DV -> Premiere Pro -> DV is recompressing. How specifically to avoid

[Colmino]

Well well. I've already exported hours of DV video from Premiere Pro, thinking that it was just passing the data along. But I wised up and decided to actually take a close look at what it was spitting out. It turns out that it has indeed been recompressing the video. I admit I was fooled. The recompression happens so quickly that I mistook the minor delay as general software inefficiency. And the newly-compressed video is really only subtly different. (But that difference is important since PPro is also crushing the blacks/whites - a topic for a different thread.)

Now, I have read that Premiere Pro is supposed to be able to pass DV data untouched, so long as no image-modifying filters have been applied. All I did to any of my projects was edit out footage - modifications which should not make any difference whatsoever to intraframe video with a fixed bitrate. Yet PPro decides it wants to recompress. I suppose that unchecking the "recompress" box is not actually important, since doing so does not in fact prevent recompression. I must be missing something. I truly pray that I am, because it would be quite bad indeed if I were to need to start all over in a different application like Sony Vegas. A solid week of re-editing would ensue.

Help. ;p

[JohnnyMalaria]

Something is wrong with your configuration/project settings etc.

Are your source material and destination of the same format? e.g., are the audio formats the same (32kHz/12-bit vs. 48kHz/16-bit) or aspect rations etc?

[Colmino]

It imports DV 720x480, 32Khz 16-bit. It outputs the same.

Yet when I bring the output into AE and compare it (difference) against the original, out pops the compression noise. It's definitely recompressing, and I have no clue what I need to do to get it to stop.

I'd say two things are pretty clear to me at this point. 1: The only way I'm going to be able to save all the effort I've already sunk into this project is to render it as raw and deal with the bloat. 2: It's time to start saving up for Sony Vegas.