Premiere Pro CS5 and VirtualDub AVI files

[Randall Leong]

Does anybody have any experience with importing AVI files created in VirtualDub into Premiere Pro CS5?

I have been having problems with standard-definition interlaced AVI files when imported into PP CS5. Specifically, the footage is clearly BFF interlaced, but PP CS5 misinterpreted that footage as Progressive Scan. This degrades image quality of the encoded result after being exported out of PP CS5, especially in scenes containing motion. I tried reinterpreting the AVI as LFF, but then AME (Adobe Media Encoder) insists on deinterlacing that footage upon export (and using the wrong method, at that). There appears to be no provision at all whatsoever to disable "automatic" deinterlacing.

Any clues as to why this is happening?

[Ann Bens]

Have you tried correcting the interprete footage in the project window.
What codec did you use for the VD avi's
what are your export settings?

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Ann Bens

Have you tried correcting the interprete footage in the project window.
What codec did you use for the VD avi's
what are your export settings?

I did try the interpret footage in the Premiere project window. I might not have fully checked the export or re-encode settings in AME.

Also, I might not have saved the new interpret footage settings properly in Premiere. I may have to save the setting, then exit and relaunch Premiere so that the footage is re-interpreted correctly.

And Premiere isn't the only program that misinterprets interlaced SD AVI footage from VirtualDub. Sony Vegas Pro also interprets all interlaced SD AVI footage from VDub as LFF regardless of whether this footage is actually BFF or TFF.

[Randall Leong]

I think I know what I did wrong:

Even though I saved the settings in Premiere, I exited the program and launched AME directly. When I imported the Premiere sequence, the interpretation of the AVI video reverted to the default Progressive Scan properties. Therefore, I decided to export while still in Premiere.

I will let everyone know how this turns out.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

I think I know what I did wrong:

Even though I saved the settings in Premiere, I exited the program and launched AME directly. When I imported the Premiere sequence, the interpretation of the AVI video reverted to the default Progressive Scan properties. Therefore, I decided to export while still in Premiere.

I will let everyone know how this turns out.

This re-do turned out much better.

However, I was thinking that I prepared the AVI differently from the botched original AVI this time around. The original was recorded in letterboxed form onto DVD from a digital-to-analog tuner converter box. VirtualDub's own resize filter botched up the conversion when I tried removing the letterboxes via cropping, causing noticeable waviness in full-motion scenes. This time, I used AVISynth and its plugins (and used VirtualDub only for the final AVI creation), which did a much better job.

[Randall Leong]

As for the default deinterlacing of interlaced footage, I found that Adobe misinterprets all footage as Progressive Scan by default, which forces deinterlacing during transcoding. To avoid this I had to manually force Premiere and AME to interpret interlaced footage with the same (correct) field order as was originally encoded (or last transcoded).