Giving up on Premiere Pro
 

Have just acquired a Canon HV30 (PAL). Mr first experience of HDV.

I was amazed to find my ancient copy of Premiere Pro (1.5, updated to 1.51 for HDV) and my not particular spectacular PC managed to capture, and allow me to edit, some test footage, taken to try out the camera and to see if my PC setup would work.

All fine until I come to export to tape. Although I am sure I have project settings right and have altered the only setting I could find (SPEED -> QUALITY slider, set to Quality) relating to export to tape, the end result was quite disappointing.

The picture quality seems OK but any movement is quite jerky. Unacceptable.

I have now downloaded a trial version of Sony Vegas Platinum Pro and the result is stunning. Fabulous. Even on our non-HD TV. If I cannot find a solution for Premiere Pro I will have to abandon this old friend in favour of Sony Vegas. I cannot justify the cost of further upgrading Premiere Pro especially as what I have at the moment is supposed to work OK.....

...unless someone can point me in the right direction as to where things may be going wrong in Premiere Pro?

Thanks.

PP 1.51, I believe, was Adobe's first toe in the water for HDV. Although I started in HDV with PP CS3, I'd guess that PP 1.51 was nowhere near as capable as CS3, or the current version of Vegas for that matter.

If I was in your position, I'd get trial versions of CS4 and any other NLE that might be of interest and do an objective comparison of each vendors' currently supported products. I'd then figure out which one fits my use cases and workflows the best and buy that. But that's just the way I do things. Another approach might be better or more expedient for you.

Tripp's pretty much always right about everything, so I'm not going to disagree with him. But I will say I had very good luck exporting to HDV tape with 1.5.1 when I used it. You may have some settings wrong or your PC may not be up to Premiere's demands (Vegas is known for using fewer resources).

Also note that the Premiere trial versions never do HDV, so you won't really be able to try CS4 out before buying...

Thanks for the thoughts, guys.

Have compared settings in Vegas, which work, with Premiere, that don't. Can't spot any differences.

I spent a morning editing with Vegas yesterday and have now learned to do in Vegas what I used to do in Premiere so am entirely happy with it. Capture and Export to tape is hassle-free and produces excellent results. So I've bought it... at a fraction of the cost of upgrading Premiere! Therefore I'm afraid it`s farewell to Premiere after quite a few years.

Go for Vegas if that works for you. But PremPro 1.5.1 should also work, despite what Cineform claimed at the time they started selling their product independently (the 1.5.1 update for PremPro is and early version of their codec).

I edited happily with 1.5.1 for a long time, until I went to something totally different (Edius).

John,

I did the same tonight. Premiere just wouldn't perform a good HDV->SD conversion. Very happy with Vegas right now.

If somebody can post a link to some (free) online Vegas tutorials, I would be much obliged. Otherwise it's time to hit Amazon and get a book. (I haven't had to do this in years)

I'm wondering if Premiere 1.5.1 works OK (ie exports to tape to an acceptable standard) with NTSC but not with PAL? Possible?

Learning Vegas after a bit of a struggle was OK with a combination of the inbuilt "show me how", Help and a couple of online tutorials I found (I don't have the URLs to hand but easily found through Google) and just getting on and using it. Somethings are better than with Premiere (1.5 at least). Eg I can now drag music files (.m4a format) directly from ITUNES onto Vegas without first having to convert to .mp3. And creating dissolves and fades (audio and video) is incredibly easy. I'm going to save myself a lot of time and wonder why anyone like me would pay so many hundreds of Pounds/Euros/Dollars for Premiere when Vegas Suite Platinum Pro package does the lot.

Except...., perhaps, unless you know better. Audio Mixing, in Premiere: I could do this "on the fly" with Audio Mixer. Not sure how to tackle balancing audio between sounds and music tracks in Vegas. Any clues, please, people?

John

I don't know about exporting to tape, my problem was with SD output from HD. But I'm an NTSC user and it was bad.