Jody Bruchon
Forum Replies Created
-
What happens if you just copy the VIDEO_TS folder from the DVD to the computer and then try to open the first large VTS_xx_x.VOB file within using an MPEG-2 capable media player? You should get video. If it just looks trashed then the DVD needs to have CSS encryption removed first, but from what I can tell you’re using software that doesn’t just decrypt the VOBs but also transcodes video files from them.
You need to work with the original VOB files and you need to use VirtualDub with FccHandler’s MPEG-2 plugin as documented in my other post to process the interlacing and pulldown the way you want. Ripping software tries to do stuff like this for you and may get it wrong.
-
VirtualDub has a deinterlace filter that gives you the choice between blending the interlaced fields to get half-rate progressive (25p) or doubling the fields to cover the entire frame which doubles the frame rate (50p). The only reason I suggested VirtualDub is that it gives you the ability to control the deinterlacing. It’s been a while since I pulled interlaced video into Premiere so I don’t recall how it handles the deinterlacing.
Are you trying to output 25p, 50p, or 50i?
-
How do you connect to the storage? Are you using SMB/CIFS or AFP or something else? Premiere relies on the path names being exactly the same to reconnect clips automatically that aren’t in the same directory; it sounds like the paths to the files are ending up different. If you can figure out where the network drive is being mounted and the name of that location is different on each machine, you may want to do a workaround on each machine in Terminal by making a symlink to the mountpoint which normalizes that path component and enables Premiere to find the data.
-
If you want 50 frames per second, you’ll have to first use a tool like VirtualDub to deinterlace with frame rate doubling to 50p (which means video will only be at half the vertical quality) instead of blending the interlaced fields down to 25p which is what most video software will try to do. You have to choose between full resolution at 25p and halved vertical resolution at 50p; if the destination is a computer or television then 50p is generally going to be a better choice despite the vertical quality loss, and it sounds like that’s what you want to do anyway.
-
DV camcorders generally use FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) ports and a special DV-specific protocol to transfer video and Macs started dumping FireWire around 2008. I can only assume you’re using a Mac that doesn’t have a true FireWire port. You can’t stream DV through an adapter meant to connect storage devices; the protocols are completely different and won’t translate. You need a real FireWire port to connect an old DV camcorder to a computer. Are you using some sort of an adapter? Some DV cams come with USB ports as well but they can’t be used for transferring DV tape info to the computer; usually those cams have an SD card slot and the USB interface allows reading the SD card only.
Premiere Pro still has a Capture facility which can be used to handle DV camcorders. On the PC simply hitting F5 will bring up the Capture panel. Also remember that the camera has to be ON and usually in the PLAY mode rather than RECORD mode to be usable by the computer. I did a capture a few months ago from an old Canon ZR200 camcorder using a FireWire port on a PC and Premiere CC 2017 with only minor issues related to unwisely using LP mode to record and having the DV transport error out once in a while as a result.
-
This isn’t even about archival. It’s about quality and file size concerns. Adobe’s H.264 AVC encoder is not as efficient as x264 (the encoder in Handbrake) tends to be, especially since x264 has constant rate factor (CRF) compression rates whereas Adobe’s encoder only does CBR/VBR. I once had an informational video project destined for upload to YouTube consisting mostly of static frames (it was basically a slideshow with video clips occasionally thrown in) that was encoded to MP4 by Premiere Pro and was 920MB. That file re-encoded in Handbrake was 50MB. That’s a 94% drop in file size and upload time, but the MP4 from PPro is lossy (it lowers video quality on purpose) and adds some mostly invisible artifacting which will be amplified if that “final” MP4 is processed further down the line.
By exporting from PPro to a lossless mezzanine codec you do not introduce any compression artifacts or banding into the video which enables even better and cleaner compression in the final compressor (Handbrake in this case) since a block of pixels that are any given color will ALL be those exact same numeric values instead of having potential variances at macroblock and edge boundaries. Ignoring the size benefits, why wouldn’t you want to reap the quality benefits?
-
We’re not talking about transcoding media. We’re talking about using a different lossy final encoder for a completed project and not encoding to a lossy intermediate first. These lossless intermediates can easily be 20GB for 5 minutes of video. Storage has costs ($90 for a 3TB 7200RPM drive is about the best price per GB) and uploads take time (even with a 30 Mbit/sec upstream a 3GB master file will take 13.5 minutes to upload at best) so reducing size for the same or better quality has very real benefits.
-
VirtualDub does support MPEG-2 though not with just the stock program. FccHandler’s plugins are an absolute must-have for anyone using VDub. You specifically need the FccHandler MPEG-2 plugin and when you File – Open Video File and select the first VOB file, you need to also check “Ask for extended options after this dialog” underneath the file browser. One of the extended options for the MPEG-2 handler is to open multiple VOB files as a single file; check that and it’ll try to auto-pick the successive VOBs for you, but you can edit the list before opening.
Once you’re in VirtualDub, you’ll need to set the video menu to “full processing mode” and you’ll need to use two filters: IVTC (inverse telecine) followed by Deinterlace. IVTC will give you options for field order and field assembly; it sounds like you want to “reduce frame rate” in that dialog and leave the others alone unless the field ordering is incorrectly detected by Autodetect. If you want to preserve the 24p frame rate, the Deinterlace filter options you want are “Blend fields” and “Keep X field, interpolate/discard Y field” (depending on the field order; try “Keep top field” first, change if that doesn’t work right).
You’ll also need to pick a codec under Video – Compression or you’ll get an uncompressed RGB export. I’ve been using UtVideo for intermediate lossless encoding and that may work for you; other options include Lagarith or the FFV1 compressor provided by ffdshow, but I’ve had issues with those options before so I think UtVideo Rec.601 4:2:0 is what you’d be best exporting to from VDub.
-
I don’t know if it is smaller than QT PNG, but I’m on Windows so I do not have that as an option anyway. UtVideo is technically 8-bit but it has a lot of different “versions” to cover a lot of different color spaces: RGBA, RGB, and both Rec.601 or Rec.709 in 4:4:4, 4:2:2, or 4:2:0 subsampling. For mezzanine exports where quality is priority and source material isn’t fully RGB (i.e. CG) I’m dumping to Rec.709 4:4:4 and for exports to be encoded with Handbrake I dump to Rec.709 4:2:0 since there is no benefit to the other options and some of the UtVideo options are simply not readable by Handbrake.
The main thing for me is that it’s a compressed but lossless codec that Handbrake handles internally. Combined with good x264 advanced options and a video that has a lot of non-moving parts, I’ve had the final product in Handbrake with this workflow come out to 1/12 the size with no quality drop compared to Adobe’s built-in MP4 encoder.
-
There is a free (open source) mezzanine codec for Windows and Mac OS called Ut Video Codec Suite that seems to work much better than Lagarith. I have been using it recently as an export from Premiere Pro for final encoding in Handbrake (I have done some work that is mostly static images and Handbrake produces drastically smaller files for that kind of content) and I have been very happy with the results. I was using Lagarith until I started having issues with a short period at the start of videos that consisted of a grey-cast pause of the first frame for about half a second which is unacceptable.