[Richard Angle]

“Premiere will import so that you get one long clip to edit with, no breaks between the pieces. Just a lot of little benefits like that by using this method.”

Hi Jeff. Could you or someone else out there please elaborate on what exactly the “other benefits” actually are besides the file spanning? I simply despise the fact that we can’t rename our footage. I don’t really mind keeping the file structure intact. I just want to rename my dang source footage for organizational purposes. Particularly for large projects where I might have to relink and maintain my sanity. This has always been the achilles heel of the AVCHD CODEC to me.

If I knew that the only benefit of holding the structure intact was file spanning, I’d do my best to try and keep file sizes below 4gb and rename them. The only other metadata info that I’ve ever been aware of being useful is time of day timecode but Premiere no likey that one. Boy. I sure wish I could figure that one out. Would be terrific in doc shoots.

Thanks,
Richard Angle

[Richard Angle]

I feel your pain, Scott. AME crashes on me several times a day. Typically this crashes Premiere as well. Unfortunately, this requires me to shut down and restart my computer in order to open AME and Premiere back up. I think its more a matter of Adobe Dynamic Link crashing than it is the individual programs crashing. The kicker? A saved AME queue is useless when this happens. Restart and start back up your render and you get the “baa haa haa” sheep/goat warning. Then, you must rebuild your batch queue from scratch. I’ve lost countless hours due to this. Please post back if you find a resolution.

Richard Angle

[Richard Angle]

Problem Resolved.

Disabled “Enable Native Premiere Pro Sequence Import” in General Preferences. Still testing but so far, so good.

[Richard Angle]

Thanks for the response Ryan. I’m pretty sure that it isn’t a settings issue, but a bug with either Premiere or ME. Again, the timeline renders as expected when exporting directly from Premiere. It only adds the stretch when exporting through Media Encoder. And unfortunately, I need to use ME daily for batch encodes of segmented material.

And to add to the confusion, I realized yesterday that when adding a “handshake” .dpx file from Photoshop to the top layer of my timeline, the stretch did not occur at that exact point where the still masked photo was used. I’m really scratching my head on this one.

My work-around is to do a horizontal inward “pre-render-squeeze” to the material to compensate for the stretching that I know will occur. It does the trick but somehow I don’t feel that this is the best utilization of the compression CODEC as some of the data is lost in the blacks on each side of the frame.

I’m a bit frustrated with not being able to trust that my program monitor is a true representation of what ME decides to spit out in the end. Masks often end up outside of their original boundaries and video inconsistently gets stretched. It undoubtedly has something to do with the blow up and stretch out form 720×486 to 1920×1080, but this is unfortunately something that needs to be done to these specs.

Thanks for your suggestions and any more you might think of would be greatly appreciated.

Richard Angle

[Richard Angle]

Dang Jeff! Thanks for sharing that! I never realized that a double render was going on when using previews was enabled. Why on Earth, I wonder, is it even an option?

[Richard Angle]

Declan’s advice would be perfect if only Premiere Pro included feathered edges with their garbage mattes. Not sure why they left it out as it usually makes the supplied garbage mattes almost useless. If you happen to be on Premiere Pro CC, try the oval tracking mask under the opacity settings in the effects control panel instead. This new feature allows you to feather the edges. Do as Declan advises in terms of duplicating the clip and shifting the bottom layer. But apply the tracking mask instead.

If you dont have CC, try the crop effect instead with feathered edges and the instructions above.

Richard Angle

[Richard Angle]

Mike, Could be wrong here but I think the problem with renaming .mts files is that it breaks the link to the embedded mystery files in the AVCHD structure. Which in turn, destroys any connection to the important metadata that is really there that Premiere unfortunately chose to ignore.

I’ve had the recent opportunity to move forward to the CC 2014 release and give her a test run. Gotta say that I’m still scratching my head. I’m of the strong opinion that the fine folks at Adobe need to hire some experienced long-form FCP/AVID editors to do a little pre-release testing on their projects before putting their current price tags on the box.

I’ve said it before. Premiere CS6 was, in my opinion, released far too early due to the pressure of taking the silver platter from the idiots at Apple FCPX. I sucked it up and prayed for a better re-release because I want so bad to support this. But CC comes along and it’s the same old box of chaotic bugs. I’m pretty disappointed with Adobe these days for failing TWICE to step in as our savior. And Apple should be ashamed of themselves for pulling the rug out underneath millions of loyal FCP professionals who loved them like a brother.

Its PC from here on out for me. Y’all please excuse the rant.

Richard Angle

[Richard Angle]

Thanks, Ryan. Just never done it before. Just covering my tracks before taking a dead drive into data recovery services.

Thanks,
Richard Angle

[Richard Angle]

Thanks Shane. So its good to know that if the project data file is recoverable, then the project should be possible to resurrect into Premiere on a PC.

Just to clarify, the drive is not only a SCSI, but a super dead SCSI. So plugging into an old G4 MAC really isn’t an option. But perhaps a data recovery service could salvage the project file and I could do a re-capture. The originally captured footage data is long gone on as it is on a secondary media drive that is also dead. But a recapture from tape shouldn’t really be an issue here. All I would need from the old system is the single .fcp project data file for the conversion and conform, correct?

Can you foresee any issues with the following path…
– Recovery of FCP4 project data file from damaged SCSI drive
– Open FCP 4 data file in FCP 7
– Export offline project to whatever is necessary to convert to the Premiere Pro CS6 file (XML?)
– Convert to Premiere Pro CS6 project file
– Batch capture old mini dvd footage into Premiere Pro and get back to chopping a long-neglected decade old project

Do you happen to know what is needed to do the conversion to Premiere? And is it an XML file from FCP7 that is needed as the source?

Thanks,
Richard

[Richard Angle]

Thanks all for your responses. I just wasn’t aware that ones internet connection performance was so dependent on the CPU. Glad to know it isn’t an issue with the software or my hardware but it just is what it is. Thanks everybody and have a great day!