Splents

This may seem really dumb, but it will drive you up the wall if you’ve ever got caught in it.

Situation – you may be editing a HDV movie in Adobe Premiere Pro – but for some reason you’ve had to delve into the archive for some DV footage.
Annoyingly, you realise its still on tape. You blow the dust of the DV camcorder, plug it into the firewire – hear the satisfying device found sound.
You goto ‘Capture’ only to see that you cannot play or record the video.

I wasn’t even editing HDV when this happened, which in itself is a pretty big indicator of what the problem is, in fact I’d already dumped over 50 hours of DV footage!

Simple solution, somehow find the ‘Capture Format’ in the comparatively few options you have in the capture window, and change from HDV to DV.

I’ve had the frustrating experience of ghosting in my videos before.
This time I was editing GoPro footage, and, after solving my first problem with importing the video I was now finding the video was ghosting and jolty after exporting.

Whilst editing, the picture was fine. In fact, it was exactly what I wanted. In the video I was doing a lot of slow motion, sometimes at high frame rates, other times at 25-30 fps.

It didn’t matter what options I selected in export, the video was always jolty with ghosting. The solution was to deinterlace. The problem was finding out how to do this is Adobe Premiere CS4, because to me, it wasn’t obvious.

1. Highlight all the clips in the sequence, Clip > Video Options > Frame Blend (Off)
2. Select each clip individually, right-click > Frame Hold > Deinterlace (On)
3. Export!

*UPDATE*
I found by changing the extension from .mp4 to .mov was enough to allow me to edit with them. This saved making new sequence presets.
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I recently had to edit some GoPro footage for a customer in Adobe Premiere.
I ran into a few problems.
You can import the .mp4 no problems, but then you can only edit with the first file. The rest of the videos are almost unreadable, and come up as a green frame in the preview window.
It is almost like Premiere freezes.

I found a post “Importing GoPro HD footage in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4” which somewhat resolved this (even though the solution feels unsatisfactory, it does work).

The crux of the problem apparently lies in the frame size that the GoPro films in by default. (1280×960). This resolution/ratio retains a lot more vertical picture than many other HD formats.
In the post, you’re told to create a new sequence template and then entering in the resolutions you want to work in.

The second part addresses the format problem. You need to change the container that the videos are stored in – otherwise, Premiere will try and encode each file on the fly as you edit. This results in VERY laggy editing.

You can either change the extension from .mp4 to .mov, or use the free tool he suggests MPEG Streamclip. It doesn’t have an installer (which is good), it is simple, fairly ad free and *just works*. It has a batch mode, and seems to be a good tool to have in your belt for other projects. THE IMPORTANT PART is to “Save As .mov” not “Export”. If you export you are doing the same thing Premiere is trying to do, and it will take ages – if you “Save As”, it simply moves the file into a new container and takes seconds to do a whole sequence of files.

Import the .mov files into your new project and your up and running.