Premiere and Divx (no flames plz :P)

[Vchat20]

Fairly simple question. Ive got about 30+ half hour long tv show episodes here. all in divx/mp3 format. I would like to take these into premiere for a small collage project im working on. Now ive found this problem before where Premiere absolutely does not play nice with divx in any way, shape, or form.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew of a half decent fix for the importing side of this short of re-encoding my source files. Due to limited drive space (downstairs computer has about 8GB free. upstairs has about 9GB free), I cant afford to re-encode them.

The only other solution I can think of is I do have wmv encoded version of these videos, but they are low quality (320kbps total, 320x240, 64kbps, 44khz, stereo audio) and I would only like to use these as an absolute last resort.

[guns1inger]

Are you editing or just joining ?

[Vchat20]

editing. im taking short clips out of the episodes and joining them up for a video collage.

[mpiper]

Are you using Pemiere Pro? If so, upgrade to 1.5 It works well with DivX. It doesn't always display onscreen that well, but if you render, it does composite, edit, etc. fine.

The other options (I've used these for serious editing) is either
A) convert to MJPG of DV via VirtualDub and then edit, or
B)open the DivX vid clip in the preview pane, fine the start and end points, mark them, then drag onto the timeline.

If you need more than a specific start and end, then converting is the only way. DivX is a method like MPeg, and does not have the full frame infor for every frame. Premiere is designed to do frame-accurate editing, so any codec that misses info does not work well for advanced editing.

[guns1inger]

Use virtualdub to cut out the small sections you need. Write them out to DV using the panasonic DV codec. Depending on how many clips and how long they are, you might still make it within your space constraints. Load up just these short clips into premiere for final editing.

You may find at the end of this you don't have enough space to create a DVD (if that is your intention) so you will have to start freeing up space at that point.

[Vchat20]

yeah. I might just go and do that with grabbing the clips with vdub. because I have also come to find that premiere is also sloppy with the audio. just importing a few episodes gave me over 7GB of data in the conformed audio folder. since I wont need any audio from the episodes, I could grab these clips sans audio in vdub and HOPEFULLY premiere will leave it be and I wont have too much of a space problem with this.

P.S. i am using 1.5 . but it still seems to have divx issues.

[Vchat20]

ok. seem to be having one tiny problem here. when trying to encode the clips with vdub and the panasonic dv codec, it keeps telling me that the source image format is unacceptable. any ways to get around this?

nvm. seems it wants a strict 720x480 resolution. the video was 640x480. added a resize filter and it encoded just fine.