A couple of noob questions about the 7D and Premiere Pro

A few weeks ago I upgraded to a 7D and I thought I would give the DSLR video world a go.
I fired up Premiere for the first time with a copy of the premiere pro cs3 bible book and went to work making my first video. Turned out OK but I have a lot to learn.

A couple of small things that I have found bits of info on but no clear instructions.

> Editing the compressed MOV files in Premiere is choppy. I have read that it is best to convert to another format prior to import. Does anyone have a specific method/workflow for this (hopefully free or cheap)?

> My book recommends starting a new project in the same framerate you recorded in 24/30/60. Makes sense. Does it matter if I am working in 24 fps but want to put in some 60 fps footage, that I may want to slow down to 50%?

> Regarding changing the speed of clips. Is there certain increments that you should try to keep to? For example if I have a 60fps clip should I only stick to 25%, 50%, or 75% speed changes or does that not matter at all?


Thanks for any help and sorry if these are duplicates of old questions. I must have missed them when searching.

I use premiere pro CS3 and CS4 for all of my work and I have never had a problem with .mov files. It all depends on the original codec though. Sorry I am not much help there.

It is always good to start a project with the same frame rate and audio frequency. it's more predictable that way. You can use 60 fps footage on that time line you can even use 30 fps on that timeline but it can cause problems during output. My recomendation would be to work with your footage on another timeline, make your speed and effect changes and then use it as a nested sequence in your original timeline.

When changing the speed of your clips there is one guidline I suggest you follow. Always change your frame rate by an even divisable or it will through your audio out of sync. For example is you shot your footage in 60fps you could change it to 45, 30, 15 etc. But you would not want to change it to 48, 24, or 12 etc. If you shot your source footage in 24fps then you would be able to change the frame rate to 12 because it is an even dividend of that rate.

I hope that makes sense.

cnv wrote in post #9274375
I use premiere pro CS3 and CS4 for all of my work and I have never had a problem with .mov files. It all depends on the original codec though. Sorry I am not much help there.

I guess you haven't tried editing HD video in either then, especially high bitrate ones like 5d and 7d

chrisb321 wrote in post #9008130
A few weeks ago I upgraded to a 7D and I thought I would give the DSLR video world a go.
I fired up Premiere for the first time with a copy of the premiere pro cs3 bible book and went to work making my first video. Turned out OK but I have a lot to learn.

A couple of small things that I have found bits of info on but no clear instructions.

> Editing the compressed MOV files in Premiere is choppy. I have read that it is best to convert to another format prior to import. Does anyone have a specific method/workflow for this (hopefully free or cheap)?

> My book recommends starting a new project in the same framerate you recorded in 24/30/60. Makes sense. Does it matter if I am working in 24 fps but want to put in some 60 fps footage, that I may want to slow down to 50%?

> Regarding changing the speed of clips. Is there certain increments that you should try to keep to? For example if I have a 60fps clip should I only stick to 25%, 50%, or 75% speed changes or does that not matter at all?


Thanks for any help and sorry if these are duplicates of old questions. I must have missed them when searching.

Editing h264 files at high bitrates will always be choppy even on good machines because premiere doesn't support DXVA (mainly because macs don't support it, and adobe has always had platform independent features). There are a few ways around this, the most effective of which is to use premiere to re-encode the video to a intermediate file (if you don't care about space, uncompressed is fine, if not, mjpeg, restricted mpeg 2, and intra-frame codecs are best). You can also use CS4, 4.2 for premiere pro with certain geforce and quadro fx video cards, and adobe supports gpu acceleration for those cards only.

In general, stick to multiples of your lowest frame rate for video, or else you'll end up either dropping frames or multiplying them to get your video. Sometimes (well, more than sometimes if you know when it's worth it) it's fine to drop or duplicate frames, so don't worry all that much about it unless you are doing production work (in which case you wouldn't be asking the question here anyway)

basroil wrote in post #9276734
I guess you haven't tried editing HD video in either then, especially high bitrate ones like 5d and 7d

Actually yea I have. I edit high bit rate 1920 x 1080P HD footage every day. Most of it is shot with the Sony EX3 which shoots in a Quicktime MP4 format native. I have also edited 2k and 4k footage from the Red that has been wrapped into a .mov format and the R3D format and I have not ever had a problem with stuttering.

I use an 8 core windows 7 machine with 10 gb of ram so that kind of helps.

cnv wrote in post #9277716
Actually yea I have. I edit high bit rate 1920 x 1080P HD footage every day. Most of it is shot with the Sony EX3 which shoots in a Quicktime MP4 format native. I have also edited 2k and 4k footage from the Red that has been wrapped into a .mov format and the R3D format and I have not ever had a problem with stuttering.

I use an 8 core windows 7 machine with 10 gb of ram so that kind of helps.

RedCode is actually a wavelet compression rather than DCT compression, so you can decode smaller pieces if needed (i.e. when previewing you can decode 852x480 instead of 4k), hence much better for editing. And not all compression formats use the same codec. 5d and 7d use h264 without many optimizations, so premiere pro doesn't decode it properly. I haven't updated it since 4.0, so perhaps 4.1/4.2 improve the use of multi-core decoding (I have an i7 920, and premiere pro doesn't even use close to 25% cpu if I wanted it to)

Depending on if you are willing to spend some money, download the trial of Cineform Prospect HD. You will get their HD Link program which converts the 5D Mark II files into AVI for WIndows use. These make editing much easier. Also, you get Cineform's First Light program which allows for great outside of Premiere editing which you can sync up to Premiere. Plus Premiere will then use your Cineform files as the preview files and make it much easier to edit.

I've been using a Free Open Sourced program called "mediacoder" to do the trancoding from MOV to AVI/MP4 and has been satisfied. (though I'll put it as "not knowing much yet" rather than it being actually the good/right thing to do)

I'm really new to all these HD video editing and what not.

Pointers please?