* Because I processed the image somewhat (shrunk to letterbox size), this *forced* PPro to render completely *new* render files and those files were somehow cleaner than the original AVI.

OR

* Shrinking the video removed information from the video signal that was causing the audio artifacts.

Anyway, sorry to leave such a long post, but please reply if you have any further insights!

Later,
Aaron

If you have a DVD burner, which you should, you could export to DVD and play that from your DVD player to the VCR. Ofcourse that only works if you have a DVD burner.


Owen

I have a DVD burner but DVD video is compressed and I needed the best quality DV video for my export, so alas I had to do the above.