[Tim Kolb]

Do you need to crop to make the picture letterboxed? Otherwise you could just try going in the Effect Controls and scale the image up there…no crop.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

CS3 or CS4 should be pretty seamless, but that’s quite a leap, and I haven’t tried to load projects over that large a span recently, but typically Premiere Pro has been pretty backward compatible.

I would say that there have been enough structural changes that you may see some gaps…but you won’t harm the projects by trying it

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Michael Krupnick] “First, the imaging is done as a “master raw” file in-camera that is 60p/960:720″

On a tape from a Varicam 27F, yes…everything was contained in a 60p stream. Videotape is constant rate and therefore the datarate is somewhat inflexible…

The HVX 200 had that system available, but nobody who knew what they were doing used it as it’s a 100 Mbit’s data stream for (if you were shooting 23.976) 40 Mbit/s of useful content.

In the HVX200, the “pN” (progressive-Native) modes didn’t write all the redundant frames and if you were shooting 23.976 pN, increasing your P2 card capacity by 2.5X over shooting 23.976p, which would have been embedded in a 60p/100 Mbit/s stream.

At that ,moment, it was a bit of a PR conundrum for Panasonic, who had spent a lot of time and money marketing against HDV with their 100 Mbit/s data rate as the obvious separation factor…40 Mbit/s obviously changes that message, but for those who were calculating the actual running time available on a very expensive P2 card, that message needed to get out.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Ju Dor] “Premiere somehow seems to create actual artifacts when doing that.”

Premiere creates interpolated frames so the action isn’t stuttering every time an extra frame needs to be inserted, which stops the motion.

After Effects can sometimes do more intricate frame interpolation with rendering than PPro does on the fly, but I think most users over the years have been lobbying for better blending in these kinds of circumstances, making the motion constant…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Do you work in animation?

Live action film is usually shot at 24 fps and with a 4% audio pich compensation, they play back at 25 fps without an issue.

So…it does sound like what you want is a simple, frame-duping system for speed changes.

You could change the framerate of the source file, but even then I would think that on a timeline with a different frame rate, you’ll likely have some blending as the math involved going from 12,15, or 18 fps to 25, then changed again…will be pretty fuzzy.

You say you don’t see any blending on the timeline, but just on export? What are your timeline settings and your export targets?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Todd VanSlyck] “I tried the Interpret Footage option, but it’s saying it’s 30 fps already.”

If it looks overcranked, I’d try to interpret it to 23.976 and if it looks right, it would still play on a 30 fps timeline, though you may have to be a bit judicious about edits…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Your subject line says you want playback speed change to be ‘smooth’ but you’re actually seeking non-blended, simple frame duplication for speed changes?

Do you want an actual frame rate change? Interpreting the frame rate would do that.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Do you have some screen grabs to compare?

Keep in mind that taking square pixel 1920×1080 down to non-square 720×480 isn’t a process which will handle light weight or small point-size fonts very well. You are taking each frame, represented by over 2 million pixels and forcing it to map the same image into 345,000 pixels…17% of the original pixel count.

Years ago there used to be a lot of discussion about various encoders and what one does better than another, or whatever ‘secret sauce’ conjecture was floating around (I remain a HUGE fan of GV ProCoder for transcoding)…over the last 5-6 years, Adobe’s encoder has historically worked well for me.

However when I go to DVD, I’m typically going from 1920x1080p23.976 square pixel to 720x480i29.97 non-square (1.2) pixel…but if I know I’ll end up on a standard def distribution copy, I don’t use exceptionally fine onscreen text…or at least I don’t expect that it will reproduce well at less than a quarter of the original resolution and a change in pixel shape on top of it (we haven’t even addressed whether you might be going from progressive to interlace.)

So, I haven’t seen your results of course, but I doubt anyone is truly ‘satisfied’ with onscreen text that goes through that sort of resolution reduction. I don’t do a lot of SD delivery anymore, so I haven’t noted any specific changes in Adobe’s encoder in the last handful of releases myself…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

As Andrew notes, the “Modify>Interpret footage” function is available after right-clicking on the clip in the Project panel.

…not sure how 30pn ends up being 24p though…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Did you download an mp4 or an FLV?

Is this a trial version of Premiere Pro? Did you activate it?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor