Adobe Premiere & Premiere Pro discussions from 2004

[Roger Golub]

Richard:

Sorry for taking a while to get back... The day job and all of that.


Have you removed the DV500 and the Pinnacle software? If not, try that - at least uninstall the software and just ignore XP when it gets all excited that it found something new....

Run it for a while.

If the problem goes away (and yes, these intermittent problems are really annoying), then it's something in the Pinnacle system. You could then pop over to the Pinnacle forum (http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=4&SectionID=12) to see if they can help.

If it doesn't go away - then you've got a Problem with PP. I've not had much luck with Adobe tech support, although I think they have a sponsored forum, someone there might be able to help.

Another tactic would be to see if you get a specific error on your BSOD. If so, copy it down and run a google search with the error terms and perhaps add "Athalon" and "Windows XP" or any other keyword that you can think of.

It's likely someone else has dealt with this before. I often get at least hints on how to fix problems that way.

Also, if you haven't tried it - take your PP defaults away from the Pinnacle options (use generic DV). This can also help isolate things and it's faster than pulling the board and uninstalling the software.

Good luck!

[Richard Lewis]

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

I shall try the options you have suggested.

My life has been full of intermittent and very annoying problems with DV500 and Premier.

[Roger Golub]

Welcome to the club.... If and when I upgrade this machine, I'm going to move to another NLE. I'm in general pretty annoyed with Adobe. Their support is abysmal. There policies for licensing worse. I really don't want to be stuck with XP if I don't have to - I prefer Win2K and most likely, the next versions Premiere and Photoshop will only run on Longhorn (assuming, of course, they actually ship it in our lifetimes). If Photoshop wasn't the industry standard for stills, I wouldn't use it. Since Premiere has some really strong competition in the video world, I will avail myself of it. After I finish paying off the new Nikon D100.

Sigh.

Let me know if you need additional wild goose chases.

[Pete Bauer]

Maybe this is bunk, but if it crashes so hard it doesn't even give you a BSOD, I'd lean toward believing it is a fundamental hardware problem. On XP, check the system log in the Administrative Tools; just maybe there will be a clue there as to what's making it unhappy...if not, it probably isn't software. I do agree that you ought to remove all extra hardware and its software (SB, Pinnacle, etc) to track down the culprit.

Failing that, here's just a shot in the dark ... but since you have a new system it may be worth a try. My ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard is P4 hardware, but I suspect the MB manufacturers have similar circuitry in the "guts" of all of their boards.

Anyway, I found that using automatic BIOS settings for memory timings caused incessant, random BSOD's. I manually entered the correct timings per the memory manufacturer's specs (in this case Corsair TwinX), and the system became rock stable. I noticed also on Corsair's web site that the memory timings for their DDR sticks were different for AMD and Intel processors. I suspect that the ASUS board's automatic memory timing function either had overly aggressive memory timings programmed in or misread the memory's timing capabilities. Even if your MB is from a different manufacturer, it might be worth a try.

FWIW, I don't happen to share Roger's opinion about either XP or Adobe. I use Adobe Vid Collection Pro 2.5 on a 3GHz P4 machine VERY happily. I was slow to adopt XP from Win2K Pro, but I REALLY like XP's additional functionality and ease of use. (One tidbit though...I join the chorus on the online world in saying "disable Indexing Service!")

Seems to me that Adobe is about on par with any other major software company in terms of bugs and customer support. I don't use GoLive, but sounds like a lot of people have had severe crash problems with it. There have been bugs in previous Adobe products I've used, as with Microsoft and everyone else's software. I've observed zero crashes so far with Vid Collection 2.5 -- or anything else -- in a few weeks of hard use and it is a joy to use (given that I'm already familiar with the Adobe interface). The only "bug" -- which really is a graphics card OpenGL issue -- is that After Effects 6.5 Pro needs a very simple manual tweak to an *.ini setting to install properly if you have >1GB of RAM. Adobe posted an explanation of what the issue was, with that simple workaround, on their message board almost immediately...can't complain about that.

Best o' luck on the crash problem.

[Jason Morris]

Here's my question(s):

Working an internship this summer collecting a bunch of footage (using an XL1S) for an employer who will eventually be editing it with Premiere. We'd like to pull the raw footage off of the MiniDV tapes and store it on DVDs. (Would like to do this because we don't have enough hard drive space to store all of the video clips and would like to reuse the tapes.) The idea then would be that when we get around to editing we'd just capture video clips from the dvds rather than capturing from the tape, etc . . .

Is such a thing ever done? Can it be done? If so, how would I do it in Premiere? Would I just capture the video and copy the captured video files to dvd? Should I copy the scratch disks?

[Jason Morris]

One additional question related to my other post:

I'd like to take video files that were captured with Premiere Pro and edit them in FCP. Is this possible? If so, how would I do it?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Kim Denby]

I do not claim to be any kind of digital expert, as I have only been using the digital format for the past year and a half.
It is my understanding though, that making a DVD changes the video file format. It is no longer just an avi.....it's now VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS and you are not able to just export that into the timeline.
The only solution (I've found) to get it back into the timeline is to copy the DVD back on to mini dv tape...as through a stand alone dvd player with output to your mini dv camera in VCR mode, or a mini dv deck.
I suppose you'd save on using a lot of mini dv tapes for storage if you didn't intend to go back and use all the footage you store on DVD's, but it is more work to get the footage back into the timeline, with the additional step of re-recording.

I'm suppose some editing computers can play the DVD's with an output back to tape, mine does not.

I just save my master edits on tape as well as DVD...that way I can just copy the DVD's if I need more, and if I need to re-edit, I just capture the edit master tape back into Premier.

Hope this helped.

[Roger Moore]

Ken, I don't think he wants to make DVD's that can be played on a standalone dvd player, he just wants to store raw data on DVD's the same way you'd back up all different kinds of files to a CD or a Zip or tape or HD or another storage medium.

As for backing up to DVD's, it may save you some money but do you really want to spend all that time burning and later transferring back again to a hard drive? Hard drives are not that expensive you know.

I download tons of stuff, and I used to burn DVD's to free up space whenever the hd reached full capacity. However, I found that burning and keeping track of the growing pile of DVD's was often a time-consuming headache. Now I rarely use my burner for that reason. When I run out of space, I just run out to the computer store and buy another hard drive!

I have 3 maxtors (160 gb) which take turns plugging into my laptop via firewire or usb, and it saves me so much time. No burning and swapping discs, but best of all no worries about maintaining an index to catalogue the content on your discs.

If you're lazy like me, then convenience, I believe, is sometimes worth paying a little more for.

[Rob Lohman]

Jason: one tip: do *NOT* recycle DV tapes. Just don't do it.
Ofcourse you want reasons, so here you go:

1) DV tape is cheap. Don't safe money there

2) DVD's and harddisks are much less reliable than a good stored tape. Keep backups of your hard shot footage!

3) Writing multiple times to a DV can seriously corrupt your footage if signal bleeding happens. Yes, people have had this

What you want to do is very easy and has nothing to do with
Premiere unless you already started editing. What you do is
indeed simply burn the captured AVI files directly to a DATA DVD
(DVD-ROM ISO in Nero). Nothing more, nothing less.

If you have Premiere projects you can copy those on the disc(s)
as well. When you continue editing it will ask where all the
footage is, but that's normal.

I can get a 120 GB harddisk (IDE) cheapest at around $75
or something. So I'm not sure why you are wanting to re-use
DV tapes (which are quite cheap) and go through all this
hassle when even a harddisk isn't that expensive anymore.

But, if you still want to do it like that you can...

But is there a program that could rip this format into raw video, or something like that. Is there another format that premiere would recognize that would keep a good quality.

Anyone know any ripping programs for a raw format the premiere can read?

[Kim Denby]

I knew some of the people who've used digital longer than me would have better answers....... my husband (a.k.a. my own personal techsupport) says the same thing about how inexpensive hard drives are now, and storage isn't a problem.
I have been in video production since 1985, and I have the 2000+ SVHS tapes in storage to show for it.
Tape is cheap compared to the pain and woe of re-using a damaged or worn out tape to master to or record on......hence my tape collection.
Oh well, some women collect shoes, some collect men, I collect music and video.........

[Ed Smith]

Hi Jason,

Premiere Pro can import and export Quick time files which FCP can read. I also have a feeling that it can directly capture to QT, although not entirely sure.

If FCP can import standard AVI files then there should be no big problem.

Cheers,

[Richard Lewis]

Thanks Pete. All your suggestions shall be noted, and translated by a friend who is far more technical than me in these aspects of computing.

[Jeff Klein]

Hi all,
Decided to stop banging my head against a wall and just ask those in the know <G>. I'm trying to capture some VHS-C footage my son took on his youth group trip using Premiere 6.0.1 and would like to know the best settings to use.

The camera is a Panasonic PVL453 VHS-C and I'm using the AV output cable (composite video) into an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro card with the nice little breakout box. I'm using the NTSC 720x480 Video for Windows preset (just picked one that looked right) and tried both the Cinepack Codec by Radius and the Microsoft Windows Media Video 9 settings for compression but my resulting clips show up as 320x480 instead of 720x480.

The camera specs simply state it's resolution as "EIS Standard (525 Lines, 60 fields) NTSC Color Signal"; am I just using the wrong setting? Another weird thing is that from the capture window I can see the video but hear no sound, but when I hit 'record' the video freezes but the sound appears. When I play back the clip I find it did actually record both sound and video, but it's squished narrow at 320x480. It stretches out again if I drag it to the timeline and play it, but it's kinda fuzzy looking (might just be a monitor window thing, like DV doesn't look great but renders fine).

My computer is a Win2K Pro PIII 800MHz, 256 RAM, dual drive (5400 primary, 7200 record drive), with the ATI All-in-Wonder Pro graphics/capture card. Any help with settings would be appreciated. I know I could record to my Sony DCR-TRV520 and firewire it in there, but I'd still like to learn how to direct capture it (unless the first method would yield better quality?).

Thanks,
Jeff K.

[Rob Lohman]

You need to capture in the native form that comes from the ATI
card. 99% chance that it is MJPEG. It's been a real real long time
since I did any analog capture in Premiere but you must make
sure you do not have it set to DV.

Try it with MJPEG and if that doesn't work try to post as many
capture settings as you can. Hopefully that will spark my mind
a bit as to what was needed to get this running.

Also, with analog capture you usually have to setup the Analog
board as well. So there should be a control somewhere in Premiere
or in its capture tool to go the capture board preference screen.

Make sure those settings are correct as well.