Problems importing into CS5.5

[LightningCrabz]

Hi there,

Over the past several days, I've been reading this wonderful guide in an attempt to improve the quality of my videos http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... index.html
I went through the whole process the guide detailed well, and I'm having trouble importing my fixed-up footage into the sequence.

I'm ripping Ghost in the Shell:SAC from DVDs. I got some nice VOBs with DVDfab, then indexed it. The interlacing on it is a hybrid source that's mostly 29.97 NTSC video, so I used the TIVTC inverse telecine plug in for AviSynth which fixed it up good. I resized it to 848x480 inside AviSynth, then did a little more pre-production cleanup on it. I then brought it into virtualdub, and compressed it with UTvideo codec YUV420 and created the new AVI file.

Since Premiere doesn't have too many options other than DV, I did the usual preset of DV - NTSC Widescreen 48. Then I popped over to the general tab and turned the fields to progressive scan.

So everythings set. I import my resized, progressive, prettied-up footage and I get the error that the file is unsupported.

If you can please tell me where the problem lies, and/or how I could work around it, that'd be great.

Thanks,
Lightning

[BasharOfTheAges]

Since Premiere doesn't have too many options other than DV, I did the usual preset of DV - NTSC Widescreen 48.

That's a misconception right there. Premiere lets you create any number of custom sequence settings (frame size, frame rate, etc.) and save them as presets.

As you your actual problem, older versions of UT video had seperate x86 and x64 codecs, I hear that's not the case now, but if you used an older version and you only have the x86 version on your system, the 64bit CS5 software won't like it.

[LightningCrabz]

That makes sense.

I just installed the x64 one, and I'm not seeing it in my options for compressing in virtualdub. I thought it might be because the virtualdub I'm using is the stable 32-bit one, so I downloaded the 64-bit one, but it won't allow me to import my .avs script into it.

[Brad]

You're probably not running the 64-bit version of AVIsynth. Unfortunately, 64-bit in general is just not terribly friendly if you're using AVIsynth in your pipeline, since the 64-bit version is just not terribly stable. I messed around with it a lot to get it working nicely with CS5.5, but I just kept running into weird errors and hard to predict crashes. Basically your best bet is doing one of the following:

1) Get ahold of a copy of Premiere CS4. This is the last 32-bit version of Premiere. Then just move to a completely 32-bit workflow with AVIsynth. We just set this up for Liz (Nessephanie. Mah wife) and it's working perfectly.

2) Stick with CS5.5, but use 32-bit AVIsynth to bring your footage into VirtualDub, and either clip out specific scenes you want to use (and compress them to a lossless codec), or just convert the entire thing to lossless. Then just bring your footage directly into Premiere. Keep in mind that although CS5.5 is a 64-bit native program, it'll still read 32-bit codecs just fine. It just can't write to them (including Previews). The 64-bit version of UTvideo should work fine for that, though if you can get ahold of it, I like the 64-bit version of Morgan MJPEG, as it's much much speedier.



(on a personal note, I'd like to say welcome to the Org. I saw that you're pretty new and these are your only 2 posts so far. I'm making it a point to say this because you're actually doing everything right so far in terms of reading the guides, posting for help in a very thorough and intelligible manner, as opposed to being vague and uninterested in researching stuff, as many new editors seem to do. So, it's just nice to see somebody taking the initiative you are!)

[LightningCrabz]

1) Get ahold of a copy of Premiere CS4.

2) Stick with CS5.5, but use 32-bit AVIsynth to bring your footage into VirtualDub, and either clip out specific scenes you want to use (and compress them to a lossless codec), or just convert the entire thing to lossless. Then just bring your footage directly into Premiere. Keep in mind that although CS5.5 is a 64-bit native program, it'll still read 32-bit codecs just fine. It just can't write to them (including Previews). The 64-bit version of UTvideo should work fine for that, though if you can get ahold of it, I like the 64-bit version of Morgan MJPEG, as it's much much speedier.

Unfortunately, getting ahold of CS4 is pretty difficult for me. Adobe won't sell any of their old programs, all the ones sold on ebay get incredibly expensive and fast, and all the workable torrents of it are dead.
Can you explain that second method a little more? I already used 32-bit AVIsynth and Virtualdub to compress my footage to a lossless Avi with 32-bit UTVideo, and premiere pro CS5.5 wouldn't read it. Also, I tried installing the 64-bit version of UTvideo, but it wasn't showing up on my compression options in 32-bit virtualdub. Can you tell me why?

(on a personal note, I'd like to say welcome to the Org. I saw that you're pretty new and these are your only 2 posts so far. I'm making it a point to say this because you're actually doing everything right so far in terms of reading the guides, posting for help in a very thorough and intelligible manner, as opposed to being vague and uninterested in researching stuff, as many new editors seem to do. So, it's just nice to see somebody taking the initiative you are!)

I've actually been editing for a couple of years now, but I've been trying to learn how I could improve my video quality. I just never knew this site existed until recently, and its been a great help ever since. Thanks again!

[mirkosp]

A 32bit software won't be able to use a 64bit codec and the same applies to 64bit software with 32bit codecs (it's why the preview options are "limited" in premiere, since only 64bit codecs will do, and most codecs one would have are 32bit, generally). However, when you have both 32bit and 64bit version of UTVideo installed, they both will be able to encode and decode the same files, so this allows you to encode utvideo files with 32bit avs+vdub with the 32bit version of the codec, and then later on decode those same files in 64bit softwares (such as premiere cs5.5) with the 64bit version of the codec.
That said, if the file won't open in premiere yet, then something might have gone wrong, particularly if you have an older version of utvideo (the one in the avtech is quite old).

First uninstall both the 32bit and 64bit versions of utvideo from your system, then install version 11.1.1. The newer versions have a single installer for both the 32bit and 64bit versions of the codec, so it's easier to manage.

If it still doesn't work, check out this post and see if what I wrote there helps you fix the problem for good.

[Brad]

What mirko said. Say, it seems to me like there's just something weird going on with the codec in general. I can't confirm 100% right now, but I do believe that I've imported 32-bit encoded Lagarith and Huffyuv (2 more lossless codecs, similar to UTvideo) into CS5.5. It tends to be fairly forgiving when it comes to file types and encoding. So my guess is that there's just something funky going on with the install of the codec? Try the uninstall and reinstall of the latest version and let us know.

[LightningCrabz]

I tried the 11.1.1 version of UTvideo like mirko suggested. I'm happy to say it worked perfectly. Premiere CS5.5 was able to decode the video just fine. Thanks a lot guys!