Codec – pendent relationships

Posted by douglaswilcox on
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 5:32 am

Posted by Doug, Pedro Producer

I’ve been working with digital video for about 10 years now, but have never encountered such a thoroughly original and unexpected series of setbacks as we’ve encountered trying to edit the FLIP video. Just an hour ago Adri and I achieved a minor miracle – flip video in an NLE program with full interactivity, preview, rendering ability… everything you might reasonably expect.

As it turns out, the 3ivx codec is a touchy little bugger that apparently brings out the worst from Final Cut Pro and Premiere versions 6.5, Pro 1.5 and Pro CS3. And the bad news is, yes, you really do have to convert it from the native .avi to something else. In our case, we use Compressor on the mac G5 at UW to batch convert to h.264 quicktime files.

But along the way:

- Install FLIP firmware, necessary first step. Firmware is out of date, so 2 hour update process ensues.
- Try the files directly in premiere 6.5: No luck.
- Install Morgan Multimedia mpeg codec. No difference.
- Premiere Pro 1.5: Files will preview, but oddly will only display black static in the timeline, and won’t render at all.
- Premiere Pro CS3: Files won’t display, until we install the ffdshow mpeg codec recommended by Amy. Then they display fine… but there is another problem. Each file in the source bin (over 100 in our case) open a seperate instance of the ffdshow codec software, crashing the machine. They aren’t even in the timeline yet. No kidding, you can see all the scores of little icons lined up at the bottom of the screen.
- Final Cut Pro is more or less ok with the native FLIP .avi files, but won’t display in realtime. You have to render. This makes NLE editing very close to pointless, but I believe it’s the way most teams are proceeding.
- Final Cut Pro even seems to have the interactivity problem when working with h.264 files converted from FLIP files. Odd.
- Finally, 4 days later, we find the magic combination: h.264 quicktime files in Premiere Pro CS3.