martinpalmer8
16th April 2008, 14:12
I have a Sony miniDV PAL camcorder and two desktop computers; one has a Matrox TRX100 capture card installed, one has no capture card. I use Premiere Pro 1.5.1 to edit and render the captured AVI files. My plan is to get them on to a DVD to be ultimately viewed on a standard 4:3 analogue PAL TV
When I do a firewire capture using the non-Matrox p.c., the resulting AVI is lower field first (LFF), which is the convention for PAL DV. When I capture using the Matrox p.c., the captured file is LFF but when played back or rendered on the system, the Matrox codec converts it to upper field first (UFF). It does this by moving the frame down 1 pixel and the replacing the top line replaced with black.
I believe that Matrox is unique in regarding DV-PAL as UFF. You can install a Matrox VFW codec on non-Matrox machines to render files with the UFF field order.
The problem comes if you have third party software that uses it's own conventional LFF codec in preference to the Matox codec. I don't know which applications do this (I've read that Procoder uses its own, Adobe Encore uses the Microsoft codec) and it is difficult to make choices when it comes to encoding edited AVI files.
I have my own additional complication if I swap projects from the "UFF" Matrox p.c. to the "LFF" non-Matrox p.c. Presumably the edits will be UFF, but the raw files will be LFF.
My question: If I use the Adobe Premiere's integral MPEG2 encoder, should I choose LFF or UFF for the source? If I use the Procoder plug-in, should I choose LFF or UFF for the source? Will this change according to which computer I am using?
Finally, should the MPEG2 output always be UFF and should the output file be a multiplexed sound+video mpg file or separate mv2 and wav files?
When I do a firewire capture using the non-Matrox p.c., the resulting AVI is lower field first (LFF), which is the convention for PAL DV. When I capture using the Matrox p.c., the captured file is LFF but when played back or rendered on the system, the Matrox codec converts it to upper field first (UFF). It does this by moving the frame down 1 pixel and the replacing the top line replaced with black.
I believe that Matrox is unique in regarding DV-PAL as UFF. You can install a Matrox VFW codec on non-Matrox machines to render files with the UFF field order.
The problem comes if you have third party software that uses it's own conventional LFF codec in preference to the Matox codec. I don't know which applications do this (I've read that Procoder uses its own, Adobe Encore uses the Microsoft codec) and it is difficult to make choices when it comes to encoding edited AVI files.
I have my own additional complication if I swap projects from the "UFF" Matrox p.c. to the "LFF" non-Matrox p.c. Presumably the edits will be UFF, but the raw files will be LFF.
My question: If I use the Adobe Premiere's integral MPEG2 encoder, should I choose LFF or UFF for the source? If I use the Procoder plug-in, should I choose LFF or UFF for the source? Will this change according to which computer I am using?
Finally, should the MPEG2 output always be UFF and should the output file be a multiplexed sound+video mpg file or separate mv2 and wav files?