Canon GL2 and Premiere Pro

[Miguel Lombana]

<<<-- Originally posted by John DeLuca : In the future try blacking out, or stripping your new mini dv, then rewinding it before you use it.

John -->>>

John I would buy into that as being teh cause of my situation however one of the advantages of having a JVC 30u Mini-DV deck is that I can stripe all my tapes before I use them and not wear out the heads on my cameras doing it.

In my case all my tapes are in sync, something happened in the transfer from my deck to the PC that is shifting my audio off by about 11 frames.

Any other ideas? It's happened a couple of times before so a fix would be really helpful!

Miguel

[Tony Hills]

Ken

Sorry, I've only just seen your original post. Could I suggest that you abandon Premiere for capture and use Scenalyzer instead. I've used this for several years and it has never let me down. It's a great little capture programme. You can review it on www.scenalyzer.com.

You can get it downloaded on the web but, if I remember correctly, it does have a a red bar that comes up every now and again on the image in review (but not on the captured file). You can live with this, but I liked the programme so much I paid the small fee of £16 ($29) and received a registration number by return email that cleared this.

Incidentally, when I recently switched to Premiere Pro I bought a book by Jeff Sengstack as a reference (and I can recommend this book too) and he prefers Scenalyzer to the capture facility in Pro.

Thought this may help.

Regards.

Tony

[Miguel Lombana]

Scenealyzer for capture? I've used it for splitting but I didn't know that it will capture. Is this exclusive to the paid copy?

I run Scenealyzer all the time for what it implies I'd be curious to know more about what you're doing with it.

[Tony Hills]

Hi Miguel

I was first attracted to Scenalyzer as means to capture using a simple Firewire card having had an abysmal experience with Pinnacle DV200 and have never regretted it since. It specialises in capturing even with the free version.

Scenalyzer has full camera control and analyses scenes in real time. BUT .... (there's always a but!) I forgot to mention that I am still in the dark ages of avi files and you may be capturing in MPEG. Scenalyzer does not do this - it only captures in Type 1 and Type 2 avi files. I have never had a problem with this except when writing to DVD - then they need converting and this can literally take hours!

I also use it to output back to tape (DV) if I need to.

Regards.

Tony

[Miguel Lombana]

Tony,

THanks for the tip, I capture from my JVC dual mini-dv / vhs via firewire and a canopus card. I capture in avi not mpeg and the canopus format is viewable to both premier via the plug in and scenealyzer with no issue.

I've not have many issues where there was a loss of sync however it did happen during this project. In the past I was able to re-capture the tape and there was no issue, however this time I found it faster to shift the audio about 11 frames forward to catch up, worked the project and all was well.

In the future I'll give scenealyzer a try for full capture, I have a program that I can run to convert the avi to canopus avi format for work in premier with canopus.

THanks again,
Miguel

[Bill Ball]

Ken
I run into the same thing with Premiere Pro capture and my GL2 if the tape is stopped. Like you said I start the tape (usually from the capture app.) and then hit record. I have not encountered any problems with doing it that way. You dont need to stripe your tapes first as long as you dont need the first few frames of each time coded section. I assume the capture utility is very sensitive to time code breaks by design. If you capture from a running tape and still get those messages make sure you are using a high quality cable. There is nothing wrong with the capture program, its just picky about getting a clean signal with good timecode.

[Scott Silverman]

Hi Guys,
I am a Premiere Pro user as well, and I happen to own a GL2 too. I ran into problems with capturing in Premiere Pro using my GL2 as well. However, I think most of my problems were fixed when I upgraded to Premiere Pro 1.5. With this upgrade, Adobe seems to have added a few nice features as well as fixed most of the bugs (your problem being one of them). The upgrade is only $99, so that's not too bad. I personally think this should have been a free update because Premiere Pro 1 was clearly a mess-up. But hey, $99 fixes the problems so whatever.

Good luck!

[Brian Neuls]

I have my GL2 set up with the firewire port and I'm trying to capture footage and it only works for about two seconds and then tells me it can't find the time code and the capture stops. Is there something I need to do within the GL2 to get this to work, am I not recording properly? HAs anyone else ever had this problem? Are there special drivers for the GL2 for Premiere? I'm pretty stumped here. Any help would be great. Thanks. (And thanks to all for all the help with all the threads over the past six months!)

[Cliff Elliott]

Hi Brian, this sounds very much like time code gaps, is the tape you are trying to capture from one long recording or have you stopped then removed the tape and later on used it from the point you finished from? If so when you put the tape back in the camera it is important to find the last bit of time code before you start recording, if not you will get a break in the code and the camera will start a new thread of code.

And so when you try to capture from the tape the capture device will read the end of the time code then stop.

You don't need any special software of drivers to capture firewire from the Canon camera.

Hope this helps.

Regards, Cliff Elliott

[Miguel Lombana]

Just another reason to "ALWAYS" stripe time-code on your tapes! pop a new tape in the deck, keep the lens cover on and record 1 full hour of black on the tape to apply the time code, many of these problems go away when you do this. I use my JVC Mini-DV / VHS deck for this to save the wear and tear on my GL's.

Brian, another option that you might try is Scenalyzer Live, I think that it will capture without issue. I use it over the capture in Premier Pro as it will break scenes on timecode changes and create seperate files for each scene. The capture is flawless "knock on wood" and in several formats such as Microsoft DV, Canopus DV etc.

Enjoy
Miguel

[Lloyd Coleman]

Miguel,

A couple of questions for you:

1. With the new scene capture option in Premiere Pro, what is the advantage of using Scenalyzer? I have been using PPro scene capture and it is working great for me. Is there something else in Scenalyzer that I am missing?

2. I used to always stripe my tapes, but found with just a little care in filming (pre-roll, post-roll, etc) that I never have a break in timecode and figure that I have just cut the wear and tear of my camera in half. If I am careful with filming, do you think there is a compelling enough reason to stripe tapes to justify the extra wear and tear on both the camera and the tape?

Thank you.

[Ken Wagner]

I had this same problem with version 1.0, but have not had any problems with 1.5. Have you upgraded?

I believe there were some serious issues with prem pro in 1.0.

I agree with Scenalyzer. . it's an awesome product. The time capture capability alone makes it worth the cost.

[John DeLuca]

I have premiere pro 1.0 and dont stripe my tapes. I have never had a problem with capture, but I will say this.......the software can get flakey at times, you have to know when to turn your camera on and bring up the capture window at the right time, or you will have to reset your camera. It seemed to get better when I told the software what camera I was using.


John

[Brian Neuls]

drop-frame timecode or non-drop frame timecode, and does it make a difference? Thanks for all your great replies, I'm going to try to get all of this to work right now.

[Brian Neuls]

I tried non-drop frame, drop frame, frame capture, everything, and no matter where it is on the tape, it stops after 2 seconds and says there is no time code. I switched tapes, recorded again, did everything normal, and it stops. Has anyone ever had this problem? I press tape in the capture window and it starts but it doesn't continue. Pretty frustrating. Am I still doing something wrong?