Editing MP4 in Premiere CS3

[RealEmotionX]

Okay, I know there is a bunch on this all over the net but HONESTLY I just want to get a final opinion all in one place

I have .mp4 files, ripped by a friend from their Card Captor Sakura DVD set, the issue becomes, while editable in CS4, you are not able to edit them in CS3.

The hastle I would give my friend in ripping them in another format would be ridiculous, and Conversion would result in lower quality, and I cannot have that.

Simply is there anyway to achieve this? I hear you can with AVISYNTH or another pay for plugin. ( I can pay for a plugin, no problem )


Thanks for the help in advance

[Kariudo]

Yes there is. Through avisynth alone or a combination of avisynth + virtualdub (or virtualdubmod) + lossless codecs.

you can get this plugin to let premiere pro import avisynth scripts.
Editing .avs files isn't the fastest way to edit, and you probably don't want to be importing entire disks at a time.

I'd vote for making an avisynth script and throwing it into vdub/mod to make lossless clips (using either lagarith or huffyuv). You want to make small clips if you use this method, because lossless = really big files

Chances are that you will need ffmpegsource for avisynth (which can be found here)

everything else can be obtained from the amvapp if you don't have it already

[chui101]

I believe that if you change the extension to .m4v that is how it knows to use the H264 decoder. If that fails you might be able to force it to use the MainConcept decoder by changing the extension to .mpg.