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Premiere CS3 and HDV
I’m a little puzzled because I just tried a small test edit on Premiere CS3 capturing from HDV and I didn’t apply any filters, just straight cuts. I know the HDV format has a lot of B and P frames so it will need to recompress around the edits, but when I set it to print back to tape it was taking a lot of time rendering for just a few minutes, so I could tell it wasn’t doing any smart rendering. Does Premiere recompress every single frame when editing HDV? I went through the project settings and Preferences and I couldn’t find any setting for that. Older versions of Premiere had a project setting for this I remember. If it doesn’t do any smart rendering then it’s a serious flaw. Sony Vegas Pro 8 recompresses only the frames you work on, but leaves the rest alone.
Also, doesn’t Premiere allow you to preview what you’re working on using firewire? This is something that also Vegas seems to be missing and I don’t understand it. When editing DV you can see everything you do on the camcorder, and thus on the TV if it’s hooked up. Why is that any different with HDV? Why if it has the ability to export the finished video from the timeline to the tape, it doesn’t allow previewing?
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2 Replies
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All HDV editors need to rebuild the sequence before laying back to tape. Any cut is going to screw up the “native” progression of I and P frames; the sequence must be rebuilt to be a correct MPEG stream. And you’re right-it takes a long time.
This also means that there’s no output on firewire of a sequence…without rebuilding the MPEG stream, there’s nothing to send out on firewire. What you see on the computer screen is rebuilt on the fly.
–Mike Chapman
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Some frames might need to be rebuilt, but not all of them. Vegas Pro 8 for example, smart-renders HDV, so it only recompresses only those frames that are necessary, probably up to 15 around each cut, but whatever segments you leave untouched, it just copies them so there’s a lot less information loss. Quite disappointing that Premiere, which costs a lot more than Vegas, can’t do that.
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