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Is this really correct?  Using a test clip on CS4, it appears to be so!

You would think this issue would be fixed by now, unless the problem relates to the behavior of the new Sony HDR-FX1000.

I am interested in doing HDV 24p video work, and was looking into whether to buy the new prosumer camera from Sony, the HDR-FX1000, or its fully professional version, the HVR-Z5U. It is looking like I will have to buy the HVR-Z5U.

Only the HVR-Z5U has the ability to directly record HDV on to tape with native 24p video (or possibly more technically precise, it is only the HVR-Z5U which allows through FireWire the capture of native 24p into an NLE application at the HDV resolution of 1440x1080 at 24p – not capturing a 60i signal with 3:2 pulldown).  With the HDR-FX1000, the manual says that HDV video recorded in the 24p mode will go on to tape as a 60i signal with 3:2 pulldown.

Unfortunately, it looks like the problems discussed with Premiere’s past problems in handling 24 frame rate, recorded on Sony cameras as 60i with 3:2 pulldown, have not been fixed in CS4.  Even after 4.1, this problem may continue to persist, particularly if the problem as another person posted in the past, is actually that Sony's prosumer cameras fail to imbed the phasing of the 3:2 cadence in the HDV mpeg stream.

I was able to find a native clip taken on the Sony HDR-FX1000 which I could download from the Web and import into Premiere Pro CS4 for test purposes.  It came from a German video engineer named Wolfgang Winne, the weblink being: http://www.fxsupport.de/blog/01_09.html

Being in Germany, this was PAL HDV video at 25p. It therefore goes into 50i with a 2:2 pulldown cadence.  Nonetheless, it should serve as a similar indicator for the U.S. 24p rate as far as exploring how well Premier can handle a reverse pulldown to restore the video to its proper progressive frames after capture/import.

Of course a number of people have noted a minor inconvenience in CS4 as compared to CS3 -- in that on CS4 it is necessary after importing a video clip to do an extra step of applying “Interpret Footage".

In order to test CS4, I first created a project with the sequence format of  HDV 1080p25, selected under the category of HDV presets.  Then I took the downloaded .m2t video file of HDV at 1440x1080 25p, and imported it into Premiere Pro CS4.

I then set up both a Source monitor and a Program monitor window, and to be sure I could accurately observe interlaced artifacts, I set the view size for both at 100 percent.

Firstly examining the clip in the Source monitor, it's clear that Premiere Pro CS4 only shows half resolution for an imported video clip with this “50i wrapper”, and not surprisingly if you just grab the freshly imported clip and drop it onto the timeline, the timeline will then have a red bar above it since CS4 requires the extra manual step of doing "Interpret Footage" before the footage can be put on the timeline as a native 25p clip.

But the big surprise, and the source of the question in this post, was what happened after I did an "Interpret Footage" step.  I would have thought that the 2:2 reverse pulldown on the "50i wrapper" would have been done correctly, and I would be able to view an interlaced-free clip on the timeline via the Program monitor window.

Surprisingly, that was not the case.  In the “Interpret Footage” options window, under Field Order, I selected "Conform to: No Fields (progressive)”.  I then dropped the clip on to the timeline, and moved the time marker to a point where a car was pulling in to a gas station.  The camera was on a tripod, so this was a perfect set up to look for interlaced artifacts.

There was severe zigzagging on the moving image of the car - and thus highly visible interlacing.

I deleted that clip from the timeline, and tried another path for moving the post-“Interpret Footage” clip on to the timeline.  This time I set an In Point in the Source monitor, selected an Out Point, and then dragged this smaller subset of time from the Source monitor onto the timeline.  Again, the car had severe interlacing on it.

There was no red line above the clip on the timeline for either of these methods, indicating that the step of "Interpret Footage" had indeed created a progressive-framed clip.

This indicates that even if CS4, version 4.1, provides the automatic pulldown removal step (which I believe is what CS3 does in v3.2) we will still likely have the fundamental problem that at least for this new Sony camera, as well as the other Sony prosumer cameras mentioned on other posts which process 24p into 3:2 pulldown at 60i, that Premiere Pro CS4 will not be able to provide proper pulldown removal.  (Same problem in PAL HDV, for cameras that process 25p into 2:2 pulldown at 50i)

Am I missing something here?

People who have used Panasonic cameras have indicated that Premiere Pro is able to correctly remove the 3:2 pulldown. But Canon and Sony prosumer cameras are said to not give Premiere Pro proper cadence flag information in the MPEG HDV stream, preventing proper reconstruction of progressive frames.

Is this really a problem within Sony and Canon HDV cameras, or is there a software issue within Premiere Pro that has yet to be resolved?

Message was edited by: Douglas R Wagner