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Using QuickTime HDV files in Premiere Pro CS4
Okay, here’s the deal: I’m working on a fan-based collaborative concert DVD project using footage released for free by Trent Reznor of three Nine Inch Nails shows from late 2008. The issue is that some of the volunteer editors are using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 on Windows, and the footage released by Trent & Co. was captured from HDV tape using Final Cut Pro on the Mac. This means that it’s being sent around as QuickTime HDV files, for which there’s no support on Windows (or on the Mac if Final Cut Studio isn’t installed). And obviously we don’t have access to the tapes, just the captured footage.
The video itself is the original long-GOP MPEG-2, of course, and the audio is linear PCM. I’m even able to use Avanti (an ffmpeg front-end on Windows) to demux the video and audio to .m2v and .wav respectively. However, I need to preserve the timecode that was stored in the original clips as well, because we’re trying to use these in a shared timeline that relies on the source files having timecode. Is there some utility that will let me mux these into an .m2t and specify the timecode to lay down into that file? I’m assuming since Premiere Pro captures HDV into .m2t that it has support for embedded timecode and thus it could be added or modified somehow.
Any help you could provie would be great.
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3 Replies
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Wow – good luck. I’ll be shocked if it’s possible.
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How about printing the clips to HDV tape from a FCP system? You would probably have to set the timeline timecode for each clip, and timecode breaks would make things more complicated. I’m not sure FCP will output timeline timecode during print to tape, but if it does, this might work.
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Only problem with that idea is that no one in this production has any HDV decks/cameras. We’re all just working with the same already-captured files, so it’s digital solutions only.
I actually found a free utility that writes MPEG-2 timecode in the GOP headers of a given elementary stream. It’s called ReStream. Problem is—Premiere doesn’t seem to read this timecode. I’m assuming however Premiere captures HDV, it stores the timecode as it was in the original subcode section of the DV tape somehow, as part of the .m2t in some non-standard way. Any timecode-added files simply show up as having a Media Start of 00:00:00;00 in Premiere.
I’m about at my wit’s end on this one. Maybe all the Premiere users will just have to offline with QuickTime DV files?
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