Premiere vs others?

[mediamogul]

Hi all. I wanted to hear some thoughts on editing systems for the pc. I just bought a monster pc to use as an editing system.

I was going to get Premiere Pro 1.5. However after reading these threads it seems there might be a better system. Are Avid Express DV, Vegas Video better?

Is there a thread that addressed this already?

Thanks in advance.

[Steve Ogden]

Hi,

here's my 2 cents worth. If I were buying today, I'd buy Vegas for the effortless 24p & true 24p DVD.

I use Premier Pro 1.5, having just upgraded. It does support 24p advanced - and my experience with 24p normal is good, but several others are reporting problems.

The Encore DVD 1.5 will do what they call a 24P DVD, but it seems to be a 29.97 frame-rate with 'flags' that tell certian players (but not all) it's a progressive DVD. This results in sometimes seeing 24p, other times interlaced.

Guess for me, the bottom line is I gambled that the upgrade would 'fix' it, and it didn't - I still cannot do a true, effortless 24p DVD. Had I purchased Vegas, I could.

I like the Premier environment, the ease of menu creation in Encore, and have quite an investment in the system - so I'll continue to 'make do' for a while. But the people using Vegas don't have any of these problems. That's why I say if I were starting from the beginning, knowing what I know now, I'd go with Vegas.

[mediamogul]

Thanks great info!

[kecorcoran]

[quote author=Steve Ogden link=board=Premier;num=1087063770;start=0#1 date=06/12/04 at 14:21:03]
The Encore DVD 1.5 will do what they call a 24P DVD, but it seems to be a 29.97 frame-rate with 'flags' that tell certian players (but not all) it's a progressive DVD. *This results in sometimes seeing 24p, other times interlaced.
[/quote]

Steve, I have to disagree -- from my experience the inverse is true. If you do the encoding correctly, Premire exports a true 24p MPEG, with flags that tell players what they need to know to show it on a 29.97 system.

The person in that thread who said it wasn't 24p was speculating, and wasn't even a Premire Pro owner.

Did you ever mail that DVD? I'd still like to get a look at your export so we can get to the bottom of this.

[scharky]

I think you were refering to a post I made, and yes, Kevin is correct, you just need to export the Mpeg video with the 2:3 pulldown falgs inserted so that it complies with the NTSC standard. IT is a true 24P dvd, I was wrong, I wasn't speculating, it was what I had heard before, but I think we cleared that up in the other thread. BTW, I do own Premiere Pro, but I'm not upgrading to 1.5.

[Steve Ogden]

Kevin, the DVD is in the mail & I sure look forward to you having a look at it.

BTW, I'm not having any problems with 24p in Premier Pro 1.5 - either 24p normal or advanced. Premier Pro seems to be removing the pull-down just fine from both, and I work on a 23.976 timeline. And I'm ok that Premier 1.5 is encoding 24p - all the settings show that.

It's once I get the 24p file into Encore that I'm not convinced & confused. Why the 29.97 timeline when it's a 23.976 assest in a 23.976 project?

[kecorcoran]

[quote author=Steve Ogden link=board=Premier;num=1087063770;start=0#5 date=06/12/04 at 17:21:30]It's once I get the 24p file into Encore that I'm not convinced & confused. *Why the 29.97 timeline when it's a 23.976 assest in a 23.976 project?
[/quote]

Hi Steve,
This is because there's really no such thing as a 24p DVD. The DVD spec says the video must either be 29.97 Hz (NTSC) or 25 Hz (PAL). Otherwise, you couldn't play it on most TVs.

The Premiere exported MPEG is 24p, but with flags that allow fields to be repeated so that the DVD player can create 29.97 Hz video. Again, without this 29.97 support, you would not be able to display the DVD on most NTSC tvs.

Now, here's where you get confused and I have to admit I'm a little confused, too. Even though the MPEG is encoded as 24p with flags, the sequence header says it's a 29.97 video. I guess it's saying the stream is NTSC legal assuming you follow the flags. The 29.97 frame rate is what you see when you import the file into Encore, but still, the video is 24p plus flags.

So as a result, you've got a DVD that can both be 1)displayed on a normal NTSC TV, and 2) displayed as 24p if you've got the right progressive hardware. The progressive scan DVD player can ignore the "repeat field" flags.

I have yet to play with a progressive DVD player connected to a progressive display, so I still have a lot of questions as to how that works.

However, I think the 24p plus flags solution is the best that any encoding/authoring system can do and still create a legal DVD.

[Steve Ogden]

Thanks Kevin,

The explanation does make sense - but the reasoning sure makes my head hurt (not the first time. . .)

But that does bring up a question - what could be going on that my pc's DVD player program recognizes 'Commercial/Hollywood DVDs' as 24p and plays them progressive, but not my burned ones? Guess that's what you'll be looking for when you get the one I mailed you.

For some reason, these questions sound familar.

[kecorcoran]

Well, it's a question I have, too. I think I'm going to take a survey of some Hollywood DVDs and see what their settings are.

[Steve Ogden]

I recall seeing a lot of discussion on this board about 24p DVDs since joining in January. One of the things I recall from the discussion is talk about a 24p dvd where only 24 frames/sec are written to the DVD, then the set-top box adds the pulldown if necessary. The discussions often mentioned how this style of DVD is what the 'Hollywood' dvds are, and that one of the advantages is that 25% more disc space is available (because not all the frames of a 29.97 fps file are written to the disk. )

Adobe says Encore creates a 24p dvd by flagging the extra frames in the 29.97 file so the set-top box doesn't display them. From what I'm hearing from adobe & this discussion (so far) is there appears to be two flavors of '24p DVD'. I think I'll ask a quesiton at the Vegas tech support & let ya'll know what they say.