What is the best way to get the best PQ at that fastest rate with Premiere?

[WeeJavaDude]

I have Adobe Premiere and CCE basic and I am trying to figure out what will produce the best quality at the fastest rate. Last night I started encoding using the CCE Adobe plug-in and it stated it would take 13 hours to encode. I have a 1Ghz 512mb machine. (Going to start looking into upgrading, but that is another thread.) I thought I had set it to only encode the work area which was 10minutes of video, but I man have set it to do the entire timeline which is 1hr and 30 minutes.

Questions I got:

1) Is is better to output from Adobe to the AVI native formate of the video and then use CCE to encode to MPEG. Does this result in PQ loss? Will this give better performance overall?

2) Is it better to use a frame grabber inbetween. Any PQ loss compared to the plug-in?


For 10 minutes of video what could I expect for encoding time on a 1Ghz machine? 13 hrs seems a bit high. Going to check tonight if I did not set the option to only do the work area.

Any opinions on what is the best way to use CCE with Adobe to produce the best PQ at the fastest rate would very much appreciated.

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[DDogg]

I don't use Premiere, but I'll throw out a few things. Does Premiere have a prerender option? I ask because I would think CCE would report a time based upon the 'speed of the feed' it is being given. If Premiere is rendering some effects it is going to delivering video to CCE very slowly.

I think there are a couple of ways you could check. First, as mentioned, see if you can prerender first and then start the feed to CCE. Also, for test purposes, save to huffy format. If that takes a long time it will indicate the slowdown is in Premiere. You might want to let the encode to the CCE plugin run all the way to finish. I suspect it may start speeding up as the render in Premiere is completed.

Another thing to try is using the freeware frameserver from www.debugmode.com to frameserve directly to standalone CCE by way of a signpost AVI. Be sure to enable the audio option in the frameserver as some programs do not like frameserved audio.

Oh, by prerender I don't mean actually saving the DV video. Vegas has this option to prerender the video in the time-line so that complex effects can be viewed in real-time as well as the prerender is used by the direct print to tape from time-line option.

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
I don't use Premiere, but I'll throw out a few things. Does Premiere have a prerender option? I ask because I would think CCE would report a time based upon the 'speed of the feed' it is being given. If Premiere is rendering some effects it is going to delivering video to CCE very slowly.


Well I am using it with Matrox RT2000 which is suppose to do real time rendering of effects. I did re-run the test last night and as expected it did something rather funny. Last night it was 10 minutes and 2 hours (2 pass). Based on the posts here. I should be getting somewhere around 20 minutes for a clip like this.


I think there are a couple of ways you could check. First, as mentioned, see if you can prerender first and then start the feed to CCE. Also, for test purposes, save to huffy format. If that takes a long time it will indicate the slowdown is in Premiere. You might want to let the encode to the CCE plugin run all the way to finish. I suspect it may start speeding up as the render in Premiere is completed.



Another thing to try is using the freeware frameserver from www.debugmode.com to frameserve directly to standalone CCE by way of a signpost AVI. Be sure to enable the audio option in the frameserver as some programs do not like frameserved audio.

Do you lose quality going this route and is it easy to do. I used to you andother frameserver directly to TEMPGENC (Can't remmbe the name). Is this the best free one to use.


Oh, by prerender I don't mean actually saving the DV video. Vegas has this option to prerender the video in the time-line so that complex effects can be viewed in real-time as well as the prerender is used by the direct print to tape from time-line option.
I know what you were meaning. With the Matrox package pre-rendering is handled i believe.


Thanks for the help. I think I need to go the Frameserver way.. What would be some good options.. is the one on debugmode.com that best way to go with CCE?

[DDogg]

You will not find a better free frameserver than Satish's (debugmode). Also, there will be a major update to the FS soon so check occasionally. I believe this should allow the best quality to be obtained, but again, I'm not a Premiere user, so take anything I say in that context.

It would be interesting to know how long it takes to render huffy or DV format to disk. You did not mention that.

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
You will not find a better free frameserver than Satish's (debugmode). Also, there will be a major update to the FS soon so check occasionally. I believe this should allow the best quality to be obtained, but again, I'm not a Premiere user, so take anything I say in that context.

It would be interesting to know how long it takes to render huffy or DV format to disk. You did not mention that.

Well I am not sure how to render something to huffy but I can do it in DV format. I will try that this weekend and post my results. I will give debugmode a try. Thanks for the info.

[satishkumr]

To render to huffyuv in premiere, first you will need HuffYUV codec installed (may be from http://cultact-server.novi.dk/kpo/huffyuv/huffyuv.html ). Then choose menu options "File>Export Timeline>Movie" or "File > Export > Movie" (whichever is available in your version) and export your timeline as "Microsoft AVI". For the AVI choose the codec as "HuffYUV" (you can find this in the "Video" tab of settings dialog). That's all, ready to render.

[WeeJavaDude]

I have downloaded FS and installed it. Looks pretty straightforward, but it does not seem to be working. Looks like CCE is locking up on me. Here is what I am doing.

1) I do a File->Export Timeline->Movie
2) I select the FrameServer plug-in and use the file Test.avi.
3) I get the FrameServe dialog box indicating it is ready to serve up.
4) Open up CCE and open the file Test.avi.
5) Press the Encode button and it locks up.

What might I be doing wrong? I am using the CCE Basic that was released on 4/28/2004. 2.69.01.04.

Am I doing anything wrong here?

[DDogg]

Make sure and select the audio option so that PCM audio is written to the signpost. Obviously make sure you leave Premiere up to serve. Also make sure you can 'play' the signpost.AVI (whatever you called it) in WMP. Depending on several things, you may need to turn off audio encoding in CCE for the test.

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
Make sure and select the audio option so that PCM audio is written to the signpost. Obviously make sure you leave Premiere up to serve. Also make sure you can 'play' the signpost.AVI (whatever you called it) in WMP. Depending on several things, you may need to turn off audio encoding in CCE for the test.

Ok... I did select PCM audio and that is what got it to actually look like it was working. It does seem to encode the audio just fine. This is being used in a configuration that includes a Matrox RT2000 real-time editing card. Would using an avs script be a better way to go? I have not tried that I just output directly to AVI and then try to encode it using CCE.

I wonder if anyone has tried this with the build on 4/28/2004 or am I the first.

[DDogg]

I have no idea what you just said. I'm happy to try to help as I help support FS for Satish, but I need you to make an attempt to answer my questions so that I might do so.

Did the video encode, or not?
Did you play the avi in WMP?
Did you get video from WMP?

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
I have no idea what you just said. I'm happy to try to help as I help support FS for Satish, but I need you to make an attempt to answer my questions so that I might do so.

Did the video encode, or not?
Did you play the avi in WMP?
Did you get video from WMP?

Sorry for confusing things DDOG. Let me see if I can explain better. This is my first attempt at doing this so I am not sure how things should behave.

Did the video encode, or not?
I don't think it did since the file size was are 2K. I would expect a much better clip in this case. I am little confused and maybe you can shed some light here. I am sending the output of Premiere through FS to a file called test.avi. I then have CCE Read that file and encode it to an MPEG-2 file. hmm I think I am starting to getit.. If I use WMP and read the same file instead of CCE, WMP will start reading test.avi and this will show that encoding is occurring. Cool. I will give this a shot for sure. It was late last night and my mind was not working.


Did you play the avi in WMP?
No I did not try this since the avi that was created was very small. When I finally got it to actually look like it was encoding on CCE, CCE did not indicate any progress except for placing the encoding dialog up. I understand this test now and I will give it a spin tonight. Thanks for your patience.

Did you get video from WMP?
Did not try this.. I will try it tonight.

FYI
What I was saying that might be an additional variable is that I have a Real-time effects card (Matrox RT2000) that may or may not be adding to the complexity. I see how doing this WMP test will narrow down the issue.

[DDogg]

Thanks for the reply. Your card was one of the reasons I wanted to see if rendering to Huffy would work ok. If it does, then FS should work ok also, I would guess.

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
Thanks for the reply. Your card was one of the reasons I wanted to see if rendering to Huffy would work ok. If it does, then FS should work ok also, I would guess.

I also plan on given that a try too.

:D

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
Thanks for the reply. Your card was one of the reasons I wanted to see if rendering to Huffy would work ok. If it does, then FS should work ok also, I would guess.

I tried the export with windows player and I did get it to work once and crash one. I also was able to get it to work a few times with FS. I am using the same priemere project for all my test. What I seem to get is it goes through the audio just fine and when it get to the video I get a dialog with the following error.

Exception C0000005 at 1C300B64A, 15B00000.

The dialog is from PluginPac FrameServer. Once I do this Adobe is locked and it requires a hard reboot. Ugly. :( Like I said I did this about 20 times and it worked twice. Once with MWP and one with CCE.

Going to try the huffy thing now.

[WeeJavaDude]

Tried huffy.. It seems to encode the file but the top have the the picture is corrupted. Is there any settings I should be aware of. I tried changing some, but they just made things worse.

[DDogg]

I think we pointed you to a bad version of huffy, not for sure but maybe. Replace the huffyuv.dll in your windows32 directory with this one http://cx.ath.cx/files/huffyuv/ (of course rename it to huffyuv.dll

[WeeJavaDude]

Originally posted by DDogg
I think we pointed you to a bad version of huffy, not for sure but maybe. Replace the huffyuv.dll in your windows32 directory with this one http://cx.ath.cx/files/huffyuv/ (of course rename it to huffyuv.dll

Got the proper huffy DLL and it works. I did both a CCE plug in version of a file and the huffy and compared. I could not see any noticable difference.

I am still trying to get FS working. You mentioned a new version coming out. Is there a possibility of getting on the Beta so I can give it a try. Since I am seeing the crash on both WMP and CCE It would narrow it down to a issue with FS and Premiere with my configuration.

I have Premiere 6.0. The fact that it works with huffy may indicate something FS is doing wrong. Anything else I can look at?

[satishkumr]

WeeJavaDude, i will try to package a development version of the FS as of now so that you can give that a try with your system. If you could try that and report any issues it would be very helpful. Give me a few hours time... meanwhile if you could send me an email (webmaster of debugmode dot com) i could send you the FS zip file when it is ready. Thanks

[DIggedy]

This may be a silly question depending on what you're intentions are, but can't you just make the work area the timeline? If you don't want to change what you already have on the timeline just make a duplicate of the Premiere project file, delete the video on the timeline and insert your 10 minute clip from the work area. Seems like a simpler way than messing around with frameserving and such as you can then encode directly to CCE without adding another process to slow down the encoding.