Reversing footage in Premiere Pro

[dubdesign]

I'm having issues when reversing my footage in Premiere Pro.

I reverse the footage by selecting the speed/duration option and set 'reverse speed'.

But when the footage plays back in the monitor it's all garbled and the footage has some visual errors too... any ideas why this is?

[actionman133]

Are you rendering the clip? If you're working with DV footage, Premiere does a dirty encode so that it can show you an image. The drawback is that it sacrifices accuracy and quality for speed.

If you have rendered it and it still looks bad, then I think you might have a bad or conflicting codec. Perhaps convert the video clip to a safer, more stable format (uncompressed would be safest, although also the largest) and work with it instead of the original.

[dubdesign]

Yeah, I tried rendering the footage but to no avail.

After reading up some more it seems that Premiere Pro doesn't like XviD... which is a huge problem for me as pretty much all my source footage is in XviD format.

Any ideas how I can edit and cut all my footage, if PP doesn't like XviD?

[Amit]

There is an AVISynth plugin for Premiere Pro that you can install and then use a standard AVI script file as your source media and premiere should be able to edit the videos for you.

The only drawback to this route is that its slow as hell. If you want speed you should convert the XVID file to any of the native file formats supported by Premiere like DV AVI or Uncompressed AVI etc.

-Amit

[dubdesign]

Thanks.

After trying DV AVI and uncompressed... I have another little issue.
When I convert my footage to DV AVI the quality is too low [I couldn't find a way too increase quality] and I can't use uncompressed footage because my PC can't handle it.

Any other format that you could think of? :S

[actionman133]

Perhaps HuffYUV... it's a lossless codec, so you won't lose any detail, but it will make the video smaller than just uncompressed. It might still be quite slow, though...

Check out the long list of apps available on Doom9, I think it's listed there....

[LocalH]

Thanks.

After trying DV AVI and uncompressed... I have another little issue.
When I convert my footage to DV AVI the quality is too low [I couldn't find a way too increase quality] and I can't use uncompressed footage because my PC can't handle it.

Any other format that you could think of? :S
I second the recommendation for a lossless codec such as Huffyuv. Unless your XviDs have 480 or 576 lines (depending on whether you're NTSC or PAL), you will get suboptimal output if you transcode to DV (which has a frame size of 720x480 or 720x576). Of course, the Huffyuv files will take quite a bit more space than the XviDs, but much less than uncompressed.

[Amit]

The other thing you can do is offline editing in Premiere Pro. What I mean is that you export a very low quality output of your edit and replace your footage with this low quality version and continue with your edit. Once you have your edit pretty much finalized, you will export the same clip but this time at the maximum quality you can export (based on the disk size and processor speed etc) and replace your dummy low quality version with the highighest quality. As long as the video length is same all your edits will be preserved.

Most production studios use this technique to speed up the process. This technique is not good if you are trying to color correct or do create masks in After effects or something that will require you to see all the details. But for general cuts like picking a segment of the clip etc. it works perfectly.

Hope this helps.
-Amit

[smok3]

Amit, yes, i used that method for some Hd editing as well, no graphics or titles were used thought so i wouldnt know how would that work, anyway in SD domain it should be easy:

1. transcode your materia to DV (dir1) and to HUF (dir2) (or uncompressed)
2. edit the DV version
3. export the huf version (you can just rename the dir2 to dir1, and restart the premiere.)

[dubdesign]

A bit of a late post (been real busy) but thanks a ton for recommending HuffYUV. It's great. Lossless but still not as bulky as completly uncompressed.

As for the directory swaping :D I actually figured that move out for myself after a while... the hard and long way.

You all helped a lot. Thanks :)