Capture timcode mismatch

[Stephen Knapp]

Is there anyone else here using Aspect HD 4.1.2 in Premiere Pro 1.5.1 (or 2.0) and running under Windows XP Home Edition that has run into this problem?

I have been having trouble with some HDV SD60P footage I shot with the JVC GY-HD100UA camera.

For reasons unknown, when I try to do a batch capture using the Aspect HD plugin in Premeire Pro 1.5.1, there is a timecode mismatch. That is, the capture clock runs twice as fast as the frame counter, so I can only capture the first half of a logged interval. That wreaks havoc in a serial batch capture.

When I use the Cineform capture utility HD Link, I cannot specify intervals or do an unattended batch capture, so I would like to get this to work in PremPro 1.5.1.

[David Newman]

Oopps! I didn't know anyone used SD60P, we haven't tested batch capture for this mode and is sound like is does work. All the HD modes work fine. I will file the bug.

[Stephen Knapp]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Oopps! I didn't know anyone used SD60P, we haven't tested batch capture for this mode and is sound like is does work. All the HD modes work fine. I will file the bug.

Thank you for the reply. Let me post here the rest of the problem I had with trying to capture the footage shot at that record setting in the JVC. This is a slightly edited version of what I originally posted as a thread in the JVC GY-HD100 section, but got only one response.

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I shot a project in SD60P inadvertantly (long story) and need to render it in widescreen. I am using Premiere Pro 1.5.1 and Aspect HD 4.1.2. For reasons I cannot understand, whenever I capture in Prem Pro using the Aspect preset for 720x480 60P it always captures it with a pixel aspect of .9 instead of the 1.2 that the preset specifies. The resulting image has horizontal distortion, and looks like a squeezed down widescreen image.

When I use the Cineform capture utility HD Link, I cannot specify intervals or do an unattended batch capture. However, this utility will allow a 1.2 pixel aspect for the captured footage. When I test run an avi of an HD LInk capture in Windows Media Player, it comes up as a widescreen image with no distortion. A capture from within Premiere Pro of the same segment of tape will run as a distorted image in Media Player.

The operating environment is Windows XP Home Edition, and in Windows Explorer the avi files for each of the two methods of capture are "recognized" as 720x480. Yet the linear dimensions of the two are clearly not the same when I run them in Media Player.

I have a work around for the problem which involves stretching the squashed images in After Effects, but the image is degraded after that -- not as sharp.

I HAD a Matrox RT.X100 in the system at first, and was routing the captures through that. But even after I removed the card and its support software, and cleaned out the links in Premiere Pro to it, I am still getting the distorted captures. When the Matrox was still in place, the HD Link captures were so unstable that they would cause Media Player to crash the whole system. I had crashes that required the reinstallation of both the Adobe and Cineform software. Three times.

I have been working with Tim at Cineform on this for a couple of months, but he apparently is not able to replicate my problem enough to help me troubleshoot it. One point he did make was that the SD60P is not really High Def. Aspect supports it, kind of, but since Aspect HD is about HD, this SD format is not one of the mains. JVC on the other hand lumps it in the HDV category, and so the default aspect is 16:9. My hunch is that the Aspect codec used in the plug-in for the preset available to me treats this as SD footage only and will only put it out as 4:3. That would mean it sees the footage as 480/60i instead of the 480/60P JVC intended. However, Tim reports to me that he was able to get a 1.2 pixel aspect capture while in Premiere Pro. If so, the problem is in something I'm doing and not with limitations in the software at all. I'm stumped.

Anybody got any ideas? I will be happy to give more specifics, just tell me what more you might need to know.

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I got a suggestion to use the "interpret footage" function in PPro in order to get it to view the pixel aspect as 1.2, and that seems to work. But it still does not address the problem that the capture is not done to spec in the first place.