Inspiring

Answered

HDV to ProRes transcodes will not import

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 30, 2020
6 replies
2923 views

I've finally broke down and transcoded all our old HDV interlaced footage to ProRes in Compressor (I find it does a much better job deinterlacing than AME). Some projects import fine into Premiere, but other projects do not. All HDV was trancoded the exact same way with the identical preset. The clips that won't import are not just one clip here or there, but an entire project of clips. I either get the message "File format not supported" or "We were unable to open the file on disk". Oh how I wish Premiere could offer more help. Error codes or something 🙂

I used Invisor to compare the specs from HDV to ProRes clips that imported fine to a couple that would not import. All the main specs are identical. So I'm really scratching my head here. Also all the offending clips (the handful I tested) open and play fine in VLC and Quicktime. They also import and play fine in FCPX.

2020 iMac, 10.15.7 Catalina, with the latest Premiere, Compressor, FCPX etc.

I've attached a 1 second clip.

AusTimS1104-80.zip

Import

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Correct answer Tom Nord

Can you please try with the Premiere Pro 14.6 Beta build? I was able to import the file there.

GlitchdogAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks again all. I just tried importing an assortment of the offending transcodes to ProRes and all import fine in PP 14.6. The only minor bug is that Premiere gets the pixel aspect ratio wrong on all the clips. It thinks 1.3333, but of course reintrepreting the footage in PP to 1.0 corrects the error. Though not a big deal, it still baffles me. Invisor clearly shows the pixel aspect ratio is 1.0 for these clips. This has happened in the past and apparently Premiere seems to find something in the files leftover from the original HDV, but I've never been able to figure out what 🙂

A

Andy 1968

Inspiring

Why did you transcode the HDV/MPEG 2 to Pro Res if you use Premiere Pro?

GlitchdogAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Andy. We use Premiere and FCPX for different projects. But basically we are Mac based and have found (generally) that transcoding the older archived HDV (1440x1080i) footage works best when editing projects that are primarily footage in 1920x1080p format. Of course there are differnt schools of thought. However, we are always open to other suggestions 🙂

A

Andy 1968

Inspiring

Premiere Pro 4.0 could edit HDV using the Core 2 Quad. No need to transcode. I take if FCPX needs HDV to be transcoded?

D

dankellycockroach

Participant

I'm getting the "We were unable to open the file on disk" error code for a 1.31GB .mov file that I downloaded from Google Drive.

I'm on a mac (10.15.7) and I'm on PRPRO 2020.

The footage is from a DSLR camera. I've imported footage from this camera in this exact same format without issue in previous versions of PRPRO. Can someone help me with this? I've got a deadline!

M

Michael Grenadier

Legend

revert to the previous version of premiere that was working for the time being.

Tom Nord

Community Manager

I agree with that answer for the short term. If you're on a deadline, go with what you know works. In the meantime if you can share a sample of a non-working file I can take a look.

Tom Nord

Correct answer

Community Manager

Can you please try with the Premiere Pro 14.6 Beta build? I was able to import the file there.

GlitchdogAuthor

Inspiring

Oh this is interesting. Thanks Tom. Will try that later this week. I did quickly try and take the same file and converted it to different flavors of stock ProRes and stock Uncompressed 10bit, Premiere would still not import. Even changed the audio to 16bit. No dice. AME won't import it, but I tried Shutter Encoders stock ProResLT and Premiere imported it.

Maybe this is just a tiny bug in the current Premiere and 14.6 will fix it. I'm not in a big hurry, but would need to potentially re-encode 1000s of clips if it's not a Premiere bug. Again, thanks again Tom. Will post another update later.

Tom Nord

Community Manager

Looking back over our internal bug tracking I'm 99.9% sure this is a fix we made in this cycle to support a change to the way FCP made to how they were writing some QuickTime files. If that's the case there should be no need to re-transcode anything so I'm pretty optimistic. Of course if you find that to not be the case we'd very much want to investigate further.

MyerPj

Community Expert

I couldn't open it in PP or AE.

PP 14.5, Win 2004

M

Michael Grenadier

Legend

now here's the weird thing. I just brought your file into compressor and applied the prores lt preset and it imports fine. using compressor 4.4.4. are you customizing the settings for your transcode in compressor? weird...

GlitchdogAuthor

Inspiring

Weird indeed. Excellent tip, thanks for checking! It's the stock ProResLT preset with these tweaks in the "Quality" settings: Resize filter: Lanczos2, Retiming quality Good. And in audio using the stock 48khz, but sample size is 24bits. I've only checked three major projects so far in Premiere. Those clips were all transcoded the same way, and one project (w/hundreds of clips) imported fine and played fine in Premiere. I'll test the others next week.

Ann Bens

Community Expert

GlitchdogAuthor

Inspiring

Thank you Ann, I'll try to remember that, but for something that would need to be downloaded and tested, would embeding a clip actual be helpful in that situation. Sorry, maybe there is something I'm missing. I do understand the security part though.

Ann Bens

Community Expert

Its still an unknown source: dropbox would have been better.

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