Categories
The Technology of Production

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 “saves” an interview.

HDV interview damaged by bad tape but gets rescued because Premiere Pro won’t stop at every break.

One of the reasons my direct posting here has been light lately is that we’ve been working on a small documentary, partly for the exercise but mostly to a) have demo material for prEdit that isn’t 10 years old and b) prove to myself the prEdit is indeed a great new workflow for documentary editing. Plus a documentary gets made to store the memories of the early 60’s drag racing community.

Inevitably one of the tapes ends up with breaks every few seconds. Final Cut Pro always, always breaks HDV into individual clips, regardless of your settings, so parts of this interview were simply lost. So I tried capturing in Premiere Pro CS5. A little surprised to have to preview on the camera (not inside Premiere Pro CS5) but the capture happens and the entire interview is captured in one piece with no dropped frames.

I’m composing hymns to Premiere Pro’s greatness, until I try an export. (All captured media is being converted to ProRes 422 for the master and editing formats.) Adobe Media Encoder crashes when it hits one of the glitches that tripped up Final Cut Pro. Rinse and repeat and we’re not getting an export. Even an attempt to playback causes Premiere Pro to disappear.

Well, not of picture anyway, but AME will export the audio by itself without a problem. So, while it’s not perfect, I now have that important interview (and the one we travelled furthest to get) with about 99% of the audio intact and laid up with what video I have and I’ll be able to use the interview in the doc.

So thanks to the ability to capture all my HDV material Premiere Pro CS5 at least got me usable material.

One reply on “Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 “saves” an interview.”

For years we used Avid DV Express Pro (for Mac) for the same purpose. Some DV tapes behave the same was the the interupted HDV tapes. Avid lets us re-export the clips as Quicktime files which we then import into FCP. Obviously we lose the ability to batch re-capture since QT doesn’t maintain the original time code, but it solves the problem of ingest.

Comments are closed.