Video quality is bad when exporting from Premiere Pro 2.0

[woody2136]

Hi all,

I'm new and already found the answer to one of the questions I had on importing MPG files after doing a search. This site seems quite helpful.

Thank you very much.

However, I haven't found why video quality suffers when exporting from Premiere Pro 2.0 to an uncompressed AVI.

The still frames export fine (like the PSD files I created for the intro), but the AVI I imported looks very pixelated when I export the whole movie. Within Premiere Pro the video looks great.

My export settings are set to an uncompressed AVI and the rendering settings are set to uncompressed. The file that results is 1.4GB for 24sec at 400x300, but the quality is much less than would be expected at that file size.

The MPG (640x480) is from a Sony DSC-V3 camera and then coverted in VirtualDub to an AVI of the same size and then imported into Premiere Pro. I split the video into 3 sections and faded them into eachother to shorten the video from ~70 sec to ~20. One of the sections is at 100% of the original and two are scaled to fit the 400x300 frame, but all sections look terrible in the exported movie.

The computer is a Dell with XP Professional, NVIDIA Quadro PCI-E, 3.2ghz and 2gb ram.

Any ideas on what the problem could be? Please let me know of any more information you might need...

Thank you very much in advance for any help.

[edDV]

Where did the 400x300 come from?

Does the Sony DSC-V3 use MJeg for movies like most still cams?

Assuming you have a 640x480 progressive MJPeg what did you do in Virtualdub? and what did you import to Premiere Pro 2.0?

I don't have Premiere Pro 2.0 but earlier versions supported MJeg 640x480 or uncompressed as an import. What was your Premiere Pro project format?

Tell us what you are trying to do and what steps got you into Premiere pro 2.0

I'm still wondering about the 400x300. Is that the target you have in mind?

[woody2136]

Thanks edDV,

400x300 is the target resolution, agreed upon by the higher ups, so I probably shouldn't change it.

I'm not sure exactly what goes on with the camera videos, but they're MPG files. How do I find out? I see nothing about the movie format other than it is MPEG2 compression and called "MpegMovieVX".

Here are the best reviews I found: http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/v3.html http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_v3-review/index.shtml

In VirtualDub, all I did was open the MPG and save as AVI.

Once I had the AVI, I imported it into Premiere Pro 2.0.

Here is an example screenshot of the source video vs what the exported video looks like: http://ericwood.net/files/qualityexample.jpg

And then here's the part that baffles me. When you play the video inside APP2, it looks fine unless you hit pause. The photo before was taken with playback paused and this one was taken during playback. http://ericwood.net/files/qualityexample2.jpg

Any ideas? I didn't have any of this trouble with the tryout version of 1.5.

[edDV]

According to the Steve's camera link MPeg VX is something like progressive Mpeg1 in the following sizes and frame rates.

VX Fine (640 x 480, 30fps)
VX Standard (640 x 480, 16.6fps)
HQX (320 x 240, 16.6fps)
Presentation (320 x 240, 8.3fps)
Video Mail (160 x 120, 8.3fps)

Try to keep the frames entact. Resize them as you see fit but don't interpolate them into a different framerate.

[woody2136]

That's somewhat odd, because the frame rate displayed in VirtualDub when I bring in the MPG straight from the camera is 25fps.

I could not find a way to change my current project from its (default?) 26fps setting, so I am creating a new one at 25fps to match the AVI from VirtualDub. When playing the AVI in Windows Media Player it looks fine, which leads to me to believe the problem comes from bringing the AVI into Premiere Pro and not in Virtual Dub from MPG to AVI.

Wish me luck.

[edDV]

That's somewhat odd, because the frame rate displayed in VirtualDub when I bring in the MPG straight from the camera is 25fps.

I could not find a way to change my current project from its (default?) 26fps setting, so I am creating a new one at 25fps to match the AVI from VirtualDub. When playing the AVI in Windows Media Player it looks fine, which leads to me to believe the problem comes from bringing the AVI into Premiere Pro and not in Virtual Dub from MPG to AVI.

Wish me luck.

The Euro model probably uses 25fps instead of 30. This should be in your manual.

[woody2136]

Eureka, we have success.

Thanks for the help. After the project frame rate was changed to match the input video it seems to be perfect.

Thanks again, that's something I never thought of as a video noob.