Hi all,

I've just bought a new camera and now I'm having strange capture problems in Premiere Pro. The camera is a Samsung SCD27.

Whats happening is that I can not capture an in point to out point. The camera goes a little bonkers playing at slow speed and then I get an error telling me that Premiere can't find the in point and to try increasing the pre roll. Well, I increased the pre roll and still no dice.

First I thought it was my cheapy firewire card so I bought a new Adaptec Fireconnect 4300, but still the problem persists. If I do a down and dirty capture it works fine, but thats a pain in the neck. I'm really looking to solve this problem.

Update: It seems Vegas seems to dislike in point to out point edits as well. Down and dirty capture works fine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Eddie

I have a Samsung SCD55 and it's a piece of crap. The deck control is poor as the camera will lose communication sometimes and can only do a few commands through firewire deck control. You can trick it by pushing the buttons on it to manually cue things up for batch capture... that works with Final Cut Pro. It kind of works with Vegas.

My camera also gets dropouts and has some really annoying quirks that make it bad for capturing.

My model is an old one and hopefully Samsung fixed their deck control issues with the newer cameras. But you could try pushing the buttons on the camera to try to manually cue things up for batch capture. Rewind before the in point and hit play. You might want to turn the display on your Samsung camera so it'll tell you what the camera is trying to do.

2- What do you mean by down and dirty capture?

Glen,

Thanks for the tips. I'll give them a try today.

Down and dirty capture is the term I use for capturing with out using in and out points. You just let the tape roll and hit record in your capture software.

Thanks,

Eddie

The plot thickens. After 45 minutes at Best Buy's service counter this morning I left with this advice: reinstall the Toshiba software, then try to connect the camera. We had tried a JVC camcorder and as usual my notebook wanted to install the non-existant drivers. It was only when it made the same request of his USB wireless device that he realized this was a sick puppy, not an ignorant client. But here's the kicker. The Toshiba rescue process includes NO option to reinstall non-destructively, as does XP on a desktop. I have to trash every app and all the data I've brought into it over the past ten days just to determine if it's a bad install or a bad laptop. If it doesn't deal properly with the camcorder plug in by firewire after the "repair" they'll give me a new one. Oh happy day. If I could charge somebody for the hours involved I wouldn't have a gripe, but you know who's paying for the time.

David Hurdon

I’m trying to put a transition on a psd file… it’s a logo that I made with a transparent background… When I preview it in Hfx window it looks perfect but when I render it out in Premiere it does not show the transparency, It does the effect only with a white background… I’m guessing that it has something to do with the A/B track on the timeline…

What does most everyone do on here for compression for the internet. I want to compress a 40sec. - 1min. video clip into quicktime format, but im not exactly sure what settings i should use.

Thanks-Curtis

I had the same problem when I had more than one audio clip on the timeline. Basically if I added an effect to the already existing soundtrack. In that case the sound could become "saturated" - go into clipping.

Solved by reducing the volume of the effects soundtrack.

Hope that was an idea.

Hmm I'm not sure how to check RAM usage.

Sorry - old post, but just read it.

Under Win XP, press ctrl-alt-del (once!) to get the task manager. That will show you physical memory present and allocated.

Well, it appears the problem was a bad retail install. After reformatting with the Toshiba rescue disks the notebook immediately recognized the VX2000 and allowed me to capture. I'm still having a bit of a wrestle with Premiere 6.5 though. It will play clips in their own clip window without rendering but in the monitor view the clip stalls fatally. I'm pleased that I didn't buy this unit as my main editing station, but I'll be more pleased when I can edit on the go when I want to.

David Hurdon

If you have a PC, your best bet is to download Windows Media Encoder for free and use that. Great quality and compatibility (compatibility isn't perfect though).

If you want to output QT, the pro codecs will give you better results but that costs money. With the stock settings, the following codecs work well:
sorenson3 for video (no reason to use anything else unless you need better backwards compatibility before QT5)

Audio:

IMA 4:1 is lossless on most sounds. The codec assumes that sounds won't change too much and spends less bits encoding material. On highly dynamic sounds (i.e. gunshots) you will hear a difference. Poor compression.

MPEG4 audio is great, but requires QT6. You can adjust bitrate to tradeoff quality vs size. At high bitrates it will be virtually impossible to tell the difference.

Qdesign music is similar to MPEG4 but offers subpar compression. QT3 compatible.

2- Frame size: whatever floats your boat really. 320X240 is the maximum I would ever do.

3- Frame rate: Half fps motion looks smooth to me. I would usually halve the frame rate.

4- Keyframes: Higher means better compression, but too high and you will get degraded video before the next keyframe hits. It's usually ok to leave this on default and it's not worth your time tweaking this IMO.

5- Quality slider: This should be somewhere low, around 11-44 for sorenson3. An alternative is to use the limit bitrate to options, which I have never gotten good results with (feel free to experiment, I was never very thorough with that setting).

I'm not sure how Premiere works again but with QT Pro you get all the options above.

Hi Pat,

Please provide us with some more info:

How is you timeline set out, i.e. where are your clips, what clips have what effects etc.

Are you using any hardware assistants?

What version of Premiere?

Have you tried it in different video tracks? or in a different project?

Any other further info you might have would be useful.

Thanks,

Hi Chris,

I don't know whats happening there Chris.

What happens if your camera is not attached/ turned off when editing? Does it still skip?

What are your settings in Premiere?

Are you running premiere on its own?

Do you have any programs running in the background?

Cheers,

Hi Pat,

Thats a tough question.

What you need to do is try and get a demo with all the possible cards you can. That way you can make a decision for yourself.

There have been many discussions about this sort of thing, so please try our search.

I must say i'm on the Matrox side. Canopus took a long time to bring out a stable version of drivers for premiere, and even now i'm not to sure that they are 100% correct.

cheers,

Dear all, expert, master...

I want to cut some 4:3 footage into 16:9
Is there any program specailly doing this job...
I am using Premiere 6.5 with Pinnacle DV-500...
Is there any function that i oversee that can do the job?

Thanks in advance,
Edmond

Hi david,

Thanks for the update. I'm Glad that you managed to sort it in the end.


Thanks,

Hi Edmond,

Simply add a letter box matte. This will crop the image top and bottom.

Steps:

Go to file menu> new> Adobe title designer
Click on templates, navigate to the matte folder
Selct Letter box matte
save and exit title designer
Drag matte from project bin to the top most video track which is free. i.e if you have video in track 1, place it in track 2.
You might need to render.

Hay presto you should now be in widescreen...

Cheers,

Thanks Ed Smith,

But can i crop the image from 4:3 to 16:9 and then restructure the crop image to fit back to the 720x480 and put back to the widescreen platform...???

Am i asking too much... or is there any program outside can do the job... since this is only a hobby to me... 1k-2k program i can afford and play with... but if the program cost few thousand - i go back to my 4:3 screen...

Thanks...
Edmond

Whats the difference in premier pro 1.5 and premier pro 1? 1.5 has 24p capturing correct. Does it make a difference on the TV? Also, Has anyone captured footy in HD and put it into pro and watched in on a HD TV? If so, how does that look? Thanks
mike

I would lean towards Matrox as well.

i have adobe premiere pro and it is the best program however, i do have one fault to pick. When using the old version 6, if i deinterlaced then compressed to mpeg4 there was practically no loss and it was actually extremely difficult to spot the difference with the two clips. premiere pro renders about twice as quick and while this is great the quality is not and it isn't even worth using it. does anyone have any suggestions.

Justin

Can you edit with Adobe Premiere Pro by its self or with Adobe plus free add-ons or do you have to use products like the Cineform line (which looks great but has a price that will make me brownbag my lunch til 2007)

no, cineform give you real time transition, but is not necessary.
all the HD products have 2 features.
-capturing and converting or not into a workable format.
-editing and saving back to tape.

If you can transfer your video into a format readable by premiere (namely an .avi video with a supported codec) you do not need anything else.

For example, ulead provide an HD plugin for their software that allows capture and translation to a format readable by premiere.
Mainconcept has an HD plugin that capture and edit DV-HD directly into premiere pro.
both are a lot cheaper than cineform.
cineform is a great product, but at this price it is a dead end.

I currently edit HDV using Premiere Pro 1.5 with the Mainconcept MpegPro plugin. With a Pentium4 HT2.8GHz I can capture and export directly between the camera and the Premiere timeline, which is convenient.

Editing certainly works, but is a bit "clunky" due to the decoding effort the CPU is putting in - for example, I can't smoothly scrub the timeline. Smoother workflow is what may convince me to get Aspect HD, eventually.

But meanwhile, there's another solution, that I am fairly happy with at present: 1) Capture your HDV clips using whatever software you find convenient ; 2) Make a proxy copy of each clip to a CPU-friendly avi codec (I use TMPGExpress to batch process them all to Picvideo mjpeg); 3) do all your editing using the proxy files; 4) Just before your final render, swop back in the original HDV to replace the proxies (this takes all of about 10sec to do - it's EASY! - see the PPro helpfile for details); 5) go have a cup of coffee (or two) while it renders out.

great advice G & G:) Thanks.

1- Premiere 6.x could export to MPEG4?!

2- What settings are you using in Premiere Pro?

codec, bitrate, frame rate, size, interlacing, etc.

3- What are you trying to do? There probably is a better codec for what you're trying to do.

For some odd reason, I can't seem to export to Huffyuv from Premiere Pro 1.5.

Does anyone have the same problem, or better yet, a solution to this problem?

thanks for ur reply glen. premiere 6 dfinately could export to mpeg4 i have done it. i had three codecs to use and there was also divx to choose from which is the same as mpeg4 and these were perfect codecs in terms of quality and it was hard to find any differences. In premiere pro i have also tried the quicktime format and chose to compress mpeg4 through there and the render times doubled but the quality was equally as good as what i did with premiere 6. If you can suggest any free codecs that are better than mpeg4 then that would be appreciated but fact is i have seen mpeg4 do some great stuff with pleasing results so premiere pro should be able to do that also.

Thanks again
Justin

As a workaround you can export using the animation codec. It's also lossless, and I believe it allows an alpha channel.

Don't have PPro in front of me to see if it can export huffyuv.

1- What are you trying to do?
What kind of footage
What the target destination/audience is
How big should the encoded version be
Length
etc....

If you're just looking for the best quality compression (compatibility and editability be damned), then your best choices would be:

lossless:
huffyuv, animation are free.
There are some commercial codecs out there like microcosm that provide slightly better lossless compression. Windows Media I believe also does lossless, although I haven't tried.

Lossy:
Windows Media 9 (download Windows Media Encoder for free) *Reasonably easy to use, and FREE.
VP6 - http://www.on2.com/vp6.php3
???Xvid (don't know if it's very good)
Real Player

divX I tried and doesn't look very good at low bitrates compared to Windows Media.

MPEG4 generally isn't as good as the options above. The MPEG4 format is limited to a certain set of compression tricks so that not-so-powerful devices can decode MPEG4 streams.

If you can't easily tell the difference between frames, then in practical terms all codecs are the same.

Hi Graham,

I am very eager to learn your method that convert m2t to mjpeg. But I don't know much about computer. Can you give an example of how to make a proxy file and then how to swop back the original to replace the proxy file?

Thanks a lot.

hello all,

I have a problem capturing 24pa from my DVX100a with PPro 1.5. I am not sure if that's because of the 24pa or something else. My understanding is that 24pa is still converted to 29.97 so this shouldn't be the issue. Then what?

The funny part is that PPro 1.5 indicates that the device is online and DV control actually works, that is camera starts, stops, rewinds by pressing buttons in PPro1.5 capture window. But there's no output to the computer and at the top of capture window it says "Can't activate camera. Try resetting it" or something like that. I am about to edit a 24pa short in a few days and I desperately need help.

Hope to hear some great advises. Thanks.

Thanks, Glenn! I'll try that!

I know this is a newbie question but when using the slice tool it has proved inaccurate. It is not a matter of finding the right frame, it is perhaps a program setting or I am not using it right. Because I will find two our three frames on the joining splice where they are not suppose to be. Suggestions welcome. I am splicing from the monitor window using the "step forward (right)" and "step forward (left)" to find the exact frame. What silly thing am I doing wrong?

Hi Edmond,

Is there a reason for you to do this? It would make your life much more easier if you record straight to 16:9.

Most 16:9 TVs can detect whether the footage is letter boxed or not, it will then try best it can to get rid of the black bars.

The thing about cropping image and then enlarging it is that you will loose resolution.

What you can do is start a project that is 16:9 import you 4:3 footage into this project. Drag clips to timeline (it will appear horizontally squished. Right click on the clip in the timeline and choose video options> maintain aspect ratio. Then right click on the clip again and choose advanced options> pixel aspect ratio... From the list select D1/DV NTSC 0.9. This might then need to be rendered. What will happen now is that you will get black pillars either side of the frame.

I think that there are hardware solutions that might help?

Try a search, there are many threads on this sort of subject.

Cheers,

Hi Scott,

What version of premiere are you using?

To cut at the edit line (should then be frame accurate):

For Premiere Pro (depending on what keyboard layout you are using): Ctrl+k
If you have it on Avid keyboard layout then its: H

In Premiere 6.5 press F10


Hope this helps,

OK, the first step is to capture your raw mpeg footage as clips on the computer - probably these will be .mt2 files (depending on what software you use to capture). Ideally you should capture as a few longish clips rather than many short ones.

Then load the m2t files into some software that will allow you to convert them to avi files. Procoder, TMPGEnc XPress and Premiere (with the Mainconect MPEGPro plugin) will all do this, and there are probably other options too.

I use XPress, as it has a nice batch processing facility: I set the source as the m2t file and the output at "avi file". In the output screen you can specify any avi codec you like - huffey, picvideo mjpeg, morgan mjpeg, etc etc - it doesnt matter because these small, low-quality avi files do not get used in the final render.

Tell the software to encode the files (this happens at realtime speed with my Pentium 4 2.8GHz). Then load these newly created avi files into Premiere and edit as usual.

When you are happy with your final edit, go to Premiere's project window, right-click on the name of each avi file used in the project, and select "Unlink media". Then right-click on each unlinked filename and select "link media" - a browser will pop up that lets you select the original m2t file that corresponds to each avi.

Then render your project, and Premiere will use the original high-quality HD clips as it renders.

Be aware that to do it this way you MUST have the Mainconcept MpegPRO plugin installed, as Premiere has to be able to decode the m2t files.

A workaround (which adds an extra step but avoids the need to purchase the Mainconcept plugin) would be to use XPress to initially encode the m2t's to full-resolution uncompressed avis. Then make your small proxy avi's from these BIG avis, and then link back to the uncompressed avis (rather than the m2t's) prior to rendering.

Hope that makes enough sense to be helpful.

Just a little comment...

MPEG4 has taken a long time to become standardized, so there are a lot of different "flavors".

WM9, DivX, XVid are actually all different MPEG4 variations (with different quality)

you can also make a white still (whatever duration you need) and cross dissolve to it...

i seem to recall being able to capture time lapse footage using older premiere versions(ie: single frame every 10 seconds and the like) .... am i dreaming or just missing something in premiere pro? anybody have a solution if its not possible? (i can do it with my canon digital still camera but its not very efficient)

thanks,
marc

Hey there,

Here is my current configuration:

ASUS P4CDELUXE Motherboard (i875 chipet)
Intel Pentium 4C 2.4GHz Cpu
1GB DDR 400 RAM (2 x 512 matched pair)
2 x 36GB SATA 10,000 RPM drives (raid 0)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Video
Windows XP Pro
Use Premiere Pro 1.5 most of the time

Everything works great, no complaints EXCEPT for the time it takes to render or transcode video to DVD. Forget about it. A hour's worth of video is going to take about 2 hours to put onto a DVD.

I'm willing to upgrade but only if I'm going to see a marked improvement. Going from 120 minutes to 109 minutes isn't going to be worth it. A 50% improvement would be great of course.

If this is as good as I'm going to get then ok. I just thought I'd check.

Any recommendations?

but recording straight to 16:9 reduces vertical resolution by 120 lines. I'm certainly no pro but have heard others suggest that if you want to have 16:9 footage from a camera that houses a 4:3 ccd, then you should always record in 4:3 and then you can either just NLE it straight as 4:3 and let the monitor detect and compensate ( this gives the viewer much more control) or NLE with a letterbox.

well this may be a stupid question but i am using premiere pro to crop and image so i can be in the same shot twice. i get the video of me on both sides then move the camera. so i was hoping this would work so i captured my first bit of footage and in the preview window looked great so i export it as mpeg 2 and there was a black line through the center where the 2 met (i croped both 50%) so then i tired leaving track 1 full size and laying 2 croped 50% on to and still a black line. if i export as mpeg1 it works fine i think just because it is set to a little lower quility. anyone ever try this before or know how to make it work. please reply with any suggestion i got alot of footage and am willing to try anything!

ps. if i got to export and export a frame it dosnt show the black line

I'm very new to all this and having shot some footage for my first project and captured it into PP 1.5 I placed a few clips on the timeline, added some transitions and exported it to DVD.

Full of high expectations I dropped the DVD into the player and settled back to be wowed. The sequence looked awful. It was of a fellow playing old time fiddle music and was shot from a few feet away with plenty of closeups of the sawing bow and the musician nodding backward and forwards. There were bad ghosts, strobing and ugly stair-stepping.

Zounds. A quick check playing the material from the camera reassured me that the dough was well spent on the DVX100A. But how could this problem be? I'd used all the defaults in PP for capturing and encoding and that ought to do the trick.

A quick search in the forums revealed that if you capture one field first then you need to encode the same way. I remembered noticing that the program defaulted to capturing the lower field first and a quick check of the default settings for the codec showed that by default it was using progressive scan. Lots more things can be set in this program than I have the slightest understanding of but I found the place to set lower field first for encoding and re-exported the sequence to DVD.

Beautiful!

Thanks DV Info.

So how come the defaults aren't compatible?

What fps should I output from after effects to include with the DVX file setting in PPro 1.5

For example I have 24p normal footage shot with the DVX and I want to add a clip rendered from after effects. Should I render the file 29.97 fps, 24 fps, or 23.976 fps.

How will PPro1.5 know? Will it do the pull-up for the 23.976 footage from AE?

Help! "The Project Appears to be Damaged" error message

I have been working on a full length movie with credits, transitions and music for weeks and I finally finished yesterday. When I went to load the project file into Premiere Pro yesterday to do a few more tweaks it gave me a "The Project Appears to be Damaged" error message. I only have a much older (much less complete) alternate project file, which does still load.

I tried connecting the external hard drive the clips and the project files on are to another Win XP computer that has Premiere Pro and it gives me the same error. I still have all the titles that were created between the old version and the new, but re-editing all the transitions and sound and music will be hours of more work.

I believe that I have eliminated the obvious things that are likely potential cuplrits. For example, other projects load fine on either system, and I checked for viruses and my two computers seem to be working fine otherwise. The only other thing I can think of was that I installed a pc card firewire hub into my my Win XP notebook that I often edit on to try and send the signal to my mini-Dv camera and on to my 13" tv. But I took that out of the slot when that experiment was over and still the same problem.

Has anyone experienced this before? Is there any hope of me recovering the more complete project file?

Check for a backup copy in c/program files/adobe/premiere/project archive.
Sort by date and try the most recent one that opens. Once you are stabilized, find out where the page fault is and correct it. Then save as. Then save as again. Macromedia drills this into programmers. Than save as again.
Most common trouble seems to be virtual clips that get adjusted and premiere has a hard time dealing with a paradox of that nature.
Best of luck....

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@177.5ogXcLpyTNb.0@.3bb49731/83

Hi Nathan,

What happens if you export to an AVI file or back to tape? Does it look OK on a TV screen?

Its not by anyc hance the black underscan of the frame you are seeing?

Please tell us your settings, which you are using in Premiere.

Thanks,

Ed

Hi Marc,

I think Adobe decided to take out Timelapse capture and stop motion capture.

I guess you have 2 options:

1) Buy a camera that is capable of doing it, XL1s, XL2?, TRV900...

2) Capture in realtime and then manually cut the bits out you don't need.

Cheers,

well i put it on tape and watched it on a tv looks fine and avi looks fine.... guess i shouldnt have worried about it.

thanks for the help

nathen