I needs me some help

[ZaCloud]

Ok, I guess I just got lucky somehow when I did my other projects... I simply can't get Adobe Premiere Pro to cooperate anymore.

I know already I have to switch to Video for Windows as the regular thingie, cuz DV tends to be way too choppy and crashy. But once I set a project mode thingie at the start (Video Rendering), in the General project settings, I cannot change my mind later.

It seems no matter what I pick, the video is way too choppy in the preview window, and unless the audio is by itself it doesn't play. Or, the runs half-decently but has artifacts trailing motion or scene-changes. Right now I have it as Uncompressed, figuring maybe it's just bad compressors, but the former problem is at its worst.

Even at Draft Quality, there's no way at all to know what effects my edits are having. I absolutely cannot make a vid like this if I have to save and export every single edit I make. (Which most of the time won't even run in video players anyway!) Choppy, dark, pixellated up the wazoo, and without working audio, that's how it keeps showing up when I try uncompressed rendering. You would think uncompressed would mean zero quality loss...

What should I do? -_- Everyone and their mother keep recommending Huffyuv, but it never ever works for me; it makes a multi-colored bunch of static on most of the screen, with a very small rectangle of working video at the bottom. I've messed with settings ("lines", whatever that is, etc) to no avail.

Why's there so many darn codecs when none of them even show up decently? What should I set mine at? How the heck do I reset the render method without starting my projects over?

[SqiKy kLeen]

Do you have Virtualdub? If not, you can find it at AMV.org somewhere.

My suggestion would be to take your footage and re-encode it to DivX 4.12. It's a very good quality codec and I will be using it in the future. Vicbond007 has a guide at AMV detailing how to use it well.

Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with 7.0 Pro. I want to use it, but havent delved into it much as of yet. I wish I could help you, Ill let you know if something comes up. Sorry. ;_;

[ZaCloud]

*sigh* Well, last night I was in such pain that I couldn't sleep, so I went online and surveyed some tips on amv.org until I found www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/premprosetup.html and eagerly heeded its words (not just this article but the other things before and after). I got the mjpeg codec, started a new project, set it on lowest quality, tweaked a few things here and there as suggested, turning my mp3 cd rip into a 16 bit .wav file so it doesnt have to compress/decompress anything...

And it helped SOME, but by help I mean coming up with a glass of water and throwing it onto a raging inferno. It now plays in the preview window, but at about one frame every two seconds. Like that's really gonna let me know exactly where to make cuts, and see how the onscreen action is in relation to the music... -_-

This isn't fair. The program IS capable of working; you all saw my Matrix video. It did just fine with that, and that was on default settings with one or two changes when my computer's probably not even DV compatible (trying that format now crashes, crashes, and has .0000001% preview ability as opposed to the 5% I have now)

Could it be just because of my footage? Ok, I hear that using Xvid/DivX footage is bad in Premiere, for not having keyframes properly. The footage I'm working with was supposedly Xvid BUT it was re-encoded as .wmv. I've used .wmv just beautifully in this program before. Would the no-keyframing carry over from the Xvid thingie somehow? I ask because ANOTHER of my problems is that if I pause, or click on a specific place on the timeline, it jumps back to somewhere else. It takes upward of three tries to get it to go where I want it to. I've heard that this could be a keyframe problem.

Considering I'm rendering my stuff as mjpeg, which is supposed to put keyframes on like every frame or something... this SHOULD solve the problem. But it isn't. So maybe it's something else. Blah... -_-

[ZaCloud]

Update: All attempts of everything have failed. This includes hiring a pink elephant to try fixing the project settings for me, me trying while skydiving, and hitting it with a Very Big Stick. Well ok so maybe not all THAT, but I DID try everything that all walkthroughs have suggested, as well as building on the logic that such walkthroughs have supplied me with.

I figured if I just re-encode my footage then it should be ok... Maybe because it's not interlaced, the Progressive Scanning is what's causing the jumping around of the slider; by depending on the frames before the one I select (since it's recycling previous parts of frames that go unchanged), it slides itself automatically back to where the static areas begin. So if I decide to work with... ugh... interlaced footage, the problem should stop. Though interlacing non-interlaced footage should still look alright in theory anyway.

But whether I try to interlace, deinterlace, or leave things alone, most codecs won't allow me to use them; they say there's a problem or the resolution's not compatible or something. VirtualDub won't let me do anything to my source cuz it's .wmv (newer ones cuz they made it illegal, and older ones cuz it comes up with some kinda error)

I got some kind of network framework something that's supposed to bypass Huffyuv and other problems, but it just sits there.

Um, yeah it goes on and on and on... There's no regular codecs in Premiere that'll do good enough as a simple re-encode; all too lossy. Even "millions of colors" gets reduced to probably a 150 pallette, with all the artifacts and generalizations that keep happening in the products...

None of those fancy progs will let me import the file for re-encode.

So finally I went back to the root of the problem in context of everyone's suggested Huffyuv solution. A lossless, huge method of saving video. Supposedly. Big filesize for losing practically nothing from the original.

My problem with the colorful scribbly lines and crashing in Huffyuv is most likely this: Premiere does all its stuff in RGB format. Huffyuv, on the other hand, leans more toward YUY2 format although it's also capable of doing RGB. Thing is, Premiere (at least Pro version) seems to send mixed signals to Huffyuv, and it gets confused, trying to encode the video in BOTH YUY2 and RGB modes! That makes sense as to why there's mixed color signals gumming up the works, and the unstable data crashes the player after a few seconds of the horrible display.

The only solution I could come up with, was to convert the exported video to YUY2 format directly, so there would be no confusion (since all my previous attempts had been exporting as RGB). Guides say that going between the two modes could result in slightly washed-out colors (pale) but at this point I'm willing to sacrifice something that trivial. However, while the video clip I tested was successful in its framerate, it was extremely, extremely dark. Turning up the brightness for the media player revealed a lot of ugly artifacts and some noise. Nothing hugely blatant like when I try to export as Xvid or DivX or most other formats, but still, FAR from the promised lossless quality.

So... yeah... I'm COMPLETELY at a loss now... I can't go back to Premiere 6.5 cuz it NEVER worked for me. At least Pro HAS worked in the past. I just don't understand why it won't now...

If too many more days go by then I'm gonna do a sad lossy re-encode of the project clips in Indeo or something with a black-bar upgrade to resolution and do the darn thing in Movie Maker. At least that thing has a working preview window much of the time...

(Don't worry this isn't my Doom Project vid, just a personal project... *sigh* a Last Order vid... I would have been the third to ever use it had I been able to start when I truly wanted to... now there's ten. Only two for download but still... blah...)

My enthusiasm dwindles day by unsuccessful day... Nothing worse than having the strong feelings, ideas, skills, and necessary equipment to bring it to life... and yet being unable to do a thing about it except continue fruitless attempts to fix it...

[AltruisticCrono]

I'm sorry to hear that Ice Angel.

It's true that if your program isn't functioning or you can't get on the computer....you lose interest in the project.

Apparently you've tried everything in the book to make it work. I wonder if your computer has anything to do with it...like meet the minimum requirements for video editing.

Have you tried other sources of footage that used to work before? In the worst case you'd either need a new computer / upgrade or find a friend that can help you.

(ponders about the rainbow huffyuv...I used to have a problem with my .WMVs)