[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s most likely Premiere. What version do you have? And what is your playback quality set to? It may be the Mercury Engine doing something funky.

Actually, it may be worth skipping this troubleshooting. Grab Avid’s codec pack https://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Download/en423319 and try re-encoding to Avid DNxHD. As a warning it only supports sizes up to 1920×1080 so no 2k or 4k work.

In Adobe Media Encoder, choose MOV as your container, choose Avid DNxHD as your codec, click options and select 709, No Alpha, and any quality setting that says 185 10bit (ignore all the formats, these are guidelines and quicktime will ignore them), set your frame rate, dimensions, and pixel aspect ratio as needed and select uncompressed audio. Render it out and bring it back into Premiere. Using an intermediate format like DNxHD will give you some headroom for noise reduction and so forth.

Give one file a try and see how it performs for you and see if any of the green artifacts transfer over so you can eliminate it being a corruption issue or playback issue.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I would base the estimates solely off of playback time. A minute in length is a good target for a casual viewer.

So lets take a minute at 29.97fps (lets call it 30 to make the math easy)

30 frames x 60 seconds = 1800 frames

6 weeks x 7 days x 24 hours x 60 mins x 60 seconds = 3,628,800 seconds

3,628,800/1,800 = 1 frame every 2016 seconds, or about 1 frame every 33 minutes

If you want to give it some buffer time you could drop down to one frame every 24 minutes or something.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Well, what is the format you’ve been given? What is visually wrong with it? Your opening post is too vague really.

Are we talking about some really compressed web format like h.264 or some older interlaced footage? or?

Also, the best thing to do is be honest with the client. If they’re under a time constraint, they’ll have to live with the lesser quality and if they have the budget or opportunity they can pay you to recut now, and then reassemble the cut from the master footage later.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services

[Angelo Lorenzo]

There is no way around it that I’ve found. AVC and H.264 are interframe codecs, your computer still needs to decode the frames around the frame you’re looking at and, when you’re scrubbing, that causes some lag in processing.

I even have it to a varying degree on CS6 with Cuda acceleration, 32 gigs of ram, and an i7 2600 quad core processor. I will say that on 1/4th quality it is somewhat better, but not as perfect as when the footage is in an intermediate format.

If you want a more pleasant experience, try transcoding to an intermediate codec like ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or Cineform. I know with Premiere, the use of an intermediate is a little passé but it still has its advantages in some regards. That’s my personal experience.

Angelo
Fallen Empire Digital – Digital Production Services

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Same issue. I actually went into each media clip, cleared the in and out points, and then recut the same in and outs and replaced the clips on the timeline. Problem solved, but it freaks me out that there was no concrete reason behind what happened.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Anddddd the issue doesn’t exist in Premiere Pro CS5.5, just CS6. That’s why I haven’t come across it until now.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I retract that, it appears that it’s an issue with how Premiere exports EDLs.

Let me explain:
EDLs use inside/outside cuts.

If I have a clip that goes from 18:03:36:04 to 18:03:47:20, the EDL displays it as 18:03:36:04 to 18:03:47:21 since the out cut is outside of the wanted frame; it’s always plus +1.

Premiere, apparently freaks out over certain ranges. The offending EDL had a clip range of 10:28:00:05 to 10:28:08:15 and the EDL reflected 10:28:00:05 to 10:28:08:15… off one frame. Other programs think it’s an outside cut and dump one frame making the end point 10:28:08:14.

Looks like I just have to be hyper vigilant of the issue and edit my EDLs by hand. The real question is why does this happen seemingly randomly?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Looks like it’s a bug with Speedgrade.

-The EDL is exported at 24fps
-The footage timecode is 24fps
-Speedgrade’s project and footage settings are both set to 24fps

So why is Speedgrade losing a frame?

I’ve reported it as a bug, but am I wrong? Premiere also reimports the EDL and shows a footage duration of 10:28:00:05 – 10:28:08:14 so it’s losing a frame there too. Frustrating.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

You might want to contact Adobe about volume licensing. Prelude isn’t listed as being licensed separately from Production Premium but it might be arranged under their volume licensing program https://www.adobe.com/volume-licensing/benefits-by-role.html

That is, if you figure out Prelude is what you actually need.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Quicktime files act differently than printing to tape. Just like you have audio and video streams, you’ll have a caption stream. It’s basically subtitles, or pseudo closed captioning.

As far as I know, Premiere can’t embed caption tracks natively but I know CPC’s CaptionMaker can embed them. A google search for “quicktime caption” will reveal some alternatives as well. https://www.synchrimedia.com/ looks like a low cost alternative that handles scc, but since I’ve not used it personally, I’d suggest grabbing the demo.