New PC - MPEG Video Problems :(

[sinala1]

Hi Folks,

I have just purchased a brand new pc with the following specs:

Pentium D930 3.00ghz Dual Core Processor
1 gig DDR2 SDRAM
256meg PCIe x16 ATI Radeon video card
160 gig hard disk
etc etc

I bought it with the intention of running Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 - I wanted to do some video editing of the videos I have captured on my Sony DCR-DVD803E video camera (this camera records straight onto dvd). The problem I am having is that Premiere refuses to import any of the video I got on the video camera (even though I have copied it onto the computer in mpg format). When I do import the video, the program hangs and has to be forcibly shut down. The computer will run these videos in Windows Media Player, but they are quite jumpy... I did not have any of these issues on my much lower spec'd laptop? The only problem was that the laptop had problems running Premiere due to its rather large usage of memory etc.

Any suggestions? I have installed all the software that came with the video camera, just incase it included a mpeg encoder or similar, and that hasnt really helped...

Hope you can help!

ps Its a Dell computer - should I have listened to my instincts and not bought a dell in the first place?

[vapilot2004]

S1, Dell's ok

Perhaps the Sony is using a codec that Premiere needs to know about.

The slow playback in WMP is likely due to the h u g e file size of the captured video from the Sony. Maybe try a copy from the DVD of the clip you want to a local hard drive would help WMP.

Not to say that another here in our forum may not have an answer, but adobe has a support forum area at http://www.adobeforums.com/

I have an older vers of Premiere ,and an older vers of computer , works nicely - so (eventually) yours should too.

[sinala1]

Hi VApilot,

Thanks for the info... the MPEG files are not that big - ranging from 2meg to 50meg - but it wont import any of them... I have them all on my hard disk, so none of them are coming straight from the camera. It does however import mpegs from other sources without any issues?

I have gone onto that Adobe forum and posted my question there too, hopefully some answers will be forthcoming...

Thanks again!

Edit: As an aside to this, I have also discovered that if I try to import said videos into Windows Movie Maker it too hangs and crashes, and again I did not have this issue on my old laptop... funnily enough though WMM will still happily import any other mpeg - ie any mpeg that was not captured on my camera?????

[sinala1]

As a further aside to this, I thought the issue may have been that the videos had been recorded on the camera, put onto a computer, burnt from that computer onto cd then taken from that cd onto my computer. To rule this out, I took the video straight from the dvd out of the camera and put it straight onto my new pc - alas, this too did not work


Getting desperate here, video editing is the whole reason I spent a large wadge of cash on this new pc

[Sh3113y]

Does the PC have PowerDVD installed?

If so, it may be a problem with a file called claud.ax living in
program files\cyberlink\powerdvd.

Try renaming this file and then re-running the import in Premiere.
If it works you will need to remember to rename the file back to run PowerDVD.

This is only a quick fix to get import working!

[sinala1]

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the replies. After spending vast amounts of time on the phone will Dell (running diagnostics to ensure it wasnt hardware misconfig or errors etc) and then Sony with their IT department, I have come to the realisation that its not the fact that the video was captured on the Sony Camera - its the fact that the video was ripped off the DVD using the Sony provided software!!! After downloading a different dvd ripper and getting some of the video off the DVD's, I was able to happily import it into Premiere.

The problem is that a lot of the video is no longer on the DVD-RW's... I had put it all on my computer then reformatted the DVDs to use again

The question that has to be asked - why the hell doesnt the software provided with the camera do its job properly???

[sinala1]

Ok so moving on further, I have stumbled across a couple of Sony Codecs that I have installed, in conjunction with a whole pile of microsoft MPEG codecs too - and voila, we are able to use the video in premiere! Still a bit jumpy, not 100% perfect, but much better than the program crashing on me...

What I still fail to understand is why the Sony IT department told me that there were no codecs available - when clearly, there is?

[Pretzal]

I have a slightly earlier sony video camera that uses tapes. When I import it into Premiere Pro it does so in a .avi file which are usually in the order of 1 GB per 20 min or so. Using this format I havent had any problems with Premiere Pro 1.5. I havent used the Sony DVD camcorders but can you specify what file it outputs to premiere?

Good luck with it. Video editing rocks