.mpg file conversion

[serious_man]

Hi all,

Bought a cheap av to usb converter from Kmart to digitise some vhs tapes, and they are being made into .mpg files.
When I tried to drop these files into Adobe Premiere Pro they wouldn't process (I assume Premiere is not compatible with this file type).

I was wondering if anybody could recommend the best way to convert these .mpg files into something Premiere can use with minimal loss of quality.

Thanks a lot

[newpball]

If you want anything resembling quality you already made a mistake in the first step. "Cheap AV to USB converter from Kmart" does not rhyme with quality. And once it is bad it really only gets worse the more you mess with it.

Capture with a better quality unit, interlaced with a lossless or high quality codec and archive the results.

By the way Premiere Pro should work just fine with MPEG files (assuming the .mpg contains an MPEG video).

[serious_man]

Thanks newpball,

Yeah, I understand it's not going to be very good quality in the first place, sort of just looking to make do on a budget over the summer holidays until I can use the gear at my school again. The files don't have that extension in their name, but when viewing properties it says it's an mpg file....

edit: just added .mpg extension to file name and that didn't seem to make any difference

[LigH.de]

If you don't know why: Post a Full/Advanced MediaInfo report in text format as "CODE". So we can have a look and check which details might prevent Premiere from recognizing or accepting this file.

CLI: mediainfo -f yourfile.mpg > yourfile.mpg.txt
GUI: Debug - Advanced mode; View: Text; select all, copy (or: File - Export: Text, [X] Advanced mode)

Furthermore, if there is an error message, always quote it letter by letter. Sometimes applications allow to copy text out of dialogs by pressing Ctrl+C, you may hear a chime when it works. If not, Alt+PrtScr copies an image of the active dialog you can paste in any image viewer and save as PNG, to upload it as attachment.

[smrpix]

Is the name and model of your cheap converter a secret? Knowing it may help with advice.