poor quality of some dv clips with no effects

[Marc Bauwens]

Are you looking at the timeline on your PC or an external monitor?

If it is the PC is you monitor plaback quality set to auto?
This could be the reason as Premiere the balances quality versus playback speed. Try to put the quality in highest and look if that solves the issue.

[Jamesh]

Hi,
What do you mean by poor quality? Has the picture changed or is it just not playing back smoothly? You may need to render parts of the sequence to see what the final result will look like. Use the work area bar above the timeline to select how much you want to render then hit ‘enter’ or go to the ‘sequence’ menu and click on ‘render work area’ (think that’s where it is – trying to do this from memory!). Hope that helps.

cheers – James

[Tim Kurkoski]

What version of Premiere are you using? I’ve never seen dropping a null effect (an effect with values set at zero) do much for Premiere Pro, but in 6.5 it was a pretty common fix.

If my swiss cheese memory hasn’t melted yet, I think this article may point to a better solution:
https://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/328201.html

[Alpay Kasal]

Marc Bauwens:
I am experiencing the same degradation in the preview and the firewire output. also, this is a new unpolluted machine, a 3.2ghz with a raid0 stripe of 10k drives which are basically blank. the clip plays fine until I stack another clip over it or do a simple razor cut.

JamesH:
the playback is smooth, seems to be a full 30fps. it seems like edges are blocky in a very regular way… I thought it was interlace problems but I went through each of the field options and saw what i might expect from those. this is different, almost like I was looking at poor jpgs. however, clicking on a single frame in the timeline shows me a proper looking interlaced still on my ntsc monitor. I’ve used ‘enter’ as well as rendering out, the dv file looks degraded until I add some kind of effect to it as mentioned… i’m stumped

Timothy Kurkoski:
I do recall this problem from the 6.x days. I’m using prempro1.5, I’ll look at which DV codec prem is using when capturing video, I didn’t set it to anything funky so I’d assume it’s simply MS dv. Cineform is on the system, but thats there just for HDV captures. the part that gets me is how the clip is fine until I stack something on it.

thanks for the help.

Alpay Kasal
Artist/Engineer
https://www.NYCRenderfarm.com

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere Pro always captures and renders with the MainConcept DV codec. It’s hard-wired into the program this time.

The other info you’ve shared makes it sound like what you’re having is simply an issue between Premiere Pro and the display card. If you haven’t already, go to the pop-out menu for the Monitor window and set the quality to highest. (If that doesn’t help, in that same menu choose Playback Settings and choose GDI or Direct3D for the display mode, whichever you aren’t currently using.)

The only problem is I don’t know why splitting a clip with the razor is causing this behavior, or why adding a null effect is fixing it.

In any case, I’d recommend looking for updates for your display card, and/or tweaking the settings- lower the resolution, turn off any 2nd monitor, try pulling hardware acceleration down to one notch above minimum, that sort of thing.

[Alpay Kasal]

Thanks so much for your effort first off…

I switched to GDI playback from the Direct3D setting it was at. btw, I have a radeon 9800pro with the latest catalyst drivers. I also want to mention again that the problem exists on the firewire out, I would think the radeon has nothing to do with playing out to DV… but hey, thats why I’m here with my questions 🙂 let me know if you think this really could be the problem, I’ll install the “Omega” drivers, a hack, a some say an improvement on ATI’s driver work. It solved problems I had with a laptop so I’m not so scared of the “Omega”.

>The only problem is I don’t know why splitting a clip with the razor is causing this behavior, or why adding a null effect is fixing it.

I’m doing it right now under this firefox window… it’s a royal PIA, huge chunks of my timeline have th eol’ red bars because of this problem. Thanks again for the help.

Alpay Kasal
Artist/Engineer
https://www.NYCRenderfarm.com

[Tim Kurkoski]

If switching to GDI helps, it definitely is something with the video driver, or something else on the system that is fubar’ing the driver. That card should definitely be capable of running Direct3D properly.

Did switching to highest quality do anything? Normally Premiere will down-res the image if it feels it needs to in order to achieve real-time playback. The behavior you described sounds a lot like that. Using highest quality forces Premiere to keep the image at high-res, but at the possible cost of playback speed. If that helps, you may have some sort of a system resource issue; ie. Premiere needs more power to handle the playback.