No sound in Premiere timeline with FRAPS clip

[turbines]

I am having intermittent problems with no sound showing up in the timeline after importing a captured
FRAPS avi clip into Premiere Pro (CS3). The FRAPs clip is 1152 x 864 32 bit with a audio sampling rate
of 44,100 Hz. I set the the project properties in Premiere to reflect these properties. The FRAPS
clips all play fine if opened with VLC or other viewer. This problem cropped up all of a sudden. I
tried doing a reinstall / repair to Premiere but that did not help. Previous FRAPS projects that were
rendered in Premiere import into Premiere without problems.

[poisondeathray]

The FRAPs clip is 1152 x 864 32 bit with a audio sampling rate
of 41,100 kHz.

Typo ? 44.1Khz not 41.1Khz ?

[filmboss80]

Premiere was not designed to work with the the file type or parameters you listed. Period. No matter how many uninstalls, reinstalls or repairs you do, your problem won't be solved until you convert to a Premiere-friendly format.

[turbines]

Ok, thanks. How do I convert and which would be the best format?

[filmboss80]

I have never worked with FRAPS, so I don't know about conversion tools you might want to use. For standard definition video, Premiere is built to work best around a DV-AVI Type II workflow, although it is certainly not exclusive to that format. So, you'd have smoothest sailing with the DV CODEC. Audio should be in the PCM/WAV format, with a 48KHz sample rate, and 16-bit bit-depth. This is obviously for SD material.

For HD, Premiere works best with HDV. If you can find a way to get a FRAPS file to a legal HDV file, go for it. HDV specs can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV

Hopefully, others can post here with suggestions about conversion tools.

[poisondeathray]

Fraps footage should work fine in Premiere, just use matching custom sequence and project settings, and check that you have fraps installed.

The fact that it worked before suggests this to be true, and I did some quick tests on CS4 to confirm, and it works fine - I don't think CS3 would have any difficulty.

Make sure your export settings are the same specs as well (incl. audio sampling rate)

Try another clip, to rule out the possiblity that it's isolated to that clip, not a systemwide or software specific issue.

[turbines]

I converted the raw FRAPS files to DV-AVI Type II 48000 Hz using DVdate and was surprised that the file size was so much smaller. I was not expecting the file to be significantly compressed after conversion and suspect there was also a significant decrease in quality. That being said all of the files did import into Premiere CS3 without any difficulties. I am still curious as to why some folks don't seem to have any problems importing the FRAPS files directly into Premiere.

[filmboss80]

Since your FRAPs clip is 1152 x 864 and DV-AVI is 720 x 480 (NTSC), the converted clip will indeed take up less space and there will definitely be a downgrade in resolution. You're going down from high definition to standard definition.

Again, I am not familiar enough with FRAPS, but from what poisondeathray said, you can edit the original clip without conversions by simply maintaining the exact parameters (frame resolution, frame rate, audio sampling rate, etc.) of the original clip when customizing Premiere's project settings. (And you need to have FRAPS installed.) No need for downconversions to DV-AVI, apparently.

[poisondeathray]

Some things I would be cautious of if you choose to use DV-AVI as an intermediate for import/editing: most fraps footage is full range (0-255) RGB, and some DV-AVI conversions might not respect that, and of course DV is lossy, so you are losing quality, and will lose even more when exporting out of Premiere

One option if you can't configure it to work for particular clip, is to use a lossless intermediate such as lagarith or huffyuv. Of course the filesize will be much larger, but you minimize the extra generation loss incurred if you chose to use DV-AVI, as well as ensuring the proper RGB range

You mentioned uninstall/reinstalling Premiere, but did you try the same for Fraps?

[turbines]

I did try uninstalling and reinstalling both and that was no help. I did find that running the Fraps files through VirtualDub using Fast Recompress video setting and Direct Stream Copy audio settings allows the resulting files to open in Premiere without problems. Does that give us a clue as to what the problem might be?