Premiere Pro CS5 Preview/Rendering Problems

[MitchHussey]

I have been using Premiere Pro CS5 in a video editing class I'm taking and I'm having a couple different issues.

1. Some of my video is having a weird frame glitch while editing.  If I step forward or backward through one of my video clips, it becomes choppy.  During playback, the video will play about 10 frames forward, then go back one frame, then play several frames forward, then glitch back one frame again, etc.  The amount of glitches is random and they go away when scrubbing back and forth over the glitched clip.  The source file is always fine, but the frame glitch renders out with my project.  Do I just need to pre-render the preview files? They have a yellow line over them, which means they shouldn't need pre-rendering. I would just try pre-rendering, but it seems to cause it's own problems sometimes.

2. When using a green screen with "Ultra Key" in premiere, the keying works great.  Everything looks amazing.  However, when I get more than one layer, Premiere becomes unresponsive.  If I hit play, I hear about 1 second of sound, then premiere freezes up.  I have the red bar, which means I need to pre-render, right?  Could this cause any problems for me later on in my project?

3. Audio will sometimes be very picky about the layer it wants to go in.  Layers 1,2,3, and 4 will all be empty, but when dragging an audio clip in, it will create and go to layer 5.  It works there, but it won't let me move it up to the previous audio layers.  Not a huge deal, but a little annoying.

Here are the specs of my equipment.

I am using a Samsung H204 HD Camcorder. File format is H.264 1080i. I'm dragging the video clips straight from my camcorder onto my hard drive, then into premiere.

The computer I am using is a Dell running Windows 7.  Intel Core i5 CPU, 12 Gigs of RAM, 2.80 GHz.  It should be able to handle everything I'm doing, right?  At the most my video projects have 5 video layers and 4 audio layers.

Thanks for your help-

Mitch

[Todd_Kopriva]

Have you installed the Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.3) update? The recent updates fix a lot of problems.

[MitchHussey]

Yes, I am currently running 5.03.

I'm wondering if it's something to do with the video format or something like that.

Here's a little more info on the Chroma Key Problem-  I can play through my files once fine, but after that, premiere becomes unresponsive.  It will let me move the scrubber around, push buttons, etc, but nothing happens.  I get no sound when scrubbing, and if I hit play again it becomes unresponsive and locks the program up.

Edit- Just messed around and found something out.  If on the first playthrough I hit the back to in point button, premiere doesn't lock up and I can go back through it.  The problem starts when I hit the stop button during playback.

[Jim_Simon]

I'm wondering if it's something to do with the video format or something like that.

A valid question.

Premiere Pro is set up to work with AVCHD video, which is a very specific subset of the H.264 specification.  Most cameras that record strict AVCHD will carry the logo.  Yours doesn't.  Which indicates that it's recording a non-standard variant.  As with all things non-standard, it may or may not work correctly.

To verify, shoot some footage from a camera that has the AVCHD logo on it and compare the results.

[the_wine_snob]

For the behavior of the Audio Clips, PrPro insists that the channel-count of the Clip match the channel-count of the Audio Track. If you look at the Audio Track's Header, you will see a little "speaker" icon in the upper-right of the Header. One speaker = 1-channel, two speakers = 2-channel and 5.1 = 6-channel.

When one creates a Sequence, they can adjust the default number of Audio Tracks, and the channel-count of these. For the default, if one has set this to two 1-channel (mono) Tracks, two 2-channel (stereo) and one 6-channel (5.1) Tracks, they will be created in that order, with Audio Tracks 1 & 2 being 1-channel w/ only one speaker, Audio Tracks 3 and 4 2-channel w/ two speakers and Audio Track 5 with "5.1" for 6-channel. A 1-channel Clip will ONLY go onto Audio Track 1 or 2, in this example.

Now, PrPro is quite smart in this regard, in that if you have a Sequence with zero 1-channel Tracks, it will create one for you, if you drag that Clip to the lower part of the Master Track, but that new Audio Track will now appear at the bottom of the Track stack.

Here's a look at the speaker icons:

Good luck, and hope that this helps,

Hunt

[the_wine_snob]

Also note that you can change the default Track setup for each new Sequence. If, for instance, you usually have several 1-channel Tracks, say for SFX, set your default with those, plus any normal 2-channel Tracks, and any 6-channel (5.1) Tracks, if you work with original 5.1 Clips. If you do not use all of these, you can Delete Unused Tracks (Audio, and/or Video) to clean things up a bit.

One can also Rename the Audio Tracks, as I have done in my example above. One then does not have Audio 1 through Audio X.

To swap Tracks around, one needs to do a little "dance." One can create new Audio Tracks, where they want, and with the channel-count required, as one can Delete Tracks, but they cannot click-drag Audio Tracks around, as one can with many DAW programs. This has been a fairly common Feature Request, especially from folk, who work a lot with a DAW.

Good luck,

Hunt

[Guest]

I am just learning Premier Pro, but after many years on Avid and more recently Final Cut, what I have found is that H.264 doesn't edit very well.  Most if not all of the stuff shot by DSLR's is H.264 and we did some small in-car cameras from Go-Pro which produced H.264 and I had to transcode them into something that played well with FCP.  In my case it was DVCPRO-100.

As someone sort-of suggested below you might want to transcode some of the H.264 into AVC-HD and give that a try.  I think maybe you can do it with Quicktime Pro.  not sure what other apps might do it.

Good luck,

-peter

[davidbeisner2010]

I've had very little issues with editing lots of formats of h.264, including stuff from the new DSLRs in PrProCS5. One thing I would suggest you try is to reduce your playback resolution to 1/2, 1/4 or even 1/8. To do that, right click on your monitor and choose from the playback resolution menu towards the bottom. With an i5 CPU you're not likely to get very good response with HD video, especially with effects like Chroma applied.