export avi quality issue

[Vincent Rosati]

If the lines you are seeing are horizontal, they are probably interlacing lines.

Your process sounds like you started with…
HD converted to…
MPEG converted to…
AVI.
Every conversion is a generational loss in quality, unless you are decompressing. Ideally you want to edit the native format (HD), and encode to your delivery format – this would be one generation of degradation.

If you are seeing the interlacing in Premiere, seeing the interlacing lines is normal.

DV/HD Hardware/Software, such as a DVD player, deinterlaces automatically for playback.
However, you mentioned that you would like to have a desktop version.
Desktop video should be deinterlaced before encoding.
So, you could create one deinterlaced program for both playback console and desktop. Or, create two versions, interlaced for disc and deinterlaced for desktop.

There’s a ton of info here, about deinterlacing. Do a search, the link is near the top of this page.

I realize I just threw a lot of stuff at you, but there are a lot of points to cover.

Hope this helps.

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

Hi: thanks so much for your reply and information. Would it be safe to continue on the way I’m going and worry about the deinterlacing when I’m finished? It seemed that the format in capturing and importing the footage was mpeg as the default, I couldn’t change it. Or perhaps just didn’t know how to change it. Would you recommend that I start a new project with new settings? I’ll have a look at the other information you recommended as well.

Thanks again,

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Vincent Rosati]

I just noticed, you indicated 1080i. The ‘i’ means Interlaced.

Generally, if you are going to deinterlace, it should be done first. This is especially true if you are going to be compositing effects or doing titles.
Note, you can create interlaced titles and effects, but I try to avoid that.

This page has a decent description of what you are dealing with, regarding interlacing and playback…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV

I can’t offer more advice to your capture settings. Although, there are Third-party plugins that may help, such as Main Concept. Also, I recall Adobe used to offer an update to older versions of premiere that enhanced capture and encoding options, perhaps there is a package that is available for your version of premiere.

I would try to start a new project to see if other capture options are available, as you suggested.

If desktop video is going to be typical in your process, it’s worth getting used to deinterlacing, and experimenting with the different methods used to do this.
Premiere has a method, but it’s barely adequate. A plugin would be better.
After Effects has much better deinterlacing. There are also some very powerful plugins for AE – FieldsKit, MagicBullet, etc.
DVFilm Maker is a standalone product, it’s really nice and it can batch process! https://www.dvfilm.com/maker/

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

Thanks for the information again.

Just a couple of more things:

I tried to start a new project and find de-interlacing… There is just one place that I found anything to do with that and it’s under playback settings – you can choose either ‘repeat frame (ABBCD)’ or ‘interlaced frame’ – my original project was ‘interlaced frame’.

When I tried to import a clip I got an error – something to the effect that the clip size is too large…

Can I use after effects after to de-interlace? Should I not put any effects on the footage in premiere? Can you do the effects in After Effects? I have the program but haven’t used it yet.

Sorry for all the questions. Any further information you have would be much appreciated.

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Vincent Rosati]

I’m not sure about the ‘repeat frame (ABBCD)’, it looks like a ‘Pull-Down‘ procedure.

Effects in Premiere – Absolutely! You just need to be aware of pitfalls. Trial and error.
Premiere is ideal for editing audio and video, color corrections, leveling, transitions, compositing pre-rendered effects, and encoding.
AE does a better job of creating effects, text, and deinterlacing. However, There could be an issue importing, it might have a problem with MPEG audio, depending on the codec.

After Effects is the ideal place to do video effects, it’s like Photoshop for video. The AE forum here is top notch.

I often recommend decompression prior to import. I use AVS Video Converter for this. It eliminates codec, sync, and encoding issues.
It also improves application speed, accuracy, and overall performance as you are not forcing your app to decompress on the fly for preview or encoding.

Don’t worry about too many questions, look at this thread…
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/205/871306#871348
It covers some of these issues and some issues you will soon encounter.

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

Thanks again… it’s very reassuring to have someone who knows what they are doing :.)

I’m using an hp laptop (vista) with 160 gig hard drive and also an external 250 gig drive for my editing. Already my project is taking up about 75 gigs on my hard drive. I’m using the external drive for a scratch disk and backup. I think I figured out the syncing problem. There were a couple of clips that were coming from the external drive so I moved them over to the laptop and it seems to be fine now. However, premiere is slow, slow, slow. Even though I’ve closed down most unnecessary services and programs. I have captured some video from a tape on my sony V1U and I also have a hard drive which created m2t files. When capturing I can take just the pieces I want from the tape, but I can’t seem to do that with the pieces from the hard drive and some of them are really large 2-3 gigs. I have to bring in the whole file to get a clip that I want. This could be accounting for the slow processing?

I have been putting some effects on things in Premiere and I think I will take your advice and use AE for that and also the de-interlacing. I’ll go back and take all effects off except for the transitions. This may account for slowness as well I guess. I’m really pulling my hair out things are taking so long.

Thanks again and if you have any more suggestions after reading this that would be great.

cheers,

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Vincent Rosati]

Here’s a thread about optimizing your system for editing…
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/205/871353#871355
The discussed multiple-drive setup doesn’t address the use of an external drive, so you might want to experiment.
Maybe you just need to defragment. I’ve been using PerfectDisk.

It sounds like you’re setting in/out points when you capture. This is good. It’s best to clip your shots as you capture.
The other files that you mentioned which cannot be clipped… sounds like these are files, they’ve already been captured. You can’t split this file without recompressing. The only way to do a lossless split would be to, first, decompress.

2-3 Gig files. They are large, but not too crazy. I like to capture clips as tight as they can be, and I’ll never let a clip be larger than a DVD, so I can backup all of my source material. A lot of small clips is better than a few large clips.
My first capture was a single 20GB dv file. It worked, but it was painful, and I couldn’t back it up.

A note about processing your effects in AE, consider exporting all of your effects shots as uncompressed. Huge files, but they are lossless, and premiere loves uncompressed AVIs.

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

thanks again for your quick reply.

the files that I cannot clip are m2t files which were saved to a hard drive I have for my camera. I just copied them over to my computer hard drive in m2t format and imported them as is. I’m not exactly sure what m2t is… So, I have actually a combination of m2t files from the hard drive and captured mpeg files from the tape.

Unless you think otherwise I can continue working with these files and then export the sequences to work on the effects in AE -what format should I save them as to work in AE?… avi uncompressed for example?

One more question. If I want to get rid of all the effects that I currently have in my sequences easily and quickly, how would I go about that?

Thanks so much, this is very helpful and much appreciated.
Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Lillian Fidler]

One more thing… As I’ve mentioned, when I capture the footage from my camera tape, there is no other option than mpeg for hdv format. In the capture settings the only two options are hdv and dv. I’m wondering if it might be an idea to capture at dv? Or, once the files are captured then convert them outside of premiere to another format and reimport them? Just ideas as you’ve mentioned that performance may be affected by using compressed files. I tried using avs video converter to decompress one of the mpeg files and it’s giving me an unrecognized file format error.

Thanks again,

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada