Premiere Pro Issue with Screen Captured Footage

[Daniel Gast]

First of all, been years since I was on this forum. Hello again :)

Now, I'm not 100% sure where all the issues lie, so I'll just explain the whole situation on the table. I have been doing in-game video recording with Bandicam and had great success in a quality/framerate department. I normally use a cloud server to host the game to offload that processing from my PC so I can focus on running the client game and the screen-capture software. Just today I captured some in-game footage while running a server locally, and that is the only difference between my previous work and this session.

Bandicam capture settings are as follows:

- Video: Xvid codec, 30 FPS, Bitrate of 5000 kbps
- Audio: stere,o 48000 Hz Frequency, MPEG-1 L2 Codec, 192kbps Bitrate

First issue, the audio will never import correctly into Premiere Pro CS6. The video is fine, but the audio sounds as if it is running in slow motion, despite being the correct length of time. To fix this issue, I import the video into VirtualDub 1.9.11 and Save the WAV file out.

Each time I place the footage into VirtualDub, it lets me know that it has a non-zero start position on the audio and is offset by 476 samples (20ms). The audio seems to save out to a WAV correctly, however. I cannot find the specific output settings from VirtualDub, but the resulting file is STILL not able to be played by Premiere Pro CS6. It reads as completely silent, no waveform at all, though VLC plays both the original file and the new WAV file perfectly fine.

As another hassle, I have to import the WAV file into Adobe Audition (where it is read correctly) and export it as an MP3 file, finally resulting in a playable file. I have not tested other export methods from Adobe Audition and it is possible other options other than MP3 are available.

Now that I finally have playable audio, things have worked well.

Until this final session, bringing me to the second issue. While editing this session's file in Premiere CS6, the video seems to get "out of sync" with the audio. Again, they are the same exact length, and moving the edit point manually with a click seems to sync them up again, but as the video players, the video seems to "outpace" the audio, moving faster. I figured maybe it would be fixed on render, so I edited, rendered out the file, and watched it.

The rendered file now goes about 4-5 seconds before "skipping ahead" to catch up with the audio, and generally having very confusing and poor playback. I'm at my whit's end on what to do with this, and frustrated at my ongoing issues to get the audio into Premiere.

I have a feeling it may have something to do with Premiere expecting 30 fps, but not always getting it due to the slight lagging of my screen capture from the game server being run locally. I don't know how to test this, however, but the symptoms seem to make this hypothesis logical.

I know it's quite a wall of text, but if you guys could help with any or all of this, I'd appreciate it. Any further issues, I'll take to respective boards for various softwares if need-be. Just wondering if maybe there is a simple codec problem I'm dealing with, or something more.

Thank you.

[Ann Bens]

Yes it is a codec problem.
Xvid is a codec that wont edit very well. Its designed to play video not edit it.
Convert the file to something Premiere likes before bringing it into Premiere.

[Daniel Gast]

What would be a preferred format to minimize the quality loss from the conversion? What formats does Premiere play nice with? And thank you for your quick reply!

[Ann Bens]

I do not know if you can set a codec for the screencapture program.
I use Camtasia and have it set to avi with the Lagarith codec which is lossless.
Adobe Premiere Pro Help | Transferring and importing files
You might be able to convert the file Adobe Media Encoder to Lagarith.
Lagarith Lossless Video Codec

[Daniel Gast]

Thank you so much for the help, going to try this out. Quick followup question that may or may not be related:

I store all my footage on an external USB hardrive. When I first import the footage into Premiere, there are no problems. I can edit, view, save, export fine. However, when opening the file at a later date (the hardrive is never removed or unplugged) the footage comes up as all black, or audio only, or "Media Pending".

I have found no sure-fire way to fix this, and it's QUITE annoying, as I just spent 1/2 hour rendering a video only to see black footage for all but two segments. And yes, those two segments are located in the same exact folder as the other footage. As is the audio, which also rendered correctly.

Does Premiere do this often? Is there something I can fix? Is it because of the XviD codec? Thank you.