Hi!

I am capturing video from my Sony TRV19, then compressing it with Xvid for archival, and then converting it into Sony DV format for editing and eventualy writing it back to the DV tape using my camcorder.

So what I am doing is:

1) Capture off camera into sony dv format (interlaced).
(Premier can play this back fine)
2) Compress into Xvid format for archival (interlaced).
(Premier can't play this back at all, but im not worried about this)
3) Convert from Xvid to sony dv when I need to edit it (still interlaced).
(Premier plays this back all messed up)

For some reason Premier does not seem to be able to playback the video properly, even though it can write it back to the tape properly and even though I can play it back fine in other players.

The file I end up with, which is in the sony dv format, plays back fine in other players and premier can successfully write it back to the tape in my camcorder. However, Premier does not seem able to play it back correctly: the sound play back fine, but the video is partially scrambled. By partially I mean that I can sort of tell what is going on, but it looks strangely blocky and jumbled up.

I have attached a screenshot.



The frame on the left is from within Premier at step 1.
The frame on the right is from within Premier at step 3.

I thought I was able to get around this by adding an extra step. I found the pinnacle DV codec on my machine so I converted from Xvid to Pinnacle DV, which Premier played back fine. The I tried writing back to the tape and my Camera LCD flashed up “Copy Inhibit!” and stopped recording after a few of frames (the half second of video looked fine on the tape though . Then I thought I’d be smart and convert from Pinnacle back to Sony (though I was beginning to worry about generational degradation by this point from all this converting) but when I tried to write the converted Sony DV back to tape it still flashed up “Copy Inhibit!”. Surprisingly smart…

So now I am shopping around for another DV format to try, but it would seem simpler to me to get Sony DV to work fine and cut out the extra conversion.

Any thoughts?