AVCHD bug in Premiere Pro CS4 and use of Apple ProRes

[Eric Jurgenson]

I’d use whatever HD project preset your computer/disk system is capable of playing back in real time – from uncompressed HD to DVCPRO HD to XDCAM EX (I-frame MPEG). If your system balks at HD playback, edit in an SD project, then import that project into an HD project and rerender. Actually, Premiere should let you go straight to export without rendering if you don’t need to view in real time first.

[Raj Swahali]

Open your avchd files in VoltaicHD and export using ProRes format. It is just a quicktime format and Premiere will have no problem importing these.
Adobe Media Encoder also reads avchd but has trouble outputting it to Prores. There are no presets needed because you are just going to be using standard Quicktime Pro interface except Voltaic reads avchd, QTPro does not.
Or. you could just export to ProRes from the log and transfer panel in FCP.
It just outputs ProRes Qucktime files which Premiere will read.

[Robert Battaglia]

First, I thank you and Eric for responding.

I am able to import AVCHD into FCP as apple prores. Those clips now reside in my Capture Scratch folder as prores clips. Eric suggests then to use Pr preset DVCPRO or HD so I can then import the prores clips into Pr then edit in the sequence. I will try that although I believe I did in the past with problems (maybe.)

The other suggestion was to use just a regular SD DV NTSC preset and then edit. I assume that I could then open a new HD project using a HD preset, then import the DV project, render for 1920 X 1080 and burn to Blu-ray. I hope that is the correct understanding of all of this.

Am I getting the drift here or am I missing a step? As you can tell, I’m really new at Pr.

[Robert Battaglia]

Eric thanks for the post. Your information made the most sense to this Pr newbie. Please read my response to Raj to review my understanding. Thanks again!

[Dennis Radeke]

Hi Robert,

Check out this blog entry which details how to edit Pro-Res natively in Premiere Pro. Also, make sure you update your Premiere Pro to version 4.01. The blog entry below is CS3 but it’s completely the same for CS4.

https://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/2007/06/adobe_production_premium_cs3_a.html

[Robert Battaglia]

First, thank you for your response.

I’ve seen the blog and video before and while it is quite interesting, ProRes will not play smoothly in Pr 4. The playback is extremely poor, so poor, any editing or refinement cannot be done. This problem was verified by Adobe and is listed as a now known bug along with several others that I reported. Basically Pr4 on a Mac for AVCHD and several QT codecs are totally unusable.

I would have to do all the editing in FCP and then import into Encore for burning – which works well. What good is the suite, other than Blu-ray burning, if the main app, Pr, can’t be used.

Thanks again.

[Raj Swahali]

Competely agree. AVCHD crashes my MacPro in Premiere and ProRes
stutters and crawls, as it appears, there is no optimization in Premiere for Quicktime intermediate codecs.

[Robert Battaglia]

I “hear” “they” will be coming out with fixes in the near future. Until then, the program is worthless.

[Chris Bauch]

I edit video on my MAC in FCP. I have a camera man who captured his footage to his PC in Adobe Premiere. He shot in 16:9.
I am editing my footage in 4:3 for television broadcast. What is the best way to convert his 16:9 footage from Premiere into Quicktime files for importing into my MAC and FCP and 4:3 aspect ratio?

[Jeremy Aubert]

Man I am so in your boat!!!

We captured all our HDV footage, from a Sony FX-1, on a PC using Premiere. Now we decided to edit on a Mac, preferably Final Cut Pro. The files have an extension of .mpeg along with a .xmp file. I can’t even open these .mpegs in quicktime let alone FCP or Premiere CS4!!!! I can’t access any of it and recapturing would take days, also one of the tapes has broken! How do I read these?

I don’t want to lose quality by running it through heaps of conversions. What can I do?