i'm having problems with how Premiere pre-renders... i think.

everything looks fine in the Display Window as long as nothing is pre-rendered. But most staff here have to pre-render... this is when the problems appear.

SETUP
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CS4 Suite 4.0.1
WinX64 Pro 64bit SP2
Xeon Dualcore 2.83GHz
4 Gig RAM
NIVIDIA Quadro FX 1700

All media is square pixel, all the templates used are square pixel. all output is square pixel.
Image size is 720x540 and 864x486.

PROBLEMS
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1) pre-render footage (green line above timeline) using I-Frame Only MPEG, all media in the display window scales slightly in from the left/right edges of the frame (similar to D1 media scaled to DV format).

2) pre-render footage using Microsoft AVI, media is scaled outside the display window significantly (like 16:9 over 4:3)

a nifty followup problem is that:

3a) if one pre-renders using Microsoft AVI, then attempts to Export, Premiere will crash.
3b) if one pre-renders using I-Frame Only MPEG, then Exports, Premiere does not crash.

~

if it was j-u-s-t me, i wouldn't bother with pre-rendering. but there are others here who need to. Anyway, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a Display Window to function in a WYSIWYG manner.

are the problems in #1 and #2 documented somewhere? or is CS4 still getting the bugs worked out?

temp deleted (testing possible fix)

Can i assume that the pre-renedered files aren't the same as your project settings in PPRo?
There shouldn't be a green line for pre rendered material brought into an existing project..There should be a red line for pre rendered clips that aren't the same as the project settings.

Are you using a Matrox card?

Can i assume that the pre-renedered files aren't the same as your project settings in PPro?
There shouldn't be a green line for pre rendered material brought into an existing project..There should be a red line for pre rendered clips that aren't the same as the project settings. Are you using a Matrox card?

we have a Blackmagic card for broadcast monitoring, but i think we've figured out the problem, just doing a bunch of tests to confirm.

LATER

ok, to recap:
everything we work with is in square pixels. we recently shifted to 64bit workflow. this caused some problems. lost some codecs (still waiting for IT to install Huffyuv/Lagarith for instance).

anyway...

Premiere Video Previews offers two formats: Microsoft AVI and I-Frame Only MPEG.
Premiere defaults to the first codec in the list, which is DV 24p Advanced. THIS is what caused the distorted display problems.

We changed the codec to Microsoft Video 1 and Video Preview now displays correctly. And in a follow-up I found this posting at Adobe Forums which covers almost all the same problems and also lists the solution, tho the topic devolves after a bit:

referenced from Adobe Forums: Arjun_Coolarj10_Mehta (november 2008)
Adobe Forums: Rendering project messes up the program... (http://forums.adobe.com/message/1741004#1741004)

Rendering project messes up the program monitor display
...once I render any portion of my timeline, the video appears to be stretched and offset in the video panel. Meaning, the video is not centered on the screen, and is pushed off to the side, so I can see only see the top left area of my video, and it is stretched instead of in the correct aspect ratio. When I click on the video screen or try to begin editing or delete the render files, it looks fine again. Also, even though the preview in Adobe Premiere Pro looks offset when rendered, the Adobe Media Encoder still encodes the video properly without it being offset...
This was what we experienced.