Premiere 6.5 and .DV files

[Loud Orange Cat]

Does anyone know of a plugin for Adobe Premiere 6.5 to read .DV files?

This ancient program will import .AVI at a bandwidth of 3.61MB/s. .DV files (From DVCAM) has a full bandwidth of 5+ MB/s but Premiere can't import these at all.

Any ideas?

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

Are you on Macintosh, or Windows? Can you convert the .DV files to AVI or MOV ? Quicktime Pro should be able to do it (I'm sure it will on Macintosh), but there may be a Windows program that is free that will convert to AVI with the DV50 codec. The .DV files are just interleaved (more or less raw) video+audio with DV25 or DV50 compression.

I may be able to convert them for you, if you want to run them up here to me!

I'm kind of surprised the Premier won't import a DV50 .DV file. I know that when working with .DV files in Premier 6.5 on Mac OS 9, the performance was terrible. The same video played back smoothly if converted to a Quicktime movie.

 

[Loud Orange Cat]

On my Windows 2000 box, I can down-convert all I want, but I'm a bit disturbed by the fact that I lose 35% of the bandwidth converting from .DV to .AVI. There's a noticeable difference in quality that's missing.

I was considering upgrading to Premiere Pro, but it won't run on W2K. No, I will not upgrade to Windows XP.

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

I'd never suggest upgrading to Windows XP. However, if you can convert to AVI, then select a codec that supports the full quality for DV50 (YUV 4:2:2, with about 3:1 JPEG compression). You could probably even convert to uncompressed SD, but you'll take a hit on disk space and I/O requirements. AVI is just a container format (sort of like Quicktime movie, but not as robust). The quality is determined by the compression that is used.