HV20, HDVsplit and After Effects 7; repeat frames and things
 

Greetings all. I just got myself and HV20 and have been mucking around with it. I've used DV cameras quite a bit but I've never had my own and never capped footage on my PC. It's been fine so far, but there's some weird things cropping up which maybe you can help me with.
I don't have any consumer capping software so I got HDV split. Everything seemed to be great in various tests until I ventured into using the footage with AE 7, which is my primary video software toy at home.
The first weird thing is the pixel aspect ratio. Normally, when working with old SD DV stuff I'd just set the interpretation to the correct preset pixel aspect ratio, then create a composition to the same preset specs, click the pixel aspect ratio correction toggle in the viewer and everything is good. The m2t files I'd been getting from HDVsplit seemed fine, they played back in most players, although only VLC corrected the p.a.r. But when I brought them into AE I find that the image is all jagged and rough when interpreted through the HDV preset and displayed with p.a.r correction in a preset HDV composition (1440x1080; 1.33). I don't know if that's usual (I've never seen it with any other sort of footage), but it makes it hard to be precise. What's really weird is, if I import the footage and interpret it the usual way (which AE7 has been doing automatically anyway) and then create a composition of 1920x1080 with square pixels and drag the footage in, it's its proper crisp self again.
Seems odd to me; I've always been under the impression that both methods should yield the same result as rendered in the viewer.

It's a bit disquieting, but I can work around that if I just go square pix. The other problem is more severe. Every piece of captured footage I bring in to AE ( this is a PAL camera recording at full res in 25p mode, and capturing yields 1440x1080 m2t clips at 25fps) every 9 frames it repeats the next frame 5 times. This is across the whole clip and across every clip I've ever got from HDVsplit. There is no evidence of this occuring anywhere outside of After Effects; The tape is fine, VLC, Media Player and DivX player all play the m2t clips back just fine, motion wise. There's sometimes a bit of a hiccup at the start but nothing consistent. I downloaded the demo of Vegas 8 pro to see them in there and there was no problem; A bit sluggish on the realtime playback but otherwise fine. I am at a loss to explain this. The clips are all identified as 25fps, the timelines I put them on are set to 25fps. I've tried turing off field separation, changing frame rates, starting later in the clip, recapturing with audio syc turned off but to no avail. AE is quite certain those frames are supposed to be there and interpolates accordingly.
It's a bit depresssing. AE was always my rock, to be relied upon for frame accurate reading of any clip you've got a codec for.
I have some experience but I'm quite new to HD anything. Have I missed something important here? If anyone has any ideas what's going on, please share.
thanks

are you using the HDMI port or the Firewire port when you capture the footage??

You can contact Adobe Technical Support with questions like this.
 

I hope that someone on this forum is able to help you out, but I though that it couldn't hurt to mention that you can contact Adobe Technical Support, too. You are entitled to a certain number of free calls for questions like this. For information on what free technical support you're entitled to, see this page:

http://www.adobe.com/support/programs/customer/gss.html

When asking such a question, please supply information about the version number of your software, some details about your computer, et cetera.

If you think that you've encountered a bug, you can file a bug report by sending a complete description of the issue to aebugs@adobe.com.

Thanks. I had considered it, but I thought I try and nut out whether it's something else that's the problem, maybe HDVsplit or something.

Anyway, I am capping over firewire. Do folks think that would make a difference? I was worried about my processor not being up to it, but so far it hasn't been a big problem (well, when it comes to playing back in VLC anyway).

I also tried capping with the Vegas demo and then bringing the files over to AE. These files are m2t and seem the same as those made from HDVsplit (as they should be I suppose, if I tick all the right boxes), but the same frame problem occurs. I converted one of the clips in Vegas to full frame HD 1080 50i and that was fine in AE. Darn
As I said, I don't think tech support seems like what's needed. It's just so odd and ...regular, it must be some box I haven't checked or some such.
I wonder if Quicktime is supposed to handle these files and some codec pack I've got is confusing things.
Also, are there any good freeware programs that can convert m2ts into other forms, without major drama, for testing? (I'll have a hunt around the appropriate fora)

You can forget about using m2t files or any mpeg file with AE. Especially hdv. Will not work. You need to transcode them to another format for AE to work properly.

Well I certainly wouldn't use m2t or mpg anything as an intermediate step. But I would have thought AE 7 could read the files ok (and judging by my internet searching, it usually can and my problem is unique). The plan was actually to use AE to convert them.
I'm currently looking into using DGIndex and some lossless codecs talked about on VideoHelp. Any recommendations on intermediate creation methods? (it's getting so I should take this to Post section I guess)