I recorded a 1hour home movie from my DV-camera with Adobe Premiere. It ended up as a 12GB movieclip (720x576) and I can play it in Mediaplayer. But when I try to import it into Adobe Premiere, it gives negativ values for both duration and datarate. eg - 0.09.02 and - 32441687/sec. This doesn't make any sence offcourse and I can't drag it into the timeline for editing.

I tryed to encode a small piece by opening the file with VirtualDub and that works. So I thought I'll "copy" the file using VirtualDub with "direct stream copy" for both audio and video (no quality loss). But the same thing happens when I import this new file. I exported a smaller part as well with VirtualDub (direct stream copy) and that gives me a ~1GB file, but it's the same problem in Premiere.

Anyone who knows this problem? (and has a solution )

Thanks!

Hmmm I did some further testing and it works now in some way. I opened the source file in VirtualDub again and saved it with "lossless" huffyuv compression. The 1 hour movie is now 24GB, but I can import it in Adobe Premiere and the quality seems allright. I still wonder why the original file behaves like that though

You quoted "Direct Stream Copy" twice here, did you mean "Full Processing Mode" the second time. To change the video compression, you need to select Full Prrocessing Mode.

Sounds like a codec problem/clash thats all. When you capture, its good to use Huffyuv codec in the first place as its lossless but still compresses slightly.

No I really meant direct stream copy for both. I didn't change the videocompression (nor the audio) in my first attempts. (seems pointless, but I thought "copying" the file in this way would change the headers and repair the file without loosing quality).

I use huffyuv for capturing with my TV-cards, but not for DV-capture (not even sure it's possible). The hardware compression from the DV-500 is better (12GB for 1 hour <-> 24GB for 1 hour with huffyuv). In theory that is, cause in this case, the hardware compression seems to suck since the file doesn't work .

I'm gonna try capturing DV with huffyuv too and compare the quality with the faulty source file (that still plays in mediaplayer). I'd think that the hardware compression is lossless too, but who knows.

Thanks!

Yep, you guessed it, absolutely pointless. It did nothing more than just copy what it had in the same way Explorer copies a file from one folder to another.

You don't need to have it on full processing to re-compress, you only need it on that if you are going to use filters.

When re-compressing you should have it set to fast recompress if possible so as to avoid a RGB conversion.

DV files are lossless when converting from DV, the actual format however is not which is why the filesizes are smaller than huffyuv.

Not sure what colourspace DV uses if it is YV12 then you could save some space by using a lossless YV12 codec rather than YUY2.

That all said, I am not sure what is up with premiere and your DV files. What is the fourCC of them? I guess you could also try frameserving with AVISynth? That way there would be no need to create large huffyuv files.

I have no idea what happened with that specific capture. I've captured lots of DV in the past, always with Premiere and never had that problem. This afternoon, I re-captured the original tape on another system, with Premiere. 11,9GB for 1 hour and it runs fine in Premiere. So it must be a (minor) driver/codec problem on the first PC that only affects Premiere's display.
I'm glad I didn't erase the source tape