Bizarre Premiere 4.2 Behavior

[JKD99]

Hi
Digitizing as usual, with either Final Cut Pro or Premiere, 5000k per second. The piece is 37 minutes long, it's a DVCAM output from FCP. It's a film show, telecined to DVCAM at 23.98, sound rolls are at 30fps.
Anyway, when I open up Premiere 4.2 to "Conform Movie" to 30fps (as I've done a gajillion times before) the progress bar gets about halfway through and then stops. No crash, but now the clip is now half (or so) as long as it was. The file size in the Finder remains the same, and the clip isn't twice as fast, it's just as if the Conform process chopped 22 minutes off the back of the file. Huh? Has anyone experienced this? I tried using Premiere 6.5 with "Interpret Footage" but it never seems to work like 4.2.
Thanks in advance!

[Richard Fairbanks]

Is it repeatable on a new digitized clip, or a one-time thing? It sounds like something got kaflumoxed in the file (maybe the sun coughed a little extra nutrino flem while you were digitizing?) I don't know.

[JKD99]

Hi Richard,
Yes, unfortunately it's repeatedly repeatable. I've just tried loading into FCP at 30fps. FCP says the new clip is 29.97, so now the box is chugging away at a QT export @ 30. We'll see. The whole purpose for the DVCAM thing was to let FCP/Avid work with their native video format and then load at a healthy resolution in Aurora Motion JPEG-A into the Igniter. It would seem to me that letting each system do its thing would result in a better image than exporting to QuickTime in a non-native compression......does that sound logical?

[Dan Pinder]

Does your FCP have Cinema Tools? Why not let Cinema Tools do the conforming?

[JKD99]

Hi Dan
Well, the FCP I'm loading with is only v2, but I was thinking about having a v4 w/ Cinema Tools system as well. I didn't know that Cinema Tools would do a conform, probably because I don't know zip about FCP (just enough to get into trouble). I know Virtual VTR can conform, but there seemed to be problems with that when a reel was loaded via Premiere. If I conformed with VVTR, the movie became "broken", and would no longer stay in sync in VVTR........
Anyway, thanks for your reply!

[Polaris]

Is that 5000k per second as in approx. 5megs/second? Are they DV, MJPEG, etc? Are your files sizes ending up pretty large? We had the same problem with Premier with large DV movie files. Ended up using DUMPSTER to hack the file headers to 30fps until we got PT6.

Cheers,
-Polaris

[JKD99]

Hi Polaris
Yeah, I've been using the Igniter 1.5:1 Preset in FCP. limiting the data rate to 5megs per second. The file does end up pretty big, over 10 gigs. The playback has been fine, and if it's a video-only (DV) show, with no conforming, the sync is perfect. It's only when I conform to 30 that the "chopping in half" occurs, but you may have hit upon something there.....I should try a test with shorter files. I'd been experimenting with working in longer reels during editorial, the file in question is 37 minutes long, so it's kind of like an ABCD reel, about 3,330 feet. It may be that 4.2, due to it's age, can't handle big file sizes (ie: above the old 2 gig limit).
I have Dumpster, how does one "hack the file headers to 30fps" ?

Thanks so much for the tip!

[Polaris]

Here's the trick with DUMPSTER:

Open the movie and save a reference copy using QT player.

Then using DUMPSTER, open the reference movie (won't work with the larger file unfortunately) and you will see all the header info for that movie.

Next find the category `moov' under which you find a subcategory called `mdhd' media handler header. Click on it once to open it up and you will see the "timescale" which will = 2997. Change it to 3000 (three thousand).

Next go to the `trak' header which has another `mdhd' subcategory. Do the same thing again (which alters the audio tracks) and hit command+S to save. Viola, you've got the 10gig file at 29.97 fps and the small reference movie at 30 fps! You can work with either file depending on which rate you need. We always open the 30fps movie and "save as self contained..." to make a stand a alone 30fps movie to avoid confusion.

You are indeed correct, Premier has a problem with single movie files over 2gigs. It just screws up the file rather than conforming it. As you may all ready know, PT6 no longer has this issue as there are seperate pull downs for audio and video (Amen DIGI, thanks). Just one more reason to upgrade!

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Polaris

[JKD99]

Thanks very VERY much, Polaris!
The mystery is solved!