[Phil Radelat]

>>Okay, I now remember that what I was doing…<< What version of PP was that on? Curious. Maybe I'm going blind, but what I did seems to work, all you have to do is output to standard 29.97 DVD format. Like I said, it appears to repeat the fourth frame on the fifth, and then repeat, all with progressive frames. The video looks fine. Like the Staples ad says, "that was easy"...

[Phil Radelat]

Hmmm, strange. I’m not sure what it’s doing, actually. I just rendered a short clip out, and I don’t see any interlacing. All I see is the 4th frame repeated on the 5th, and the process starts over. All frames are progressive, even though I set it to standard NTSC lower fields first.

However the clip doesn’t look odd on playback. It appears normal to me. Good enough for Rock ‘n Roll I guess.

[Phil Radelat]

[As long if its dvd compalitble it does not get re-rendered.]

Well, I guess that’s really what I’m driving at. Why doesn’t Premiere just generate a combined file like I can get out of TMPGenc? Makes life so much easier, and no need to re-render. Putting an MPEG2 file in Encore with no audio means it’ll be re-rendered again to put the audio in. I’m not seeing the advantage in that.

Because I’m dealing with h.264 footage coming out of Premiere, I’m trying to avoid not only re-rendering, but having to make intermediates. I guess I have no choice but render out to an intermediate anyway and make targa image sequences, separate PCM audio, and then render the whole thing properly in TMPGenc. Big PITA.

[BTW TMPGenc can also make two seperate files.]

Yes I know that, but what’s the point?

[Phil Radelat]

[You would then add the video (M2V) and audio (WAV) files together to a track in your DVD authoring program of choice in order to burn a DVD.]

Wouldn’t that re-render the footage?

[For burning a dvd with a video and audio file in one Encore has to rip (demux) the video from the audio first and put it back together to burn to disk.]

Hmmm. In the past I’ve used the TMPGenc program to create MPEG2 files, which always combined the audio and video.

I’ve done several Encore projects using TMPGenc encoded files and never noticed any re-rendering. Encore would write out the given project quite fast because the footage is already rendered to MPEG2.

So if I open the Premiere-rendered M2V file in Encore, will it automatically add the audio file as well, or do I have to manually add it?

[Phil Radelat]

[[The nature of long GOP codecs like h264 or hdv means footage can’t be cut without reordering the GOP.]]

Well, we’ll see. Apparently the Media Studio Pro software is end-of-life, but the SmartRender technology was rolled over to a $50 consumer app known as Video Studio Pro X4.

However there is another, also consumer app for ~$90 known as Power Director by CyberLink that apparently does the same thing, only more efficiently. This I would assume is because the app is 64-bit native. I will be testing this app to see if it lives up to such claims. If so Adobe then has egg on it’s face, when two consumer apps can do what PP can’t.

As I said, we’ll see.

[Phil Radelat]

Well, I guess Adobe has some work to do in this area. THIS is what it needs:
https://www.ulead.com/spotlight/hd/runme.htm

If this program can do with HDV footage with every editor has done with MiniDV for ages, so can PP. There’s simply no excuse for it. This is exactly what I was referring to.

I will be downloading a trail version of this editor to see if it lives up to the claim. I used to work with this particular program years ago in the MiniDV age, so I’m somewhat familiar with it.

While PP certainly has a lot of features and functions that I like, unnecessarily re-compressing HDV footage is a real turn-off.

[Phil Radelat]

So ultimately the answer is no, you can’t pass-through unprocessed data without re-processing. At least, not in PP.

This doesn’t really make any sense to me, I can’t see why you can’t pick up from a full frame and continue with the original data stream until a deliberate process has been induced somewhere on the timeline. It’s not like the software can’t tell where the next I-frame is, it’s clearly identified in the data stream.

Oh well. So then what’s the next best option in PP? An intermediate format like ProRes is a complete waste of time and an additional unnecessary compression hit for the type of work I want to do with this footage. So it comes down to what’s the least damaging export setting, I suppose.

[Phil Radelat]

I don’t think you understand what I’m talking about. When I edit with MiniDV footage, any footage not run through any process goes through completely un-re-rendered when outputting to a file. Only anything that was applied some sort of process will be re-rendered. Not only does this maintain the original MiniDV image quality, it makes for fast write time on the render because only areas processed get re-rendered. The unprocessed data goes straight through to the final project output file untouched.

I want to do the same with the h2.64 footage coming from my camera. I want a project/output setting that will NOT re-render anything that wasn’t processed. Is this possible to do in PP CS5?

[Phil Radelat]

I forgot this isn’t Photoshop. 🙂 You’ll have to render your flare against black first and extract an alpha from it before you can try my approach.

[Phil Radelat]

Oh I’m not hung on 4:4:4, I just want to see what can be done with 4:2:2, as it’s the only option that appears available to small productions. I want to see how problem areas like hair are going to come out.