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PP2.0 > AE7: HDV footage not recognized by AE
I want to color correct, timewarp, motion effects etc my HDV 1080 60i (1440×1080, 1.33 PAR) Premiere Pro 2.0 project in After Effects 7.0 (Windows). But when I import the PP2.0 project file into AE, AE cannot find/link to the source footage (created AE comp thru dynamic link, so project settings are the same). All the vid files are just placeholder color bars. When I try to “Replace Footage” in AE to link to the source files, I get this error:
After Effects error: an unspecified AVI or DirectShow error occurred. The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context. (1)
( 53 :: 33 )The only solution to this I found was to rename the extensions of my source files from “mpeg” to “avi”. Tried this but it didn’t work, still got the above error.
Searched the COW, but didn’t find any sol’ns addressing this. What can I do? Why is everything so hard??
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4 Replies
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Figured it out — changed the video decoder my computer was using for MPEG (ie, mpeg2 files captured by PP) to MainConcept by first finding out which decoder was being used (using GraphEdit: https://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/showsoftware_graphedit_141.html)
and then bumping up MainConcept’s merit value above that of the bad decoder, using DSFMgr :https://www.softella.com/dsfm/index.en.htmNow AE properly imports the PP project file’s vid clips, but now my prob is that it plays EXTREMELY slow (whereas PP plays fine…) So maybe I have to just bite it and export to QT lossless format from PP and take it from there…?
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Because HDV/MPEG uses interframe compression, AE has to work harder to generate each frame in its usual manner. I suppose it hasn’t been rejigged to deal with interframe compression more efficiently. So it slows down.
Yep — moving to an intraframe codec such as Animation, Uncompressed 4:2:2, Photo-JPEG, PNG (and so on) will work more efficiently in AE.
If we viewed AE as a compositing app and not an editor, it would be easier to forgive such limitations. 🙂
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I followed these steps, but I still get the AVI Directshow error. I checked my HDV mpeg file in Graphedit and it says I’m using the MainConcept MPEG Video Decoder, but AE7 just doesn’t want to import it.
Any thoughts?
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You might want to check that the MainConcept video splitter is also being used (if there is one…).
You could try lowering the values of alternative mpeg video decoders to the 200x level to ensure that MainConcept is used by AE. Make sure you write the values down first, since you may want to set them back to normal and messing with this stuff is dangerous.
Set Mainconcept to 8001, ie highest level.
Of course even if this works, your HDV footage will be so slow in AE that it’s unworkable. I would recommend either not using AE, or exporting your vid as an uncompressed avi/animation mov to use in AE, or using automatic duck / some other software that serves the HDV footage to AE in a manner that it can handle (costs $$$).
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Ram
http://www.beyondsociety.com
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