Footage Captured with HDVSplit, “Media Pending” in Premiere Pro CS3

[Perry Cheng]

Mark,
Glad to see you here once a while. I am not sure which Camcorder you use for this, mine is HV20 and it captures and import to PPro CS3 without a glitch. Media pending usually means it has to create a cache file (or something like that). Do you notice a rendering bar like at the right lower corner when you advancing?

Perry

[Accountclosed]

I too, use an HV20 as a capture deck (to cut down on the hours on my HVR-V1Us) and used HDVSplit, a program recommended as an alternative to Premiere Pro, to capture the footage. However, it is THAT footage which Premiere refuses to “make ready”. Even small clips which should import instantly, are not ready, even after 1/2 hour.

I ended up re-capturing from the same camera in Premiere and that worked. But why can’t Premiere read footage captured by HDVsplit? I’m very concerned about synch because I’ll be covering a 1:45 Beethoven concert Saturday night with one intermission and that amounts to two 45-min performances in which the synch of three cameras must be maintained to the frame. Since I’ve had loss of synch with Premiere captures, I thought I’d try HDVsplit, but it seems that Premiere never creates it’s ‘cache’ files when this footage from HDVsplit is imported. I know some people are using it, but they much have a trick to making it work.
I also have some Vegas-captured footage, but Premiere was able to load that fine. It’s just HDVSplit footage that ends up “media pending” indefinately. Any idea why?

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Blast1]

[Basspig] “there is an amber-colored graphic with “Media Pending””

Thats usually a sign that things aren’t all right with the disk setup, if you have external disks, one of them not being located properly in the preferences disk setup, same for a internal drive that may have changed or is getting full, also can occur across sequences with different clips used elsewhere.

[Perry Cheng]

Mark, like I said, there is no special tricks in setting up HDVSplit. Consider what Blast suggested. I can’t think of anything.

Perry

[Accountclosed]

I’m pretty sure we haven’t changed drive letters, and the system is practically new–the 1TB RAID arrays are not even 10% full yet.
The location of the temp files, media cache, etc, are all on separate drives, with several hundreds of gigs of available space so I can’t imagine we’re running out of disc space.
But the files HDVsplit makes just import without much disc activity, so it’s as if Premiere isn’t even attempting to conform the audio or make a media cache file.
The files that Premiere captured directly are ready to use as soon as capture finishes.
I wondered if there was some configuration issue with HDVsplit that affected the file format in some way that makes it compatible or not with Premiere. Perhaps not.
It is so easy to get the Media Pending situation–simply changing your mind about the file name after capture can cause it–so I always am careful to choose the filename before capture and then just confirm it at end of capture. One time, I changed it, and the file never came out of Media Pending. I thought maybe because the HDVsplit files don’t originate in Premiere that for some reason the two are not ‘handshaking’.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Blast1]

[basspig] “But the files HDVsplit makes just import without much disc activity,”
I use HDV split files with no problems.
Usually “media pending” is a operation in progress, if something is caddywampus it idles forever, I’ve run across it a few times, in one case it involved external drives, two others involved the Media Cache location, another person redid their system and screwed the preferences disk settings.

Have you tried to recreate the Plug-in cache file??(know as Preference file in older premiere)

[Perry Cheng]

Is it possible you have the project set as off-line? I am just guessing. If you would try to capture another 10s or so HDV from HDVSplit and put it somewhere for us to download, we can tell you if it works on our system or not. Like I said, I have not have a problem with HDVsplit in capturing my footage to import into CS3.

Perry

[Accountclosed]

Unless that is a program default for new projects, then I would say no. The footage is definately online, but pending.

It looks like I’m going to have to solve this pronto, because I did a capture of 6 reels of camera tape of a classical concert shoot we did on Saturday, rebooting the computer before each reel was captured, just to be certain Windows was “clean”, but all of the reels have synch loss between audio and video tracks. It took a full day to get that footage captured, and it’s no good because of the synch loss. I would see the violines start sawing away, and then a second later the music would start. Camera one was out of synch from the beginning of the capture, while Cam 2 and 3 lost synch somewhere during the concert. I haven’t even bothered with the second half because we don’t have an editable program here. The footage will have to be re-captured, but not in Premiere. Since Premiere doesn’t recognize the footage captured from HDVSplit, we-ll have to try capturing in Vegas on the old workstation and then try copying the captures over to the new workstation across the LAN, which will take a small eternity. And then, if Premiere doesn’t stop Media Pending on that footage, we will have wasted another full day.

I don’t touch the Media Cache anymore. I learned my lesson in September when I deleted it, thinking it was good housekeeping, and I ended up having to re-do an entire wedding edit from scratch–capture to edit–because the existing captures were no longer recognized (media pending forever) after the deletion of the cache. I also had to name the new captured files differently from the originals, or they would not import (media pending forever) –seems that the original filenames were tainted and Premiere marked them as ‘don’t bother to render’.

Now I’m capturing fresh new files in HDVsplit and Premiere acts as if I deleted the Media Cache files with these.

I have not deleted the preferences file. In fact, I’m reluctant to delete ANY files, as it may make the whole of my existing projects unreadable, as what happened in September! I don’t understand what Premiere is doing with these cache files, and it’s a black box and as such, these past experiences of having to redo a week of editing because we mucked around with deleting the cache files has taught us not to delete anything ever again until we’re certain we’ll never edit a particular project again.

Back to this concert, we’re in a real pickle, because looking for the points in the video where the a/v synch slipped is harder than looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not readily apparent, unless there is a way to detect the corrupt frame with a search tool.

We could delete the files and recapture again, but seeing as 100% of the video reels captured have at least ONE loss of synch event, I don’t expect we’ll come out any better off on multiple tries, and it takes a full business day to re capture and rewind all these tapes.

We wasted an hour trying to figure out where the synch is lost and how to fix it, but it seems our guesses were wrong and things a minute later don’t look right, so I don’t know which way it slipped. Seems the video is a second ahead of audio, but even then, when we get to the 43-minute point in the first intermission, a photographer’s flash goes off and cam 1 is a full second behind cam 2 and cam 3, which are about 7 frames off from eachother, though both of them seem to have their audio delayed a full second from their video.

It’s opening a can of worms to try to fix this in post. Knowing exactly where and how many frames and how often the glitch occured would take days to figure out and we’d never be 100% certain. Better to capture reliably with another tool, but how to get those files into Premiere without stalling at Media Pending is the real kicker…

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Perry Cheng]

Mark,
First of all, like I said, Premiere CS3 takes HDVSplit files (MPEG) just fine. It must be some configuration problems you have with your system. Yes, it is too risky to do anything now in the middle of a project. However, what choices do you have? If the sync problems also exist, wow, I run out of idea but to reinstall or at least trash your preference (I don’t think that will hurt your projects).

Just curious, I forgot if you mention if your clips are 24p or not. 24p may have some sync problem.

Best wish,
Perry

[James O’brien]

Here is how to solve this problem:

1. Make sure you have all of your hard drives hooked up to your computer that you currently have in your project.

2. Open up your Adobe Pro project and then click Preferences > Media > Clean.

3. Make sure all of your scratch disks are going to the same place under Preferences as well so your computer won’t get confused.

4. If this doesn’t work then I delete the whole folder that contains the project file, media cache, movie files, etc.. and then go to trash and empty it all out. Then open up a separate Pro project (doesn’t matter which preset) and do step 1 – 3 again.

This should solve your problem, it always does for me.