I captured 3 tapes of HDV (720p) video for a friend who wanted the footage placed on DVDs. The three capture files play fine in Media Player, but when I place them on the Premiere timeline, two play fine but the third plays the video like it is fast forwarding (very fast) while the audio is fine.

I don't know what camera was used to tape the footage. I used a Sony HDR-HC3 camcorder to capture it into an .avi file. I am using Premiere CS4. I captured at 29.97 and the project is set up to that frame rate.

I have read a lot about out of sync audio, but this is more extreme (I think). The audio plays normally and lasts 60 minutes, but the video plays through in less than 5 minutes and the last frame holds through the rest of the audio.

Again, two play fine, but the third does not. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jeff

You can't 'capture' HDV material to an .AVI format. Capture is a digital transfer of data from tape to hard disk and results in .mpeg files.

Is that "can't" or "shouldn't"? Not knowing what I was getting (format-wise beyond MiniDV tapes), I originally put the first tape in my SD camcorder and it came back saying "HDV cannot play" or something to that extent. I borrowed a friends HDV camcoder and put the tape in. I connected to the PC via typical firewire and started a new project as HDV 720p30 (though I have no idea what the actual recorded frame rate was, which may be part of the issue). I went into Capture and captured the footage for each tape which created three .avi files in the target directory. These files were what I then placed on the timeline, one at a time, and attempted to export as MPEG2-DVD NTSC Widescreen Progressive High Quality. Tape 1 and 3 worked as expected, while Tape 2 has the fast video issue.

I have used, in the past, a Panasonic camcoreder that recoreded to their proprietary memory card and ended up with AVCHD .mts files that were a nightmare to work with, but so far I have not captured to .mpg directly. I did just notice in the Capture window that there is a Capture Setting menu for DV or HDV. The project I created was for HDV 720p30, but the setting seems to be DV. I would think Premiere would set that parameter to HDV in an HDV project, but maybe not. Could this be the issue? Though it still would not explain why 2 of 3 captures work.

All of this is why I have avoided HD like the plague. However, I have to adopt it sometime, so any document or tutorial showing proper workflow would be great!

Thanks!

It does look like your camera settings were wrong when you captured. AVI indicates SD capture, not HDV.
Check that by right clicking on a clip in the project panel and selecting 'New Sequence from Clip'. That will create a sequence that matches your footage.

If it was indeed captured in SD DV format and you need HDV, change your camera settings to output HDV and recapture.

I must have screwed up the capture. The footage is formated 720x480. I guess I thought the camera would set itself up for the format it was playing. Live and learn... :-)

Even with all that going wrong, I still don't understand the inconsistancy of 2 captures at least playing while the 3rd is messed up. Perhaps a timecode error on the tape?

Many thanks,
Jeff