Adobe Premiere & Premiere Pro discussions from 2005

[Wayne Maxwell]

Hey Pete

Thanks a lot for your reply. That make a lot of sense.
I will give it a try and see what happens. Now that
you explained it I am sure that is what happening.

Thanks again!

[Brent Ray]

Hi Pete, I'm using Premiere Pro 1.5. I shot the footage in 24p, widescreen, with 3:2 pulldown. Should I film my 24p footage in 2:3:3:2 since that's what Premiere has for the pulldown option? The jerkiness is there no matter what I do with the footage. Whether I export it as a file, export it back to the tape, or even just watch it on the camera through Premiere, the jerkiness remains. The other thing I noticed is that every 4 frames, the picture goes slightly darker for one frame. It only looks this way after I've captured the video. It looks fine on the source of the footage. It almost seems like this is a capture problem. The fact that the audio doesn't sync up with the video during capture also points to that. Is there some way to change the capture settings so it knows i'm capturing 24p? This is really quite frustrating. I've been playing around with some things for a few days now and I'm still making no significant progress. Thanks for helping.

[Ed Smith]

Hi Brent,

Is it OK with normal footage - i.e none 24p?

Sometimes jerkiness can be associated to bad Harddrive/ disk performace. However if normal footage is OK, then its more than likely the settings.

[Pete Bauer]

Brent, thanks for the further info.

The general advice is that unless you have a specific reason to shoot 2:3, set your camera on 2:3:3:2 and leave it there. I'll requote a comment that is buried in this post:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...&highlight=24p

The consensus around here is to use 2:3:3:2 pull down. If you look closely at the 2:3 pattern, there's no way to cleanly get rid of extra frames and be left with the original progessive frames. Once you've shot 2:3, there's no going back -- you either have to export it to an interlaced final product, or, if it is even practical, do a lot of post-production work to minimize the interlacing artifact that'll be induced by rendering back to progressive footage, either 24p or 30p.

Here's another extensive thread about pull-down:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...&highlight=24p

If you haven't already, try this menu setting:

Project>>Project Settings>>General...>>Playback Settings... button and in the "DV Playback Settings" dialog box, make sure the "Repeat Frame" is selected in the "24p Pull-Up Method" radio button near the bottom of the dialog box.

What's not clear to me is if this is truly just a playback option within PPro and thus doesn't affect capture or export (just playback within PPro), or if it really is telling the software how to capture and export as well. Please give that a try and let us all know what happens...but if that doesn't help, then I'm scratching my head, too.

If this setting DOES matter and you have 2:3 footage but PPro is set to use 2:3:3:2 pull-Up, it makes sense to me that you'd have the kind of problems you describe. Here's why:

Caveats to that which follows:
- I haven't had my coffee yet this morning and I'm not using source material, just trying to logically follow the pull-up schemes as best I know them. So could easily have screwed something up.
- I'm using CAP letters for lower field and small letters for upper field of a given frame. (DV is always lower field first).
- I don't know which field of a frame is duplicated when a 3rd field is created for 24p footage on a 60i tape. For these illustrations, I'll assume the upper field is the one that is duplicated.
So: if someone sees that I've made an error here, please don't be shy about correcting!

With 2:3, this is what is on 1 second of tape:
Aa Bb bC cD dd Ee Ff fG gH hh Ii Jj jK kL ll Mm Nn nO oP pp Qq Rr rS sT tt Uu Vv vW wX xx

This is what 2:3:3:2 pull-up expects to see (underlined "extra" interlaced frames are intended to be removed to make 24pA):
Aa Bb bC cc Dd Ee Ff fG gg Hh Ii Jj jK kk Ll Mm Nn nO oo Pp Qq Rr rS ss Tt Uu Vv vW ww Xx

Actually removing the frames from 2:3 footage using 2:3:3:2, this is what's left on a 24fps timeline:
Aa Bb cD dd Ee Ff gH hh Ii Jj kL ll Mm Nn oP pp Qq Rr sT tt Uu Vv wX xx

For export, neither scheme can recreate the original 2:3 footage since fields have been totally removed. The 2:3:3:2 scheme would end up (added fields are underlined):
Aa Bb bc cD dd Ee Ff fg gH hh Ii Jj jK kL ll Mm Nn no oP pp Qq Rr rs sT tt Uu Vv vw wX xx

Even if you changed back to 2:3 for the export (not sure I have this one quite right):
Aa Bb bc Dd dd Ee Ff fg Hh hh Ii Jj jk Ll ll Mm Nn no Pp pp Qq Rr rs Tt tt Uu Vv vw Xx xx

Ok, time for coffee!

[Brent Ray]

Ed, I've tried recording some footage in all three of the framerate settings (60i, 30p, and 24p). The 24p is the only one that's giving me trouble, so I don't think it's a computer performance issue.

Pete, thanks for the detailed reply. I tried doing a little test with my camera. I filmed about 15 seconds using the 2:3 pulldown and then another 15 seconds using the 2:3:3:2 pulldown. I've found that they come out looking exactly the same. I captured each one separately, and I cannot notice any visible difference. What's strange is that when I do shorter captures, that jerkiness I was talking about seems to go away. I captured about 7 or 8 minutes of straight footage before and I got all that jerkiness. But when I go back now and capture it in smaller chunks, it looks fine. But now there's another issue.

The biggest problem I have now is that there is a flicker every 4 frames. It's very noticable and distracting. This flicker does not appear when the raw footage is viewed on the camera; it only shows up after the video has been captured. It's not visible on the computer itself, but if I connect through my DV device to a TV, the flicker shows up there. It also shows up on the camera if I do an Export to Tape. So somewhere in the capture process, something is going awry. I'd post a short video clip of what I'm talking about, but the flicker doesn't show up on a computer, so it would be pointless.

Any idea what could be causing this?

[Pete Bauer]

Hmmmm. If very short clips do fine but longer ones are jerky, I'm really strongly suspicous that you DO have a system performance problem...HDD fragmentation and/or nearly full disk, DMA accidentally off, background utility interfering, flaky Firewire cable/connector...something. We have had folks with more than adequate systems get surprised by simple hardware issues that sneaked up on 'em -- 24p editing is more demanding of your system than the others, so that seems to sometimes be the straw that breaks the camel's back. So please do check the hardware basics anyway.

What's your hardware? Any recent changes?

If all the hardware appears to be in good shape after a careful check, a couple of specific things to check:
- Frame drops during capture?
- Make sure that all the scratch disk locations in the preferences are for a fast HDD other than where XP and PPro are located (eg, other than the C drive).
- If you do another generation of a short segment that misbehaved, does the problem follow the new, small segment or "magically" disappear?
- Are you sure it is every 4th frame, or might it be every 5th frame (that would be consistent with a pull-down problem).
- Is the flicker you see on the TV you're using as a monitor coming off a 24fps timeline or 30fps timeline? If it is 24fps, that may have something to do with it because regular TVs can only handle 60i (30fps).

If none of the above helps...if you don't mind, please do post a short clip so we can attempt to biopsy it! ;-) Along with that, please list your capture settings, project settings, and export settings.

[Brent Ray]

Thanks again for the tips Pete. I changed my scratch disks to my external drive and captured the whole thing again. You were right, that did help with the jerkiness. I never saw any dropped frames before though, and the jerkiness was always consistent, so i don't exactly know how or why it happened.

In terms of the flicker. It is definitely every 4 frames. I thought it might just be the TV, but I've since ruled that out. First of all, when I play the raw footage straight from the camera, the TV plays it just fine. No flicker at all. It's only after I've captured the video that the flicker shows up. It's both on the TV and on the camera. IT's even there while playing it back on the XL2 through the firewire. I looked a little harder, and you can just barely make it out on an exported file on the computer. I exported a clip so you can sort of see what I'm talking about. It's much much worse on a TV, but if you look hard you can see that there's a little flicker.

I'm really stumped with this. Maybe Premiere just can't handle these 24p projects like it should. I've tried changing all sorts of options and nothing seems to work. Any more suggestions? Thanks so much for your help so far. Even if you haven't solved everything, it's still nice to know that there are people here who want to help.


Here's the link to that video clip:
http://www.sweepinghalo.com/flicker.mov

Again, it may be hard to see, but look around the tree branches and you might be able to see what I'm talking about.

[Chris Mandel]

how do i add black borders on to my video as if its 16:9?
i use adobe premiere 6.5. can someone explain in simple steps please.

[Pete Bauer]

Brent,

I think that more than one thing was going on. First, it sounds like PPro playback performance improved when you optimized the scratch disks -- so far, so good. Second, the issue that's really bugging you...pun intended...may well be a known 24p strobing bug.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video clip is worth....!!! As soon as I saw the over-exposed sky in your video clip, it reminded me of an Adobe forum thread and FAQ. Apparently, in 24p footage that is returned in any way to 29.97fps, video that exceeds 100 IRE will strobe every 4th frame. From a quick read of the thread, it looks like this is primarily a 2:3 issue, but also affects export to tape/external device from 2:3:3:2 (in other words, when 24p within the timeline is exported as 29.97, the strobing is introduced).

You'll probably have to register to get to the following links, but if you're an Adobe user, you ought to be checking in there periodically anyway, IMHO:

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/w...iv.1@.3bb4e9c8

Here's the Adobe forum thread that led to the FAQ:

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/w....7@.3bb49731/0

There's a LOT of info in the thread, so I encourage you to grab a beverage and sit down with it for a while. Then you'll be one of the smartest folks around here on this problem!

The work-around in the FAQ seems a bit involved to me, and in the thread (around post #69) I read that someone got decent results by simply applying the "Broadcast Colors" effect to make sure the footage stays within 100 IRE. Of course, you could also work with contrast, brightness, saturation, etc first to minimize any detail loss first before trying the Broadcast Colors effect.

It is most unfortunate that this has been known for a long time and no fix yet. Maybe that's why some of the posts at the Adobe site are a bit less polite than we all are here at DVinfo!

BTW, your clip doesn't look like it was shot in Southern California! ;-)

[Brent Ray]

Wow, thanks Pete. I haven't completely raked over everything in those forums yet, but it does seem like quite the wealth of knowledge. I think you're definitely right about my problem, and the Broadcast Colors effect does solve it to an extent. It's still there a little bit, but I guess there isn't much else I can do. And I agree, it is quite surprising that there hasn't been a fix for this.

And you're right, it doesn't look like Southern California because it's actually in Massachusetts. :) I go to school in Orange, CA, but I'm originally from the Boston area and I'm home for the holidays.

Thanks for all your help Pete. I really do appreciate it.

[Rob Lohman]

The technique you are referring to is called letterboxing. Visit my
letterbox calculator page to download a 16:9 mask or any of the
other masks:

www.visuar.com/letterbox/calc.htm

I can't really help you on how to get it working inside Prem 6.5,
it's been a long time since I used that. But it shouldn't be too hard.

[Ed Smith]

Hi Chris,

Premiere 6.5 has a widescreen matte. Simply add a new video track above all your video clips in the timeline. Go to File menu and then select new> title. From the template drop down menu choose matte, then in there you'll see a 16x9 matte option. If you select it, then save the title (matte). Drag it from the project bin, into the spare video track and increase its length so that it covers all the project. Render if needed and then play. You now should have a widescreen matte over your 4x3 footage.

I don't know what frame aspect ratio it is, but it'll give you the effect.

You could always use Rob's template, or the clip effect from the video effects palette.

Cheers,

[Michael Lopresti]

hello everyone and Happy new Year.

anywho ive been editting with Windows movie maker and now moving on to Adobe.

so im trying to capture but its giving me a hard time sometimes it will catch a few min of tape(start to pause) then when it moves to the next it will only catch a few seconds and ill have to punch in a clip name the it will give me a time code error.

all i wanna do is capture the whole tape with out having to babysit anyone have any ideas


Thanks Much

Cheers

Mike

[Graham Hickling]

Very difficult to help you without at least some information about what camcorder and computer configuration you have.

As just one suggestion: go to \File\Capture\Options and set the device brand and type to match the camercorder you are using.

[Michael Lopresti]

im using a XL2 ( setting in Adobe Premiere pro is only for xl1 so i used that)

pc is pent 4 3.4mhz running XPpro




i did file>>capture>>set the options to the camera


Graham do you use Msn at all?