CS4 and mp4 / h.264

[Dashinuke]

True

I'm just testing some different settings and filetypes with Super. I've did some converting for my internship with Procoder, but at that time there wasn't really a decent H.264 preset. Are you familiar with the application Sorenson Squeeze ?

[edit] I converted an h.264 .mp4 sourcefile to a h.264 .mp4 output file. And yes, thóse .mp4's I cán import to AE/PR

[Paul LS]

I know of Sorenson Squeeze but have never used it. I hear it is very good but it is expensive. Let us know how you get on with your H.264 converted videos. Did you convert them with Super?

[Dashinuke]

Oke, I've managed to get the latest version of quicktime to work, but that didn't fix the problem, so I guess there is nothing left but converting.

Ill experiment some with the converting. So far, .avi (h.264) didnt kep the quality nor the size (strange), and converting to .mov and .mp4 made the filesize 8 times bigger.

Any suggestion of possible setting, I'm not very experienced with the different codecs/filetypes and converting between them.

[Dashinuke]

Now I've got an .avi h.264 conversion which looks it has the same quality, only I have some strange problem. It seems that when I import it into premiere, it previews the file at high speed, like its fast forwarding, but the audio is running properly. I've tried some different presets, but that didnt make a difference. When I import some other file into the project, like a .mov, both video and audio run properly.

[Edit] The avi video seems to run like 10 times faster then it should

[Chuck Engels]

If you are going to export a file that will be imported into a Premiere Elements project always export a DV-AVI, FIle/Export/Movie.
That will give you a file you don't have to render and will have very good quality and no loss. I'm not sure why you would want to use any other format

[Dashinuke]

DV-Avi only can be exported to 720x576, while the footage I recorded has a resolution of 1280x720

[Paul LS]

Try converting it to 1280x720 MPEG2 at say 25Mb/s bit rate. This will be good quality and will have better compatibility with Premiere.

[Dashinuke]

Alright, after quite a busy period, i'm back to my holliday video files

I converted the video's already to a HDV Mpeg2 (before reading Paul LS's suggestion) which exported them to a .m2t file. Quality was almost the same, just added a small gamma filter. I couldn't change the bitrate to the suggested 25 Mbps, it was fixed to 18,3 Mbps. Converting the first few files went well, and importing to premiere went alright as well, so I decided to convert all videofiles the next following days.

Some files couldn't be converted however. I noticed it were the smaller files, but since none of them were actually useful, I paid no attention to it. Sadly, wen I wanted to start editting today, I found out the procoder cut off the last 6 seconds of ALL moviefiles (which explains why the moviefiles with the duration of 6 seconds and less got an error)

So I guess it's back to the drawingtable of the procoder presets

[edit] I just found out that every videofile gives the error (while encoding from .mp4 to hdv mpeg2) "QT Reader: General error", with about 6 seconds remaining. Somehow it still finished the files (minus the last 6 seconds), and doesn't show the files as incomplete.

[Dashinuke]

Seems I've found the solution already. In the source info, i've got to select a specific audiotrack ("Use audiotrack 1", instead of "Use all audio tracks"). Quote from the ediusforums:

Try setting the Video stream and Audio stream parameters to a specific stream in the Source properties in ProCoder.
Maybe it's called Video track and not stream...
Seems QuickTime has extra tracks (much like DVD VOBs) that can contain interactivity and other things that can inhibit ProCoder's ability to "play through" the file.

Another problem solved. Now I can spend the next days re-converting again

[Chuck Engels]

Thanks for keeping us updated on your progress