Encore CS5 media offline??

F

firehawk

Veteran
Well I used to always export the video files and then bring them into Encore until I found out CS5 could actually link the premiere project without having to do an intermediate export.
So I imported the correct premiere seqence, set up the chapters, tested, previewed and etc.. Everything seemed to be fine until I go to write the DVD. It crashed. So I restarted and checked everything again and then tried again and it seemed to work until I looked at the DVD and the entire Premiere imported timeline shows the old red "media offline" slate for the entire thing. Then I looked at the Encore project (which was still open) and noticed that now the timeline also shows media offline. Hmmm...
Any ideas?
It's a long project: About 2 hrs 45 minutes for the main movie. So my plan was to write it to a dual layer DVD and then use DVD shrink to shrink it to a regular DVD if I can ever get that far.
I'm using Windows 7 Pro if that matters.

Oops forgot to mention. The premiere project is AVCHD 720 60P. The sequence I'm trying to transcode in Encore is the FINAL one from a mulicam edit.

The Encore project is of course NTSC 16X9 comprised of a couple HD .avis I exported for the intro videos, a simple motion menu, and then the main movie which is the long premiere sequence.
Just tried again and it crashed yet again, "Encore has stopped working"
 
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A thought about what might be happening here...your drives could be spinning down or going to sleep.
Sometimes you just have to do it the bombproof/old school/right way from the start. Export your movie. Compress it (to DVD5 size if that's what you want). Import it. Author it. Burn it.
The other advantage of exporting the entire movie is that you'll have it as an archive if you ever need it down the road. How many old Premiere projects can you open without something being offline or an effect plug in missing?
 
Thank you.
I thought about that as well and since then went and turned system to never sleep from 4 hrs after seeing that last nights SD avi , SD m2v and HD h264 export seemed to stop.

So now I've managed to export from premiere, a 30GB SD avi but encore won't import it?! Says the software needed to decode it is not installed on the system?! It's the same system.
I exported avi using matrox preset 29.97 NTSC SD widescreen.
I'm confused.
 
Wow the plot thickens:
I restarted the computer and it let me import the 30GB avi but now when I tried to look at the menu , which was created in Photoshop, it gives me weird errors lol "unspecified drawing error"

Weird. It's like something is disconnect from encore. After clicking "ok" about 30 times thr dialogue went away and my menu appeared in encore.
 
Well, I restarted again and it did let me import the avi but now it keeps giving me "unable to create image buffer" while I'm trying to place chapter marks on the timeline. I can click ok about 5-15 times and move a little ahead and maybe place another one or so but the error keeps popping up and I've got 54 chapter marks to make. Goodness

Opened a brand new project and tried again. Same thing
 
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Holy cow this project is making me feel like I've never burned a disc before! :)
So I started a new encore project and despite the constant error, managed to redo all my chapter points and everything and write to disc. Popped the disc in a set top player with a crt tv and the intro video and menu are fine but the main movie is now 4:3!
So I tested it next in a Blu ray and HDTV and sure enough, 4:3. Imported the avi into premiere to look and it's 16x9 and shows aspect ratio to be 1.21 like it's supposed to be. Matrox 720x486.
What the heck?!

Well now I'm re-exporting the original 720p project again from premiere but this time to SD matrox dv/dvcam NTSC 16x9 lower field to try it again.
If it still doesn't work I'm taking all the Avis to my cs2 machine to start the project in encore 2.0.
It's like something broke in cs5. I've been using it over 2 years now, with a clean install less than 8 months ago.
 
Hmm. First of all, I'm on a Mac so can't really comment on anything that's PC specific. In general, the best workflow that I've found is to export the movie in as uncompressed a format as is reasonably possible. For example, if you edited in 720p ProRes422, then export in 720p ProRes422. This does two things, first you haven't lost any quality and have everything rendered out as needed. Secondly it gives you a master file to archive in case you need it down the road for anything else like web delivery or a new format that doesn't even exist today. It may or may not take longer, but it saves you way more time later.
You should then take that file and compress it to MPEG2 using your encoder of choice. It's important here to make sure that the encoder flags it for widescreen as 4:3 and 16:9 are both 720x480 for NTSC. Whah? Yes. Both 16:9 and 4:3 videos are 720x480. The 16:9 just gets stretched on playback as long as the flag is set on the MPEG2 video file.
It seems to me that you're taking an extra step in there, by converting to Matrox 720x486 which then has to be converted to MPEG2 and have 6 lines of video stripped out. If you don't have a good high end encoder available, you might be better off just exporting a self contained full res movie file and bringing that in to Encore for compression. At least Encore should be able to figure out that it's wide screen and flag it appropriately.
 
Thank you. This project is really confusing me. I've been authoring DVDs for about a decade and haven't had this many strange problems before.
My standard HD > DVD workflow is to export from premiere as high of quality .avi as possible, or if length isn't an issue maybe go ahead and export a DVD ready mpeg2(.m2v).
My reason for doing includes that I read Adobe does a poor job trying to go straight from an HD project straight to mpeg2 for DVD, and that an interemediate downscaling step is needed, Hence HD project > SD avi > mpeg2 DVD.

And that has been working fine since I started using CS5 (except for some jaggies on motion sometimes, possibly introduced when it goes to SD avi interlaced). Then I found out that it's better to import the premiere project into Encore and skip the intermediate .avi step. Sounded good except for it won't work on this project.

I can't go ahead and export from the premiere straight to mpeg2 because of the length of the project. The created mpeg2 might been too large to incorporate into my Encore project and I don't want to re-compress mpeg2 again.

Something is just not right here. I started a new Encore project and double checked that my exported avi was indeed widescreen 16x9 NTSC (1.21) and the intro video was square pixels (1.0).
Even the Encore project said the main avi was indeed 1.21 aspect yet now previewed it as 4X3?! So next I replaced the matrox avi 720X486 progressive with the new one which was exported as matrox DV/DVCAM NTSC widescreen 1.21. lower field first (typical format I've used for years). Still the same result?!
So I manually interpreted it to 1.21 even though it already was and tried to burn the project. Another error?! A different one though. So I restarted Encore, opened the project again, left it with the other matrox .avi instead of the replacement one, previewed it and it played widescreen. So I went ahead and wrote it again. This time it worked and plays widescreen?!

Encore is having so many strange errors I don't know what's going on. Basically the latest attempt was like an 1st attempt using an .avi instead of the dynamic linked project except that Encore actually flagged the main video as widescreen this time instead of 4X3 even though I changed NOTHING in the project. Somehow it got confused on widescreen.

I wonder if part of the problem is the sheer length of this project: 2 hrs 45min XX sec. It was a 5 camera shoot so the original Premiere project is pretty significant.

Anyway, I finally got a dual layer DVD written and am now shrinking it to a 4.7 GB DVD to see if if looks decent still before I start duplicating it. And the odd thing is that the motion doesn't have the jaggies like in the past. Maybe because I used a progressive .avi to convert to mpeg2 or just random chance?

Bad news is that this is just the first performance. Now I have to export the day 2 project which is just as long. Gee whiz!!
I'm actuallly looking forward to the blu-ray version which is already exported and ready to author :)
 
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firehawk said:
Thank you. This project is really confusing me. I've been authoring DVDs for about a decade and haven't had this many strange problems before.
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Yeah, I hear ya. I've been doing commercial DVD releases since just about day one, and it's always something... Just be glad you're working in an age of fast computers and cheap media. My first DVD burner cost as much as my car then and each disc was $50.

firehawk said:
My standard HD > DVD workflow is to export from premiere as high of quality .avi as possible, or if length isn't an issue maybe go ahead and export a DVD ready mpeg2(.m2v).
My reason for doing includes that I read Adobe does a poor job trying to go straight from an HD project straight to mpeg2 for DVD, and that an interemediate downscaling step is needed, Hence HD project > SD avi > mpeg2 DVD.
Click to expand...
I don't know the specifics of your encoder, but doing the down res to SD outside of the compression step is fine as long as you don't introduce any issues through changing the field order.

firehawk said:
I can't go ahead and export from the premiere straight to mpeg2 because of the length of the project. The created mpeg2 might been too large to incorporate into my Encore project and I don't want to re-compress mpeg2 again.
Click to expand...
Again, I don't know the details of your encoder, but you should be able to set the bit rate somewhere in there to get the desired size. With single layer DVD5 and a length of 2:45 you'd be looking at a target video only bit rate of about 3.4mbps which is really low for any video more complicated than talking heads. Most consumer MPEG2 encoders completely fall apart at that rate. A dual layer DVD9 will take a bit rate of 6.4mbps which is fine on most encoders. (this assumes .ac3 stereo as the audio track)

firehawk said:
Something is just not right here. I started a new Encore project and double checked that my exported avi was indeed widescreen 16x9 NTSC (1.21) and the intro video was square pixels (1.0).
Click to expand...
Whoa, wait a sec...are you mixing 4:3 and 16:9 content on the same DVD? That can be touchy on spec level authoring systems and with Encore who knows what it's going to do in that case. The issue here is that 4:3 and 16:9 videos would have to be on separate Title Sets if they're on the same disc. That takes some fancy navigation tricks to jump back and forth, so it's possible that Encore is screwing this up and treating everything as either 4:3 or 16:9. A brute force way around this is to take your 4:3 content and squeeze it onto a 16:9 timeline in Premiere with pillar boxes (those black bars on the side) and then bringing in that footage as if it's more 16:9 content.

firehawk said:
Even the Encore project said the main avi was indeed 1.21 aspect yet now previewed it as 4X3?! So next I replaced the matrox avi 720X486 progressive with the new one which was exported as matrox DV/DVCAM NTSC widescreen 1.21. lower field first (typical format I've used for years). Still the same result?!
Click to expand...
Don't trust the Encore preview window. Don't trust any soft proofer inside an authoring program.

firehawk said:
I wonder if part of the problem is the sheer length of this project: 2 hrs 45min XX sec. It was a 5 camera shoot so the original Premiere project is pretty significant.
Click to expand...
See my comment about bit rate above. As long as you can get the bit rate down to fit, length should not be an issue.

firehawk said:
Anyway, I finally got a dual layer DVD written and am now shrinking it to a 4.7 GB DVD to see if if looks decent still before I start duplicating it. And the odd thing is that the motion doesn't have the jaggies like in the past. Maybe because I used a progressive .avi to convert to mpeg2 or just random chance?
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Eeeeeek! This is a horrible way to do this! You are just double encoding off of encoded material. Your video is going to have all sorts of encoder artifacts like macroblocking and banding. Go back to your original encode step and make it the right bit rate to begin with.
 
Thank you a lot once again.

I didn't mix 4x3 (.9) content but I didn't accidentally mix the intro video 16x9 square pixels (1.0) which was originally 1080. The other main video is 1.2 DV widescreen. Maybe that's part of the problem and encore is freaking out.

I'll try encoding with the predetermined bit rate you suggested to fit.
The reason I've been writing long projects to dual layer and then use DVD shrink to squeeze it onto a 4.7GB DVD is because I tested various methods years ago and determined DVD shrink could cram a better looking long DVD than encore could just doing 1 transcode whether VBR or CBR. A 2.5 hr video fell apart if encore transcoded it but DVD shrink could make it still look pretty good even using the extra step that I could skip otherwise. (When I saw how good DVD shrink could back up copy my 4+hr tv show collection DVDs it made a believer out of me so I tried it.) Of course this was using CS2. Things may have changed since then. :)

Yeah I'm really glad DVDs don't cost $50 anymore like they did. Sounds like you have been doing this a long time and know a lot. I appreciate you taking the time to help me.

Im going to try what you said on the 2nd show. The first show finally successfully wrote to an 8.5GB dual layer and DVD shrink squeezed it onto a regular 4.7GB DVD with it looking pretty good so I'm wiping my brow and calling it lucky to have a master to copy on that one.
one. With all the errors popping up I didn't know if id ever get that far.
 
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The encoders I have at my disposal are pretty much just :
Windows:
Premiere 2.0, cs5 and cs6,
Encore 2.0, cs5 and cs6

Mac OS:
Premiere cs4
Encore cs4
Final cut studio (3)

I really don't use final cut studio hardly, but since you use Mac, would there be an advantage to using it? Maybe compressor?
 
I wish I could give you better advice of which tool to use, but unfortunately I don't know too much about the consumer level encoders. Maybe I should look into it more, but since I've dropped a bunch of money on some higher end encoders I've not really had much need to use them. Although Compressor does some things really well, MPEG2 for DVD isn't one of them. It doesn't do much of a multipass encode which is what you really need to get good results out of low bit rates or content that has a lot of changes in it. In general, some of the things that you should look for in your encoder to get the most out of low bit rates are "open GOP", VBR, and multi pass.
 
Thank you, again.
Would you recommend some options for better encoders?
I learned about some better audio fixing tools than what I have with adobe audition and am working on improving my audio tools when the budget allows. The same with encoding. I'd like to have a target and cost in mind to work towards.
I'm constantly wanting to improve :)
 
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