Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 export problems

[dponce80]

Hello. Let me start by saying I'm not 100% sure this is the right place for this question. I think so, but I'm not sure.

Ok, I have a miniDV camera, but no DV capture device on my computer. So what I've done, is get my footage on my computer using my ATI All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro card. Using the packaged software, I get an mpeg2 file at 8mbps. The quality, if I make a DVD with no editing, is superb. I do, however, want to edit my footage.

I have Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 with the Mainconcept Plugin. I do a few fade-ins, fade-outs, cropping and what not, directly on the mpeg2 file with no problems. The problems appear when I'm done and try to export.

The file I get is of lower quality than the original, and it annoys me. There are so many settings, I don't know what to do to get it to work fine.

See, this is the problem. It's choppy, like the fps is very low. Like 15fps or something. And the image is ugly. It doesn't have the sharpness and quality of the original. I tried so many settings. VBR (4, 5, 6 and 8mpbs average) 1 and 2 pass. Still bad. I tried encoding at a CBR of 8mbps with deinterlace, and this gave me my best results so far, but it's still kind of ugly. I've tried so many settings, and I can't help shake the feeling there's something basic I'm missing.

Anyone had these sort of problems and managed to fix'em?

[BJ_M]

go out and buy a $15 firewire card and capture DV (transfer)


mpeg is not meant for editing .... you are killing the quality

[dponce80]

I will in the future, but right now I'm stuck with these files, and have no access to the original DV source. Now, the thing is, if I use a program like TMPGenc DVD Author to simply crop stuff then burn a DVD this way, the quality is fine. But TMPGeng DVD Author is too basic a program. I want to do more than just cut stuff out.

I author my DVDs with Adobe Encore DVD, but that program only deals with already edited source files. So I need to get my files in shape before.

I want to use Adobe Premiere Pro. It seems like a good program. Should I export to AVI, edit, then recompress? Will I lose even more quality this way? I really need the help of someone familiar with this program...

[Zetti]

I assume you don't have the Main Concept MPEG2 plug-in for PP, right ? So, it means that PP is stucked in a DV environment, it'll encode everything to DV "inside" it and later, at the export step, it'll return to MPEG2.

So, your files are going through MPEG2 - DV- MPEG2.

If you wanna make MPEG2 editing in PP, you HAVE TO get the MC apropriate plug-in, built specifically for that. It promises to reencode only the parts that have been touched, not touching the parts that haven't been edited.

Zetti

[dponce80]

Hi Zetti,

actually, I DO have the Plugin. The actual, 350$ (The HD version) plugin. It gives PP the ability to handle MPEG natively. It's supposed to just re-encode the parts that were edited... but i dunno. I dont think it's doing it right, or maybe I'm doing something wrong. Whatever the case, I dont think it should take as long as it does re-encoding the thing if it was really only working on the parts that I edited.

Anyone successfully used this plugin yet??

Anyone?

[edDV]

If I were you, I'd head over to the Mainconcept MPEG Pro Plug-in Support Forum

http://forum.mainconcept.com/viewforum.php?f=35&sid=85a71fa31dc5f0cccd16b6899b7176f7

I don't have the plug-in but the quality and speed looked excellent at NAB.

[Deekkeed]

Dponce80

Since you have an ATI All-in-Wonder 9700 you could use VirtualDubMod to do your capturing to AVI using the Huffyuv codec. That would eliminate the first quality loss from capturing to Mpeg2. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder 7500 and I have had pretty good luck capturing that way. Every bit of quality you save in each stage, the better the final product will be.


Deek