Canon XH-A1 HD/SD 24F Premiere Pro 2.0 problems

[shivan11]

Hi all.

I tried doing a search in the forums but could not find a specific answer to the problems I'm having. Any words of help would be greatly appreciated!

(Situation)

I'm shooting a short film on a Canon XH-A1 (HDV/24F) and editing it
on Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 (I have the Canon 24F presets installed).
My laptop is an ACER 2012 WLMI, bought 4 years ago. The specs are
1.5ghz, 1gb ram, ati radeon mobility 9700 64mb etc. The firewire card installed is called Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller.

I've been making short films using the Canon GL2 and so this is my first time with the XH-A1.

(Problems)

1) My laptop can not recognize the XH-A1 when it is in HD mode. But when I change it to SD mode or simply enable the HD->SD downconversion in the menu, my laptop will have no problem recognizing it and capturing footage from it.

2) Because I couldn't get HD to work, I decided to downconvert my HD footage to SD through the camera. I turned on the downconversion feature in the camera, and for the Premiere project file, I selected the "DV-24 P Widescreen 48kHz" preset. (Is this the correct setting for SD 24F?)

However, every HD footage that I captured this way was 29.97 fps as opposed to 23.976 fps. Furthermore, the footage looks kind of choppy and "line-y" (?) when played in Premiere while editing.

(Conclusion)

I would like to shoot in HD and try editing in HD, but because HD is not being recognized at all, I might keep shooting in HD but just downconvert to SD. However, because I'm having problems with the HD->SD downconversion, I might just shoot in SD 24F from the beginning and edit from there. But, I'm not too sure how to set up my Premiere project setting for SD 24F because I tried capturing native SD 24F footage under the "DV-24 P Widescreen 48kHz" preset and for some reason all the footage was captured as 24.07fps.

Furthermore, I am wondering if it would be better to shoot in HD and downconvert to SD because some say that it produces a better picture quality as opposed to shooting SD from the beginning. But then again, I'm having downconversion issues so would it be better if I just shoot native SD.......

All this is making me think if I should just go back to the GL2 since from the problems I'm having it seems like I'll be shooting native SD and the SD in the XH-A1 or SD in the GL2 would pretty much have the same quality since they are both SD. or am I wrong...

As you can see, I'm very confused here! Any help at all would be great!

Thanks!

 

[Kevin Lee]

Well, I can say this. I recorded some stuff in SD with the XH A1 and the pulldown that showed up was 2-3 in Vegas. I used premier pro with my DVX but it never worked out right, so I went to Vegas. In SD with 2-3 pulldown you can go to a 30p timeline (29.97) with Premier Pro.

 

[milvid]

Download HDV Split.
It's a free app that should see the camera.
Then you can capture the HD footage.
The "line-y" footage you see is the result of interlacing.
Edit a small clip and export a file and make sure the the deinterlace option is checked.
This should take care of the line-y problem.
Also you might try the footage in a 30i timeline.

Let me know if this helps.

 

[Huy Vu]

Download HDV Split.
It's a free app that should see the camera.
Then you can capture the HD footage.
The "line-y" footage you see is the result of interlacing.
Edit a small clip and export a file and make sure the the deinterlace option is checked.
This should take care of the line-y problem.
Also you might try the footage in a 30i timeline.

Not a good idea. His footage isn't inherently interlaced. It's only that way because the pulldown frame aren't removed. De interlacing it will throw away resolution from every single frame, including the progressive ones. Won't give him his 24fps footage back.