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Need Advice on PI3-Premiere Pro Workflow
Hello Folks,
I think PI3 is the best thing since sliced bread. I used the trial at work for a month and squeezed every ounce out of it. I liked it so much, I bought it for myself at home! (Unfortunately, my employers did not do the same…)
PI3 worked flawlessly at work using a Canopus RT Rex box and both premiere 6.5 and Pro 1.5. PI3 had no problems accepting and exporting Canopus DV AVIs.
But at home, it’s a different story. I have spent many hours experimenting with different combinations of codecs all to no avail.
While the Lagarith lossless codec works great as far as importing into PI3, exporting is another problem. Here’s what I’ve experienced so far…
Capturing footage via my generic Firewire card automatically compresses to Microsoft DV, which as we all know, doesn’t work in PI3. I have tried several ways of converting them in/exporting them from Premiere Pro 1.51:
1) DivX Pro 6.5.1 sucks: either blocky or black background in PI3 (maybe I don’t know the optimal settings?), even on the Premiere timeline
2) Lagarith is very good, even on the Premiere timeline
3) Using “None” (presumably meaning uncompressed?) produces a black background video in PI3
So Lagarith and PICVideo M-JPEG Codec are the only two that appear to export from Premiere with a true video look (lower field first). Unfortunately exporting from PI3 using the same codec produces a “no fields” look – even strobe-like/jerky.
Can anyone share their hardware and/or software setup? Or codecs they’ve had the best luck with? Maybe I need a new NLE setup altogether… (Compounding this is the fact that Premiere doesn’t seem to recognize my new Canon HV20. So I currently have no way to capture SD or HD footage…) HELP!!! 🙂 -
2 Replies
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I’m going to need somebody else’s help here, as I rarely work with fields. It’s quite possible that there is a bug in pI3’s fields output, so I’d first suggest some simple tests in pI3.
– Don’t import any video — just a simple project with a single emitter. No motion blur. No alpha channel. Render with fields and see what you get in Premiere (or wherever you saw the issues).
If that didn’t work, try the other fields setting.
If one of those worked, try turning on motion blur and rendering again. If that worked, try alpha channel output too. (I expect that if there are issues with fields output in pI3, they’re due to some combination of motion blur and alpha channel, which is why I want you to check these and see at what point it “goes bad”.)
Alan.
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Thanks for your response, Alan. I followed your directions to export “raw” emitter avi’s. The upper field-first versions were expectedly choppy. The lower field ones were all crisp and “video-like”, using both codecs. And the no fields versions looked, well, like no fields video. Actually, even with background avi’s, the particle effects in the lower field-first versions are crisp and clean. But always the underlying video ends up with the no-fields look exported from PI3, using with and without motion blur and/or alpha. Again, I had no problem at work getting the lower field look at work using Canopus DV Avis. Very strange.
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