Some Tips & Tricks for Adobe Premiere Pro when working with HDV
Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is the main NLE (non-linear editing system) I use. Many others exist (Vegas, Avid, Final Cut Pro), but starting CS3, Adobe did a pretty good job with Premiere Pro. It is fully compatible on Mac and PC, it’s easy to use and the file projects can easily be imported in After Effects without any rendering. As any software, Premiere Pro isn’t perfect and it can encounter some errors.
Capturing
Capturing with Premiere can be a real pain, especially with HDV footage (like Canon’s HV series). The scene detection somewhat works, with its abort drop frame option. Also, during capturing, the preview window will not work. It will display a screen in multiple languages, telling you that the media cannot be shown. Some of these bugs have been fixed in CS4, but I still recommend using HDVSplit.
HDVSplit is free and performs way better. Read about it in this post.
Pre-processing
Once you have your footage ready and you import it in Premiere, the software will perform automatically 3 crucial tasks.
1. Indexing
2. Audio conforming
3. Generating peak file
This process can take forever and depends of the length of your footage. A progress bar is shown at the lower right corner of Premiere. You won’t be able to use or edit the footage until the process is finished. It is extremely import not to mess up this process, because you will generate errors. Don’t touch the window and don’t close Premiere. Have some patience and wait for the process to finish. If the software crashes or you couldn’t help yourself messing around with it, you still have some hope. If you realize that once you reopen Premiere is continuously loops the progress bar, it might be because an error has been generated. Close Premiere and go to the saved folder (the place you saved your Premiere project) and locate the extra files that were created. Usually these files have a .xmp extension. Delete them and restart Premiere. Load your project and don’t touch anything!
Unsynchronized Audio
This is a huge bug that occurred to me lately. I import the footage, everything looks OK, but at some point I realize that my audio is not in sync. This can get really frustrating and takes lots of time to resolve. If your HDV file has any dropouts, audio will become out of sync.
The easiest fix is to export your video’s source audio in WAV format with the software of your choice. TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress can do this (this is the software I recommended for the 24P workflow).
Other than these little issues, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is great a software. Adobe has always created great products and with its 64bit version for CS5, performance will be increased drastically.
Anyone havening other issues with Premiere?
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I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
@zebra29: Sure you can. Please let me know your blog’s address.
Hi, can you clarify- when you’re having problems syncing, is the reason for the unsynced audio only dropped frames? In other words, if you don’t have any dropped frames, there aren’t sync issues? I’ve never set premiere to abort capture on dropped frames, it just never occured to me, what a GREAT idea! I can’t tell you how many hours i’ve spent sifting through a video looking for where the dropped frames are so i can cut and resync (to audio and the other cameras). Premiere doesn’t tell you how many times frames were dropped or where they are located, just that it dropped X frames.. Thanks for the tip.
FWIW i don’t have problems seeing the capture preview in premiere (cs3) but then, i’m on windows..
@Rob Trujillo: I had some audio syncs issues other than dropped frames. When I play the footage in a player like VLC, everything is fine. When I import it in Premiere, at a certain point I have a red screen. At that point I start having audio syncs. It is a bug in Premiere CS4. I think this does not happened in CS3.
In general, if your footage is ok, you are better off exporting the audio in Wave before importing the footage to your NLE.
Premiere doesn’t tell you anything about dropped frames, unless you capture your footage directly from the camera with it.
I am on Windows and Mac. What camera are you using? Again it might be CS3.
Over an hour on a dual quad core with 16GB of RAM for CS5 to index a 20 minute , 4GB .m2t file ? Doesn’t seem right – especially since CPU / core usage is at 5-10% ? Are there any settings or tweaks to be done? (The .m2t files are on a Sony HVR-DR60 HDD hooked up to an HVR-V1U and fed to the computer via FireWire…
@Robin Majumdar: Did you transfer the files to your computer’s internal HDD or esata drive? Never edit over usb/firewire…way too slow.
I haven’t used CS5 yet, but I don’t believe that is the factor for what you are having. I have an overcloked i7 (3.6GHZ) with 12GB of DDR3 1600Mhz. I don’t work anymore with my HV30 (sold it), so no more m2t files for me. I am going the DSLR route.
If I recall my indexing, it was not taking so long. Maybe your HDD is really slow (5.6k??). 7.2k at least is needed. I have two Raptor HDD in Raid. If you want inexpensive fast drives, go with WD 1TB Black Edition. They are super fast (have over 6 of them for backup/archiving).
what should be minimum memory to work with hd clips.
when i try to preview clip imported from canon xh a1. the preview is jerky.
i have 2 gigs of ram
win7 32 bit
@vipul: I am not sure.
What I know is that Win 7 requires 1Gb of Ram.http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements
You also need a good CPU. HD clips vary depending on their encoder. If ever you don’t want to invest in RAM, try Neo Scene. http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/
I convert all my HDV and AVCHD footage.
More RAM is always good, and DDR2 is extremely cheap.
I work on a i7 overclocked to 3.6Ghz with 16Gb of DDR3 and everything works like a charm.
Premiere cs 3 is an absolute disaster.
Capturing hd, audio is SECONDS out of sync.
They can’t fix it.
They should be called aDopey.
Never again i buy another dopey product!
@Hate adobe: Yea they always have bugs. I still edit everything in Premiere, but my main tool is After Effects. If I was to work 10h a day in Premier I would most probably go crazy, but AE rules for post.
You can try Vegas, it is a widely used tool.
Or go the pro way with Avid.
Here is a list of some NLE apps: http://ae.tutsplus.com/articles/roundup/12-non-linear-editing-apps-you-should-know-of/
Out of the blue, my instance of Premiere Pro CS4 has lost the ability to capture synchronized video and audio. I’ve searched a variety of forums and the web to no avail. This isn’t the typical capture problem caused by underpowered hardware. I have a quad core Mac Pro (2009) with 12 GB of RAM and three hard disk drives. The fullest hard disk drive is at 16% of capacity (84% available). My capture device is a Panasonic Professional DV deck. Video that I captured back in April has prefect sync. I’m out of ideas. So, do you, or does anyone, have any suggestions on what this could be? Thank you.
Paul
I am having a problem with CS5 detecting bad frames in my HDV footage in inserting Red frames, It is not inserting red frames which is making synching 4 multicam clips very hard as it is stitching together the half seconds dropped frames rather than inserting half seconds of red frames which keeps the footage to the right length, this is very frustrating, as cs3/4 had this, what’s up with cs5?
I have a test clip with bad frames from a old tape, when I import in it cs3 and cs4 it detect the bad frames and inserts red frames, but when I import in cs5, it does not detect the dropped frames and reduces the duration of the clip. so when i open my cs3 projects in cs5, it is all out of sync as the clips with the dropped frames get reduced in length. it has nothing to do with the clip as i get a second of dropped frames in 1 hr, this is normal, but what is frustrating is that you will have to manually detect the bad frames and cut the clip and sync it again with the other cameras.
@Paul V.: Sorry for the late reply, I was busy.
Do you capture your footage via Premier?
Do you capture your footage in one big file?
I have run into a lot of problems lately with tape, whenever I capture one big file. The solution for me is to split everything. When I capture my footage I ask Cineform to split scenes. That is the only solution I found (or exporting your audio from the video and manually sync it).
I now always use Cineform to transcode and capture my footage.
P.S. I have a better machine than you, so it’s not hardware related.
@rojer108: I started using CS5 lately and love it. Much faster and stable than CS4….but not perfect.
I never experienced your issue.
I have converted CS3 and CS4 to CS5 and didn’t get anything…but never really had bad frames.
How do you capture your footage and what codec are you using?
When I started using Cineform NeoScene, all my issues disappeared: http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/
I have the re-indexing loop because it crased when I’ve imported the footage. I have no xmp files to delete… nothing…
Everytimes I open the project it re-index everything over the last version of the .pek file.
What can I do ???
I’ve deleted all the .pek files and index it… closed… restarted the computer… re-instal CS4… nothing seems like working.
3 hours that I loose trying to make it working !
The footage is about 500 clips of 5d markII footage converted in .avi with neoscene.
Your message@Benoit:
reply here… so I’ll be notified… (I’ve just check the box for this reply)
Hi,
I am having problem when i export my final video on Premiero CS4 and i play it on Windows media the audio and video looks fine. But when i try to make a dvd or i see the video on tv – on air the audio looks out of sync from the video.
What can i do to fix it? I am not very good on computers.
Hellp Please