Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 MKV support?

>What I meant was that no matter what the format was designed for, the goal of editing software should be to be able to edit the video.

But if the format wasn't designed with editing in mind, it makes it that much harder to design software that can edit it.

Thank you Dan Isaacs. NOW THERE'S AN ANSWER!

Jim Simon - I know it matters in the programming standpoint, clearly. What I meant was that no matter what the format was designed for, the goal of editing software should be to be able to edit the video. I understand what's being said about MKV but I was getting angry that I wasn;t getting an answer like the one above.

I know well that these forums are no real place to discuss out feature wish-list for Premiere, but high on this list (for me) is native AviSynth input support. There is a plugin available, but built-in support would be better and more stable. (After Effects CS3 has it: Why not Premiere?)

AviSynth can be the vehicle by which almost any other format can be imported, including MKV.

David -- If you're already AviSynth savvy (and if you're into AMV then you probably should be), then this will be no problem for you. I believe you can simply create a script like...
DirectShowSource("filename.mkv")
... and import that into PPro with the avs import plugin above.

>Since when is it correct for a professional program not to support formats that freeware would support?

Professional products being limited to professional assets is quiet common. There are a host of audio and video hardware that will only accept signals from a professional connection - like XLR for audio or BNC from video. I don't find it at all surprising that a professional NLE acts much the same way, working only with more professional media.

>The designed or not designed to be edited doesn't matter.

It actually does, from a software programming standpoint.

>you'd want to import some clips you might have of some cartoon if its a clip for a baby's birthday or something.

Most people doing those kinds of home videos are probably using Premiere Elements anyway. It's more oriented towards the non-professional.

>What's wrong with the MKV format, I don't get it

Then you would fall under the category of non-professional as described in the link supplied by Eddie, and should probably follow the advice given for such. Doing so doesn't make you an idiot, it just means you're untrained. And the easiest method for the untrained to achieve their goal is to use other, more consumer oriented software.

If you check any AMV forum, you'd see A LOT of requests for MKV support.

David,

Adobe cannot possibly cover every possible file format. Photoshop has slowly added formats, as their use has increased to the point that it makes it sensible to do so. The same for Premiere, but it has been slower, as file formats in video seem to fade very rapidly.

The Matroska format is meant as a delivery format. Delivery formats are usually not meant to be edited. If a broad enough base of cameras used this format, pressure would be applied to Adobe to include it. Now, Premiere does not handle DivX, VidX, Vivio, and a host of other formats, regardless of which CODECs are installed on a system. Even Premiere's little brother Elements, a consumer application, does a poor job with many consumer formats, other than DV-AVI. It has real problems with .MOD files, and there are at least two popular camera companies, whose consumer models use this format.

There are many camera formats that are also not supported, yet. I'd think that Adobe would be putting their resources to work on them first, depending on how large each format's user-base is.

Give it time. If it becomes popular, then maybe Elements will incorporate it into its list of supported formats, but I'll bet not before they handle .MOD files.

I do not even know if any of my file converters handle .MKV files.

Hunt

I didn't say it would be wrong, just expensive. You are the only person to ever ask for it. Therefore, I doubt that it is appropriate to take all that time to code in a new codec for one person.

If enough people asked for it, then that would be different.

Well. The designed or not designed to be edited doesn't matter. You can say that about most formats. I guess the camera thing makes sense. Although that's really just an indirect Adobe excuse for not needing to create support to many additional formats. That's also kinda bogus though because many times if you want to edit some video from camera, you'd want to import some clips you might have of some cartoon if its a clip for a baby's birthday or something. That's very common so that's what I'm saying. It wouldn;t be wrong for it to support those formats or to have a feature to import decoders on the computer already.

There are a lot of formats that are not appropriate for Premiere Pro. Some should be included, some perhaps not.

The main goal of Premiere Pro is to edit video imported or captured directly from a video camera.

There are no video cameras at this time that use the Matroska format.

Hence, it would be inappropriate for the codec to be added to Premiere Pro until after all of the other codecs that cameras actually use are included.

Make sense?

Besides, that format is not designed to be edited, merely played back to be watched.

Most encoding software usually loads all the decoders installed on the computer. For that reason, Video Cleaner Pro for example can encode MKV files. Is there a way to do such a thing as that in Premiere CS3 and if not, may I ask you, why? Considering the fact that you say IT'S CORRECT for the program not to support certain formats with some lame excuse.