premiere 6.0 mpeg-2 HELP!

[midiguy]

does anyone know of a mpeg-2 import filter for premiere 6.0? (not for 6.5, I am talking about 6.0).. I need to be able to import MPEG-2 video, thanks!

[Arky]

I've never succeeded in doing this in Premiere 6 (not, admittedly, that I've ever wanted to anyway). Since Premiere 6.5 is such a significant upgrade, I assume most registered users will have invested in the upgrade, and I've been meaning to try Premiere 6.5 for some time now, but haven't got around to doing so yet. Media Studio Pro will handle the job though.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help to you.


Arky ;o)

[Arky]

BTW, you didn't say exactly what it is that you wish to do to the MPEG streams. MPEG editing isn't generally a good idea, because, as a video format, it degenerates extremely rapidly when edited and re-encoded.

If all you wish to do is make simple cuts, there are better alternatives, but if you wish to add fades / transitions etc., then yes, you WILL need to use Premiere(6.5), MS Pro6, or similar.


Also, do bear in mind that, unless you actually render/re-encode the entire edited MPEG stream, you will very probably introduce GOP inconsistencies, which are a nightmare if you wish to author DVDs etc. with your finished MPEG files. Just read around the forum for discussion of such GOP difficulties.


Arky ;o)

[midiguy]

yeah.. I know MPEG-2 isn't the best to edit with.. but it is all we had.. we had to work with a hitachi DVD cam.. I suppose we could hook it up to to the RCA or S-VIDEO in and capture the footage, but I figure we would get better results from the actual VRO (MPEG-2 a/v) files. which, by the way, I turn into VOB files (or m2v files, not sure what the plan is yet) the reason that we must use premiere 6.0 is because we are working on it at school (we have to) and they only have 6.0.. the teacher said we may be able to get by this little "problem", and hw would think about letting us install 6.5 on one of the machines. hopefully this will work out! also, in terms of video quality, what is generally better, DV or MPEG-2 (704 x 480 6 mbit/s CBR MPEG-2, that is what his DVD cam films atin "fine mode")

[Arky]

Well, in terms of FINAL output quality, MPEG2 should, if done skillfully, be almost as good as Raw DV footage. In fact, that's normally what people transcode their DV footage to anyway - AFTER they've done all their editing, of course. Also, you will find that MPEG2, if correctly authored into VOBs (as you would find with DVD content), will scale to fit the screen much more smoothly than an AVI will in MediaPlayer. This is because the VOB playback filters are specifically optimised for smooth, high-quality scaling, whereas MediaPlayer does rather a crude (pixelly) job with AVIs. Another benefit with MPEG2 (again multiplexed into DVD-compatible VOBs) is that you can conveniently play it back on a TV screen using a standalone DVD player.

With regard to your particular problem, you could try to use DVD-2-AVI to create a virtual AVI reference file (it will create a ".d2v" file, which you can drop into VFAPI and create a virtual AVI reference file from). This can then be used with, for example, VirtualDub, to create any real AVI file you like (in your case, one with no compression, or very little, would be best, so you can then edit the footage). If you have plenty of HDD space (and I mean PLENTY!!), then Huffy-UV is always a good bet. If you don't have quite that much space, you could use a DV codec (which is approx 1:5 compression - e.g. MainConcept's codec). You could then edit this large AVI file and finally transcode it back to MPEG2. If you do a good job, you should actually achieve a fairly respectable result. As it happens, Easy2Bcheesy did something similar to this very recently, although I assumed he was using Premiere 6.5 at the time, instead of Premiere 6.


Arky ;o)

[Zarxrax]

See this:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=3335

You can import mpeg-2 into Premiere using avisynth and mpeg2dec.dll

[Arky]

Hey - that's cool! I never knew you could frame-serve *to* Premiere, using AVIsynth, in REALTIME.

Thanks for the link, Zarxrax :)


Arky ;o)