Where's the AVI - Am I missing something?

[donphillipe]

I have been using 3+ various mfg. DV MiniDV cams for many years now, along with slow migration Premiere Pro 6 - CS2. Last week I decided to give HDV a go and bought a new DV20. To my disappointment and surprise, the captured video was saved by Premiere as a MPEG file. That might not be such a bad deal but there are video freezes and the audio trails the video by 5-15 seconds when I try to edit using MPEG format as input to Premiere timeline. (Yes, I am using the Canon add-in pack definition XML from Adobe.) Not good.

I have been researching a couple of days and all I can come up with is a solution of HDVSplit and MPEG Streamclip, however, this adds a good day of preprocessing to get it rendered into an AVI that is usable as input to Premiere CS2. This link gives an outline of the proposed preprocessing steps but gives no details and identification of the multiples of settings that can be made with MPEG Streamclip: http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/post-238667.html (And this assumes I have the extra time to play with these tools and then use the tools for the super long pre-rendering process.)

I would question how practical the DV20 matched to Premiere CS2 can be without a more practical direct camera to AVI capture mechanism. Where's the fast path and as popular as Premiere is and this camera is set to be, how can they be selling so many of these cameras if you can't even get a good input stream for use in Premiere CS2 without 1-2 days preprocessing the MPEG to AVI? (P.S. Likely not my hardware, I have the core 2 duo, 500GB video use only raid & 125GB 10K PRM system drive, high capacity video card, 2G memory, etc.

[Worley]

This isn't a solution, but it may help you find where the problem is.

Download Sony Vegas 7 Trial from www.sonycreativesoftware.com and see if it can import the file without the lag.

If it can, then the problem must surely lie with Premiere.

[Lunchbox]

I edit the .m2t file direclty in Premiere without problems. If you want the old fashion AVI editing of HDV in premiere, you can try Cineform NeoHDV or AspectHD. But after the 15 days trial, it will cost you money. You can use Cineform's HDLink to capture video to AVI.

[donphillipe]

Thanks for the tip of using the m2t file from DVSplit directly. I didn't think of that for some reason. That resolves all my sync problems. (Now if I can just learn to manage the hundreds of files DVSPlit produces, one for each "scene" or start-stop sequence shot.)

I didn't want an AVI specifically, just something that would not have all the video lock-ups and horrible out of sync audio as the MPEG that Premiere comes up with from a HV20 capture. I wonder first why Premiere product would even claim that this capture is of any value and second, after using every version of Premiere that has claimed to support MPG input and having none of them work (be in sync) on any of 3 systems I have tried it on, I also wonder why they even bother to make this false claim.

Anyway off my soapbox and onto my thanks box. You saved my day and I appreciate the tip!

|| Update: I now see there is a check box in DVSplit that allows the entire video capture to be saved in a single file instead of the individual scene files.