[Terry Kampowski]

I’ve never had any luck using Adobe’s CS3 h264 conversion.
I use Quick Time Pro – it does a great job.

[Terry Kampowski]

I’d turn to Sherlock Holmes and start to do some sleuthing.
You’ve got 5 options, camera, cable, firewire device, other software running or CS3.
Here are some of the tests I’d run.

1. Turn off everything else which is running in the background – use Autoruns.

2. Can you import the video via Firewire to Windows Movie Maker or some other simple video product?

3. Change cables.

4. Change cameras. Find a friend with Firewire camera and see if you can capture with it.

5. You could even install CS3 on a laptop and see if you can capture.

You need to do a lot of detective work to figure out which component is the culprit.

[Terry Kampowski]

Does the audio play in the project panel?

Do other files play fine, just not this one?

Put another video right above the problem video and see if you can hear sound.

Also move the video/audio to another timeline, just to make sure the volume is not turned down.

[Terry Kampowski]

Try to play it in Bridge and see if you have audio there.

If so, it probably has to do with your audio drivers setup.

I’m not sure if that is in Preferences or you may have to go back to your Control Panel and fiddle with the settings. I’m assuming you have more than one audio driver.

[Terry Kampowski]

I did a quick test to compare the QT animation codec versus the DV NTSC codec and the difference was startling.

QT animation is a big winner.
Unfortunately, it’s an 8X larger file size.

Probably for most people showing video on a TV, the animation codec is not needed, but in your case, where you want clear crisp lines, it’s probably preferable.

[Terry Kampowski]

You can also see which files are being used by adding the “Video Usage” to your list of columns which are being viewed in the Project panel(Name – label – media etc.). I like to move that column fairly close to the beginning so that I know which clips I’ve already used.

[Terry Kampowski]

The only thing I can guess is that your user account has some programs starting which are interfering with version 3.2

You can try installing Autoruns from sysinternals, which will help you stop certain programs from starting at Startup and then cross your fingers.

[Terry Kampowski]

Here’s a possible solution I copied, but have not tried.

Adobe Bridge:
-Open Adobe Bridge
-Click in Edit > Preferences (or Press “Ctrl + K”)
-Click in File Type Associations, and select the audio files like .wav, .mp3 or the format you’ll edit in AA3, click in the down arrow and then Browse
-Point to the Audition.exe file in the folder C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Audition 3.0\
-Click OK and close Bridge
Now open the Premiere Pro CS3:
-Right click the audio track / piece you want to edit, select Edit in Adobe Soundbooth > Render and Replace
-It will render a temp file and open Soundbooth, you can close it now and come back to Premiere Pro CS3
-In the left window, where the audio and video files are placed in Premiere, right click in the new audio file that was rendered and Click Reveal in Bridge. It will open the Adobe Bridge window now.
-Right click in the file (in the Bridge window) and select Open with > Adobe Audition 3.0 (default).
-Be happy and edit the track in Adobe Audition now! When you save the file and come back to Premiere pro, it will re-render automatically and you wont touch your original source audio file!

[Terry Kampowski]

You can also try to export as an avi, then import it into Quicktime and let it do the conversion. QT does a great job.

[Terry Kampowski]

I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I find it irritating when some Podcasts I listen to have a volume which make it hard to hear without cranking up the volume on my iPod.

Personally, I crank up the volume, just make sure NOTHING goes over the “0” mark.

I know that Leo LaPorte follow that advice in his Podcasts.