Problem with older Premiere

D

David W. Richardson

Chapelgrove Films
Okay, I'm running Premiere 6.0 -- not Pro -- under WinXP. I know, it's a dinosaur! But I just can't afford the bucks for the latest.

I recently acquired a Sony DCR-SR45 camcorder. This baby records to a hard disk drive in the camera. The files are .MPG -- I assume it's MPEG-4 (probably AVC). Documentation is vague on this point. I also assume it is using the h.264 codec, though I could be wrong.

The problem is, Premiere crashes whenever I try to import one of these files into a project, even a new project. When it crashes it says there's an error in ivivideo.ax -- which is a file that's part of Intervideo WinDVD, which is also an older version.

Now -- the first thing I shot with this new camera was a church service last Sunday. It was actually the very first service for a brand new church. The minister and his wife are personal friends of mine. I told them I'd give a DVD of the service to anybody who was there that morning -- for free. But now I can't get the footage into my NLE!

I'm trying to figure out if there's anything I can do without shelling out semi-major bucks.

I've read that Premiere Elements will handle footage of this type. I'm hesitant to shell out $50 to buy it without trying it first to see if it will solve the problem. Wouldn't you know -- Adobe's website has stopped all free trial downloads until after July 1st.

Of course, Quicktime Pro has the h.264 codec, but I'm not sure the codec by itself will be enough to fix the problem. And QT Pro is a $30 expense -- which won't break the bank, but again I'm hesitant unless I'm sure it will solve the problem.

I considered upgrading my Intervideo WinDVD (which came bundled with the computer), but that's an $80 expense -- and again, I don't know if it would help. It's a shot in the dark.

I did upgrade Windows Media Player in hopes that would help, but it didn't.

So I'm wondering if anybody has ideas on how I can get this footage into Premiere 6.0 and edit it without crashes. I'd rather not go through a converter, for fear it will degrade the quality of the image.

(BTW, I can get the footage into Windows Movie Maker without a problem. Just FYI.)

Anybody? I appreciate any suggestions!
 
I may have found a workaround.....pullling the MPEG-2 file into Windows Movie Maker, then exporting it as a DV-AVI file -- which should then be loadable into Premiere. I'll try that and see what happens.

Any other ideas? I wonder if it's possible to capture in Premiere 6.0 via the USB port? Probably not.
 
Well, that solution didn't work at all....

Okay, riddle me this: If I export the video from Movie Maker as DV-AVI, then use Sonic MyDVD to burn it to a DVD, it looks just fine when I play it on my TV. But if I take that SAME video (the DV-AVI version) and bring it into Premiere 6.0, it looks awful. I tried exporting it from Premiere as 'Microsoft DV AVI' and using MyDVD to burn a DVD, thinking maybe it was just something screwy with the way I view the timeline on a TV -- but the resulting DVD looks crappy too.

So why is that? I can export from Movie Maker and burn the resulting .AVI file to a DVD, and all is fine. But I can't take it into Premiere and do any editing. Anybody got a clue???
 
From bad to worse. Now I can't even load the footage of the church service into Movie Maker. I can load OTHER clips taken with the same camera, same settings. But when I try to load the church service footage, I get an error saying there's some problem in moviemk.exe, and the program crashes.

AAAUUGGGGHHHH!!!!!
 
Hi,

You'll need to use a different NLE or convert to a different CODEC. Premiere 6.0 doesn't do MPEG.

You could download Super so that you might convert the files to get an editable format, but you very likely will see a quality hit.


​
 
Well, if I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck at all....

Just downloaded the trial of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. Ran the executable to install, and it gives me 'CRC mismatch' and aborts. Thought maybe it got corrupted on download, so went and downloaded again -- same problem.

Sheesh!
 
Well, I've got a workaround for now. I installed the trial version of Ulead's editing app -- installed it on my laptop instead of my editing PC. It seems to handle the files with no problem, and I was able to get a good DVD burned from a test clip. After July 1st, I'll probably try the trial of Adobe Premiere Elements on my editing PC and see if that works. If so, I'll buy it.

What a hassle!
 
One more thing...

It would likely take less than 15 minutes to download, install and test a clip or two with Super and make an analysis to see if the quality hit would be disadvantageous. You might want to give it a go; it's free and no harm, no foul. You wouldn't be spinning your wheels.

A lot of folks find the program a lifesaver.
 
Heres the thing.. taking a quality loss is not an option for you so forget it.

You can convert with the options offered
or..
you can upgrade your software and your 'puter.

:-)
 
Hi Chapelgrovefilms, I know it's been a while since you posted your mpeg problem. I hope that you have resolved it by now. If not, why don't you burn a DVD with the footage and capture it through analog capture? I mean, you are already using a lossy compressed format (dv-avi is much better than mpeg) so it will not hurt your footage that much if you can capture it analogically with premiere.
 
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