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DVDit PE - Adobe Premiere - and DV Files (1 Viewer)

MarkHastings

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So I just bought DVDit PE for it's 16x9 support. The program is great, but I am running into field issues like you wouldn't believe.

I tried the forums on Sonics site, but response seems very slow over there so I thought I'd try here:

-I have recorded 16x9 video on a SONY DV Camera, I've captured the DV files through Premiere 6.0.1 (lower field first), edited them in Premiere and exported an uncompressed AVI file (lower field first) for my DVD authoring.

-When I used my old DVD program (neoDVD), everything worked great! I had no video problems, but now (when I use DVDit PE), my video is stuttering on my TV. I've read the Sonic forums and people have been saying that you need to export your videos with "Upper Field First" checked. I tried this and still ran into the same results.

-I've even tried reversing field order in my timeline and exporting to Upper, Lower, and No fields and I still run into problems. Actually, the "No Fields" option looked ok, but (obviously) the video was a bit soft (fuzzy).

I also tried exporting several clips, all differently...
-Upper Filed First
-Lower Field First
-No Fields
(Results: "No Fields" looked blurry, the other 2 were jittery)

-Reverse Field Order/Upper Filed First
-Reverse Field Order/Lower Field First
-Reverse Field Order/No Fields
(Results: "No Fields" looked blurry, the other 2 were jittery. Also, All still graphics looked chisled except in the "No Fields" video)

-Flicker Removal/Upper Filed First
-Flicker Removal/Lower Field First
-Flicker Removal/No Fields

Etc.

Can anyone give me exact steps on exporting these movies for DVDit? Has anyone run into this problem and has been able to fix it?

I just ordered the Premiere 6.5 upgrade so I can try exporting MPEG2 files directly from Premiere (hopefully this will work), but I've been blowing through TOO many DVD-R's to warrant any more testing.
 

Ken Chan

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Ken
Premiere 6.5 will definitely help, because its MPEG encoder has a critical feature: you can declare the field order. It might very well be true that DVDit's encoder always assumes upper field first.

The root of the problem is that AVIs don't "know" their field order, while MPEGs clearly declare whether they are upper first, lower first, or progressive.

The field settings in Premiere only matter when it has to render something -- although as we saw with your problem a few weeks ago, sometimes it doesn't pay attention when it should.

In order to really convert lower field video to upper field video, you have to throw away the lower field in the first frame, then combine the remaining upper field with the lower field in the next frame, and do that for every pair of frames. The upper field in the last frame also has to be discarded. The audio is then off by a half-frame and has to trimmed and shifted. Simply switching the field settings in the Rendering options in Premiere does not do this.

(Where it would have an effect is if, for example, you want to overlay a graphic moving across the screen. It would render the graphic's position in each field, upper or lower first as designated, and overlay both fields over each frame of your video, without knowing or caring about the field order of the video. Obviously, you'd choose the matching order, but if you chose the other one, Premiere can't really "fix" the underlying video, you just end up with a mismatch.)

If you were to do a byte comparison on the one exported as upper and the one exported as lower, I'd bet they are actually identical. The one exported as no fields should also be the same, as long as you didn't apply any deinterlacing.

Given that all these DVD maker programs are being geared toward handling DV, which is lower field first, you'd think that if they saw a DV AVI, it would know how to handle it. In fact, this might be true for DVDit, but because the file was exported as uncompressed AVI, it lost its heritage, so you can't blame the program there. If you got a DVD-RW, it might be worth trying exporting as DV.

But encoding the MPEGs yourself will definitely give you more control. You can fault DVDit for not having field control for its internal encoder, especially at the price they charge.

//Ken
 

MarkHastings

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Thanks Ken, I just got my Premiere update today so I just have to go get some more DVD-R's.

I think the thing that really got me in trouble was the fact that DVDit doesn't support DV files (I just assumed it did when I researched the program). Oh well.

I'll let ya know what happens with the exported MPEGs from Premiere 6.5.
 

Wayne Bundrick

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May 17, 1999
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I thought DVDit would work with any AVI file including DV AVI, but come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever allowed DVDit to do my MPEG encoding.

Premiere 6.5's encoder seems to be pretty capable, it has a lot of options to tweak. I haven't really stressed it at low bitrates so I can't speak about its quality, the few things I've encoded with it so far have been balls to the wall 8 Mbps CBR.
 

MarkHastings

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NO, DVDit didn't like DV files, it imported them, but the file said 360x240? so I didn't bother with them.

I juts loaded Premiere 6.5, exported an MPEG file, burned a test DVD and it looked GREAT! I did the MPEG as Lower field first and I finally got rid of my stuttering problems. And the fact that I no longer have to worry about uncompressed avi's taking up all of my HD space, I'm even more pshyched about this.

I just wished I had only done it this way before I wasted $40 on DVD-R's, but...live and learn.


p.s. I'm loving the 16x9 capability of DVDit, It works great!
 

MarkHastings

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Jan 27, 2003
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Correct Wayne, I have a DVD-RAM drive and I'm still waiting for the Panasonic DMR-E60 to be released (so right now I'm stuck with testing on DVD-R's :frowning: )...the DMR-E50 was just released, but I want DVD-A support as well.
 

Wayne Bundrick

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About the DV files importing as 360x240... I think that's some of Microsoft's stupidity. Microsoft has a tool called graphedit that you can download and use to change the decoded resolution to the full 720x480, and then DVDit will import it as that. Or, I think if you load a DV file in the old Media Player (click Start-->Run and type "mplayer2.exe"), you can get properties for the DV codec and change it to 720x480.

You can find graphedit at:
http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/do...graphedit.html
 

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