Blockiness in AVI file

[tmann]

Hi,

I'm very new to all this, working on my second miniDV->DVD project. I woke-up this morning to check out the AVI that I exported from Premiere 6.5 overnight to find that it was blocky, pixilated, and during some scene transitions there seemed to be some "color noise" (does that make sense??). Here are the steps I've taken thus far:

1) miniDV cam to PC via firewire in Premiere 6.5
2) Edit in Premiere 6.5
3) Export Movie in Premiere (used all the default settings, eg, Microsoft AVI, 100% quality, 720x480, 29.97 frame rate, .9 pixel ratio, etc)

Any idea what's going on here? The video looked perfect when I rendered the work area in Premiere (shift-enter), but the resulting AVI is dissapointing. Perhaps this is normal and when I convert to MPEG2 w/ TMPGenc things will look better???

Please help if there is a better way to convert to AVI so I can load to TMPGenc. My goal is HIGH quality if possible. By the way, my system is fairly up to speed: P4 3.0, 1 Gig RAM, penty of disk space -- exporting the AVI out of premiere took about 4 hours I think for my 13 minute movie...is that about right??

Thanks in advance for your help!!
Tommy

[Baldrick]

Try frameserve direclty to tmpgenc with PluginPac FrameServer . Or get a mpeg2 plugin for premiere, like cinemacraft encoder or mainconcept encoder.

[tmann]

Will the frameserver work with TMPGenc Xpress? If so, I can definitely give it a shot. Any reasoning for why framserving shoudl solve my problem???

Anything else I could try? Perhaps I need to change the Premiere export movie settings???

I could try an MPEG2 encoder -- I actually have mainconcept which came w/ premiere 6.5 -- but I understand that TMPGenc will give me better results.

Thanks,
Tommy

[tmann]

Just to provide a little further clarification, the blockiness is most apparent during fast motion scenes. The little spurts of rainbow color (color noise?) occur only during transitions. There must be some sort of quality issue going on during conversion from premiere project to AVI???

Thanks for your help!
Tommy

[daamon]

Hi tmann,

Are you sure you're exporting to AVI? The reason I ask is that what you're describing sounds like the macroblock effect when a bitrate is too low when encoding (say, to MPEG), and this isn't something that's involved (as far as I know) with AVI.

I know (well, believe) that Premiere 6.5 comes with an MPEG encoder (MainConcept I think) - I wonder if it's somehow using that...?

Try selecting a DV AVI output, or the frameserving to TMPGEnc will (should) bypass any weirdness that Premiere is performing.

Hope that helps. Good luck...