Hi all,

I am resetting up my computer that keep giving me problems with my third HD. I read information on Adobe's forum about scratch disks and how to set them up. I still don't fully understand how to set this up. I have the OS on a single drive as drive C:. All my programs are on the D: extended partition. A 500GB 7200rpm blank disk eSATA and 2 500GB disks internal as RAID 0. I tried importing from my new Sony FX7 camera in HDV mode. It captured with out Delayed write errors this time but the audio is out of sink. I wanted to make sure first that I have the scratch disks set up correctly if that is the problem. Could someone explain each of the setting under scratch disk preferences...
Captured Video
Captured Audio
Video Preview
Audio Preview
Media cache
DVD Encoding

Currently I have it setup this way.....

Captured Video is on RAID 0
Captured Audio is on the single blank I call scratch disk
Video Preview is on the RAID 0 disk.
Audio Preview is on the single blank I call scratch disk
Media cache is on the single blank I call scratch disk
DVD Encoding is on RAID 0 disks.

What are the captured Video and captured audio settings? Are these the actual place where the captured Video and Audio from my camera is going to be stored?

Thanks in advance for any advice,

John Gerard

There is nothing wrong with your disk setup. You didn't tell whether you use CS3.20 If not, download the latest update for CS3. Versions 3.00 and 3.01 were not very good at capturing, often causing out of synch problems. 3.20 remedies that. However it also introduces red frames when dropped frames occur. You could try capturing with HDVSplit, which also gives you scene detection.

Hi,

I will try some of your suggections. I tried capturing video on my sister Apple G4 with dual 800Mhz cpu's and a single HD. It captured from my camera via HDV just find. This was using Imovie HD6. I noticed that the program stated that it was capturing at 1/4 real time. I was under the impression that this could not be done. But I know now it can. I would like to find a program that can throttle back the capture speed if needed. Then I could capture uncompressed HD without having to have expensive hardware. My system is not that slow if it was not for the specs reported for capturing Uncompressed HD. Although I don't know if uncompressed HD is going to be that much better quality in any case. IIt is something like 6 to 10 7200rpm HDs and I think a quad core processor. I have been told that my system will work ok for HDV but the spec for that are pretty high. From what I had heard and from my experience Premiere Pro will work just fine on a slightly slower computer except for the capture process. I was able to capture Standard def on a Sony notebook with an external USB HD in Premiere Pro 1.5 with no problems. I get to confused over what will work and what will not work.
Do you have any good web sites what will actually explain the Premiere capture settings? I will like to learn exactly what each setting does in detail?

John Gerard

Hi,

I am running Premiere Pro CS3 version 3.2.0.
I tried running the Mpeg file in Windows media player and everything was in sync. I tried again to create a new project and import the Mpeg file 11Gig. and in the timeline the Audio is out of Sync. I have only worked with AVI files in the past.

John Gerard

HDV is tape based. Capturing from tape is always real time. There is no provision in the camera to adjust the tape speed. Capturing uncompressed HD can only be done with HD-SDI, which requires an AJA or Blackmagic card and a very fast raid array, since the data rate increases from 25 Mb/s for HDV to 1.485 Gb/s for uncompressed HD 4:4:4.

Try capturing the HDV material with PP and HDVSplit instead of importing from another source. This happens in real time. Then wait for PP to finish conforming the audio and indexing the video, have a cup of coffee. Once both tasks have finished, check whether you still have the out-of-sync problem.

Do you have any good web sites what will actually explain the Premiere capture settings? I will like to learn exactly what each setting does in detail?
My suggestion is to leave PremPro alone all together when capturing. What happens is, PremPro eats up most of your resources just doing nothing, especially if your PC is anything slower than NASA supercomputers. HDV should give you no trouble at all since it's the same bitrate as good old DV - as Harm explained, it's only 25 Mbps. Even an old, old PC should be able to capture that. I captured HDV using HDV Split with computers as slow as 1.5GHz single AMD processor and only 512 MB RAM - and CPU usage was barely noticeable at 5% or so. Capturing DV or HDV is nothing more than a file transfer.

Some of the best things in life are free, remember? HDV Split is one of them, and PremPro does absolutely nothing more than Split when capturing, except leaves your resources alone so you can capture without any problems.

Hi,
I tried HDsplit and it imported correctly with no problems. I only got a few red frames at each split clip point. The clips ran fine up to the split point end of each clip. So I will use HDSPLIT from now on for capturing HDV. PP will not even split HDV even if it worked.

John Gerard