frame edit any format in premiere

[krohm]

i have premiere 4 and i have about 6000 different formats of video, a lot are blurays as well as a plethora of various non hd video formats that im wanting to load into premiere to edit with the goal to output several different formats, ie bd/hd, dvd/sd etc etc.

i have been advised i will need avisynth to load these various formats before i can start editing so to do this, to my understanding, i will need different scripts for each format im wanting to load.. i have no idea on how to do this so am needing some help on how to get this started.

pdr im sure u will reply, please just pm me and maybe you can help me directly im sick of posting here and getting nowhere. please someone i need some serious assistance with this project and i now have the time to undertake it. needing some major help. hope someone can get me started as i need to start clipping everything up and story boarding it.. cheers

[hech54]

im sick of posting here and getting nowhere.

Wow...thank you.

[filmboss80]

i have premiere 4 and i have about 6000 different formats of video, a lot are blurays as well as a plethora of various non hd video formats that im wanting to load into premiere to edit with the goal to output several different formats, ie bd/hd, dvd/sd etc etc.

Wow, 6000 different video formats! I never knew there were that many. Yeah, Premiere CS4 really seems inadequate since it works with only 17 different video formats (according to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405978.html).

You can search this site about frameserving in Premiere, but for the trickier formats, I suggest you convert most of your video clips to a singular, uniform format (preferably as lossless as possible) prior to editing in Premiere.

Keep in mind that your demands/requests/expectations/terms are fairly unrealistic, and that you're probably not going to get the hoped-for response from us. The problem is not us, it's you.

[krohm]

the problem is me? wow. what can i say to that. the problem is not to do with video. the problem is me. nice. really nice. not rude at all by either of you.

i actually originally posted saying i wanted to convert to a singular uniform format and was advised this is not the best way to go about it and to post again with specific requirements. so far both responses have been scarcastic rude and not helpful. really, nice. amazing

[Baldrick]

What did you expect when you wrote "im sick of posting here"....

But try also http://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/premierepro_previous

[krohm]

i believe i wrote, 'im sick of posting here and getting nowhere'

but hey, i guess that justifies these responses rather than responding to what ive written..

[filmboss80]

i believe i wrote, 'im sick of posting here and getting nowhere'

but hey, i guess that justifies these responses rather than responding to what ive written..

What part of "your demands/requests/expectations/terms are fairly unrealistic" did you not understand? How do you expect us to help you within the terms you have laid out? You may be offended by the blunt truth, but it isn't going to change the reality of the situation.

[poisondeathray]

Easiest way is to convert to a digital intermediate . Something lossless like ut video codec, or huffyuv . Another great option is cineform, but it's not lossless and not free, but performance is better . So if you have a relatively slow system, you can still edit HD material smoothly.

You don't need avisynth to do your project. But if you know how to use avisynth, you can use the premiere avs import plugin. But for big projects I would still convert everything to the digital intermediate. It will end up being a lot more stable as you run into memory issues (CS4 is 32-bit , and the frameserver consumes more memory per instance than the actual video)

The only way you get anywhere is to start doing it. If you run into a specific issue, ask for help. If your question is phrased too generically or broad, you 're not going to get any help, or at least not from me. If you ask a generic question, and you get generic answer.

[hech54]

I guarantee krohm will be back....thanking some mysterious, unknown person for the help via a private message.

[krohm]

thanks pdr, ill get onto converting everything and see how i go with it.. ill post in conversion if i cant get it going, cheers.. as always giving the right advice. cheers man

[filmboss80]

In my earlier post, I wrote:

I suggest you convert most of your video clips to a singular, uniform format (preferably as lossless as possible) prior to editing in Premiere.

That is essentially the very same advice as in the first 2 sentences of pdr's post. You rejected the idea the first time it was given.

As I also stated, the problem was never us.

[hech54]

this is not the best way to go about it

Easiest way is to convert to a digital intermediate . Something lossless like ut video codec, or huffyuv .

cheers.. as always giving the right advice.

Hmmm....

[krohm]

i have transport streams from a capturing device, blurays, mpg, avi, flv, mkv, everything and all other formats and the best way to approach this would be to convert all the video im wanting to watch, and potentially edit, the terrabytes of various formats, i should convert it all to a lossless codec, then load it in premiere 4 to edit, then output to whatever formats and variations i want, ie data file, bluray, sd, youtube etc. ?

what is my best way to approach this if this is the case, should i be looking at a different editor, upgrade in my system, i will need more than the many terrbyates of hds ,
, should i be using premiere 5 as a peferential editor considering this,

[filmboss80]

...convert all the video im wanting to watch, and potentially edit...

If your goal is to simply archive your various videos for viewing, Premiere would not be necessary, and conversion might be detrimental. A player like VLC will handle many video formats. If your goal is to mix and re-edit the differing formats, then yes, Premiere should do that task as well as any other good NLE--however, you don't say whether your "Premiere 4" is Premiere CS4 or Premiere Elements 4 (the latter of which might have severe limitations). A generally lossless intermediate format like HuffYuv would help provide uniformity in the editing process, and would be less inclined to cause crashes and overload the CPU. VirtualDub with the appropriate plugins for flv, mpeg, etc. should help you prep your movies and clips to a uniform spec (same aspect ratio, frame rate, etc.), outputting to HuffYuv. After editing in Premiere, you can always export any project timeline to a wide variety of output formats. (You did not say how many different editing projects you intend to do.)

But again, if you simply plan to organize movies and clips for viewing--without a lot of editing--there might be other alternatives. It would help if we knew more about your actual end goals.

[krohm]

im wanting to edit all of it,

so i should only convert all the internet formats (mkv avi flv etc) to a lossless format, ut or huffy, before loading to an editor...
virtualdub converts these formats to ut or huffy./?
and there is no point in converting any transport streams from a capturing device, m2ts/blurays or dvd/mpgs to a loessless because they are in a lossless form anyways (or limited to what data rate the capturing program maxes at)

or do i have convert it all before loading to an editor.. i literally have thousands of videos wanting to do this with. i should think about getting a machine just for conversion. that is an option.
i have a bit of a beast of a system, or it might not be maybe 2 years ago. core duo e8400 3ghz, i can get it overclocked to 3.6 at least quite easily though, i have the option of upgrading also if need be..

which video editor would be best considering this , premiere 5, something else...

[poisondeathray]

No need to convert them all, only convert the ones that don't load natively

premiere will accept most of them e.g. blu-ray (except vc-1 blu-ray) , and most of them them a simple remux will do because only the container is incompatible (e.g. re-wrap flv avc or mkv avc , into avi container or transport stream using avc2avi or tsmuxer). This way you don't waste time. Re-wrapping is even faster than converting to a lossless format

I would use CS5, especially if you have a nvidia card with cuda enabled. Then you can use mercury playback engine. It will speed up your editing many times faster (everything is decoded wayyyy faster, and everything is encoded waaaayyyy faster because faster decoding relases CPU cycles for encoding & rendering). You will want a quad core at least if you are editing native avc, although with a dual core + MPE will be faster than a quad core without MPE . Also recent CS5 patches fixed a native decoding bug with progressive AVC (interlaced chroma), but still broken in CS4

[krohm]

No need to convert them all, only convert the ones that don't load natively

premiere will accept most of them e.g. blu-ray (except vc-1 blu-ray) , and most of them them a simple remux will do because only the container is incompatible (e.g. re-wrap flv avc or mkv avc , into avi container or transport stream using avc2avi or tsmuxer). This way you don't waste time. Re-wrapping is even faster than converting to a lossless format

ive used tsmuxer to convert the dts to ac3 to stream a bluray file, it doesnt actually change the quality of the video, no obviously, so avc2avi demuxes/re-wraps flvs and mkvs to avis>?

I would use CS5, especially if you have a nvidia card with cuda enabled. Then you can use mercury playback engine. It will speed up your editing many times faster (everything is decoded wayyyy faster, and everything is encoded waaaayyyy faster because faster decoding relases CPU cycles for encoding & rendering). You will want a quad core at least if you are editing native avc, although with a dual core + MPE will be faster than a quad core without MPE . Also recent CS5 patches fixed a native decoding bug with progressive AVC (interlaced chroma), but still broken in CS4

ok sounds like i need a new cpu and graphics card, hopefully my motherboard and ram might be ok. otherwise might have to go the full upgrade. what kind of conversion times am i looking at with upgraded system...

editing native avc? this is the lossless ut or huffy format i will have converted everything to... this will be avi or just lossless native avc.? what am i missing here at 8:44am...

[poisondeathray]

ive used tsmuxer to convert the dts to ac3 to stream a bluray file, it doesnt actually change the quality of the video, no obviously, so avc2avi demuxes/re-wraps flvs and mkvs to avis>?

yes , re-wrapping is just swapping containers. It's copying video & audio into a new "box"

besides tsmuxer and avc2avi, you might make use of mkvextract, flvextract to take the elementary streams out. There are other methods of remuxing as well , eg.. ffmpeg . You can use batch scripts with ffmpeg (e.g. batch remux a folder full of FLVs into a different container) . This will save you a lot of time if you have thousands of video as you claim...

when you have a raw avc stream (.avc, .h264, .264) , it has no framerate. So you usually have to specify the framerate in the muxer. Use mediainfo on the original file to determine what the framerate was . sometimes you might have to import audio separately (depending on the audio type) , and some types of audio are incompatible (e.g. dts-ma , true hd from blu-ray won't be accepted). For those, you will want to use eac3to to decode to wav for import

anyways, just get started and if you have a SPECIFIC problem, just ask. There are way too many little quirks to list in 1 post.

ok sounds like i need a new cpu and graphics card, hopefully my motherboard and ram might be ok. otherwise might have to go the full upgrade. what kind of conversion times am i looking at with upgraded system...

depends on the project, what effects used, what type of video etc.... to hard to say what times. In general, a quad core of the same class will be about 1-2x faster than a dual core. On the same system, on average, the same project renders 1.5-3x faster on CS5 with MPE then CS4. (That doesn't count the faster editing times)

editing native avc? this is the lossless ut or huffy format i will have converted everything to... this will be avi or just lossless native avc.? what am i missing here at 8:44am...

native avc is the h.264 format , a type of compression (most blu-ray or most HD youtube, or most MKV's will use this compression). This is different than huffyuv or ut which are different types of compression , but lossless.

AVI is just a container, MKV , MP4, TS, MT2S, FLV - these are all just containers. They can hold different types of audio and video. (plus metadata and subtitles etc...),. The video & audio they hold can use different types of compression

AVC (or h.264) is a type of compression . MPEG2 is a type of compression. You can put those streams into different types of containers. For example MPEG2 can be put into a program stream (.mpg, .mpeg) or transport stream (.ts, .mts, .m2ts)

[krohm]

yes the different forms of compression into different containers. avc for my capture device, vc1 for bluray etc etc, so the formats that cant be loaded to premiere natively, i could batch script remux with ffmpeg. flvs mkvs mp4s avis everything that isnt an avc , vc1 from bluray, mpg from dvds etc that can be natively loaded to premiere 5. and the formats that dont load natively and dont allow remuxing i should losslessly convert with ut. this would be the way to tackle loading all of these formats to premiere to edit,

[poisondeathray]

Yes in general that's the basic approach. But there are a lot of "gotchas" or quirks you will encounter. When you do , ask.

blu-ray can use MPEG2, VC1 or AVC . Only VC-1 is problematic for native import into premiere. Also I mentioned some types of HD audio found on blu-ray are problematic as well . eac3to is your friend for those.

AVI container shouldn't be a problem. Anything you can play on your PC in AVI container, should be able to be imported natively into premiere , same with MP4 . Only FLV and MKV will be problematic ALL of the time.

[rallymax]

For a stack of input formats that don't have Video for Windows (VfW) drivers or Adobe provided Importers (Importer*.prm) you'll need to add the ability to open those.
I found that FFDShow and it's successor "FFDshow Tryouts"
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/
...is a great way to add that functionality to your Windows machine. It takes the FFmpeg project's libraries and presents them as DirectShow (but more importantly also VfW). VfW is the type of codec you need for Editing. DirectShow and the new Media Framework for Vista and Win7 do PLAYBACK only - thus you can't use those codecs in Premiere or any other NLE program.
By using "FFDShow Tryouts" it is using a much newer version of libavcodec and thus you get A LOT more of the newer codecs that have been developed since FFDShow went dormant many many years ago. It also has the experimental multithreaded decode of h264 vs the standard libavcodec option.

See here for more info (it's a thread I made on FFDShow a while ago (and prior to changing to FFDShow Tryouts)
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/308650-HOWTO-Edit-Motion-JPEG-(MJPG)-in-Adobe-or-ev...ws-Movie-Maker

[krohm]

tried using mkvtoolnix to demux the streams from a 10gb mkv file i have. i had to convert the dts to ac3 with eac3to after, then remuxed the h264 avc and ac3 streams using tsmuxer...
tried to load the outputted ts file to premiere, premiere wont see the file when trying to import. it doesnt even recognise the individual h264 stream, only the ac3.
tried loading another mkv i demuxed and remuxed, it wont load either, also not visible when trying to import.

[poisondeathray]

try .m2ts

some mkv's are encoded with L5.1 or higher settings than premiere can handle it's internal decoder cannot handle it. You can try avc2avi (you may need ffdshow and h264 enabled in vfw configuration, 64-bit version if CS5, 32-bit if CS4)

But if it's from a retail blu-ray it should handle it no problems

AVC is a very broad specification. Look at mediainfo text view of the file, and I bet it's using something like L5.1 and a huge number of reference frames

[krohm]

ok it loaded when i remuxed to m2ts, but no sound and wont play back properly at all,

media info sais..

[krohm]

so how can i go about loading these mkvs, first videos i try and of course they dont work. im using cs5 btw. guess im going to have to start converting them to ut before loading them in. shhhiett.

have to post in conversion i guess to get this working properly.

[krohm]

ok i tried avc2avi earlier and it didnt work or i thought it wasnt. just left it then when i thought it was frozen and it has worked. ill try and load the avi and then load the ac3 and see if that works.. if not i guess ill have to convert it to ut

[krohm]

na said unsupported format after using avc2avi.. looks like my only option is to convert it to ut. i have a feeling im gonna need to do this with a lot of the video. damn

[poisondeathray]

yeah, if you can't use any of the workarounds (e.g. avc2avi, even demux and import as raw avc, or try a different container like mp4) , then you would have to use an intermediate

If you cut a sample with tsmuxer I can have a look at it and maybe try to suggest something else

[krohm]

how would i change the container to mp4 without re-encoding, ? when remuxing it doesnt matter what the container is, m2ts ts bluray or avchd thats just the container.. u mentioned try m2ts so ive cut it to that, just 10 seconds of it
http://www.mediafire.com/?qy4sg6quk41uu48

[poisondeathray]

u mentioned try m2ts so ive cut it to that, just 10 seconds of it
http://www.mediafire.com/?qy4sg6quk41uu48

it loads for me directly in cs4 and cs5

the AR is read incorrectly (1.0 square pixels), so you just have to right click and interpret the file as HD anamorphic (1.333)

do you have all updates?

are you running the full retail version (not a trial) ? Some features are disabled in the trial, like AVCHD support

how would i change the container to mp4 without re-encoding, ? when remuxing it doesnt matter what the container is, m2ts ts bluray or avchd thats just the container..

And Yes, the video is the same when you remux it, but some containers are incompatible with Premiere (and other software) . For example, mkv is incompatible, but the video stream inside IS compatible.

To remux to mp4, you could try mp4box (mymp4gui or yamb, or mp4muxer) , but transport streams will be the most compatible with any editing software , including premiere

The raw avc stream also works here (use demux in tsmuxer or mkvextract), but I would still use .m2ts (transport stream has timing information and recovery information and is less prone to errors or sync problems)