I bought a Pinnacle DV500+ capture card to digitize my VCR tapes and put them onto VCDs for preservation. Most programs I'm digitizing are 50 minutes in length, or less. Little did I realize that Pinnacle uses its own form of AVI for capturing video. When I try to use 3rd party programs to convert the files, they all claim the file is unreadable.

In Adobe Premiere, I don't seem to have any MPEG or VCD plugins. I've been trying to use MPEG4. It crashes all the time.

I need an inexpensive Premiere plugin to export my data to something that's an industry standard. Can anybody help me?

Thanks!

-- David Cole (dpcole7@yahoo.com), November 22, 2001

Answers

Exactly what codec does that DV500 use to digitize video coming in from its analogue inputs?? Isn't that some form of DV AVI codec?? Or are you or are you not allowed to choose codecs duly installed and registered in your system for capturing?? What are you trying to convert into?? Are you trying to convert into another AVI codec or to some form of MPEG?? Are these 3rd party programs encoders of some sort?? What is something that's an industry standard?? If it will help, let's take TMPGenc as example. Program writers usually create executables for their program installations such that after installation the program is registered with Windows and can, and are given permission to read certain source files it will process. The more complex programs can corrupt registries during installation or when trying to process files, and to get around this Hori has made TMPGenc simply be copied into the directory of your choice. But since it's not registered with Windows as a result it will not be able to recognize files Windows will not frameserve to it. This is why there is an accompanying VFAPIinstall.bat file to be run from the same directory it's in that effectively makes it recognize most, if not all codecs, AVI or otherwise, duly installed and registered in the system. It's probable the AVI codec the DV500 uses that you chose for capturing is not registered with Windows in a deliberate attempt to prevent you from processing the resulting files with 3rd party programs, other than what came with it (Premiere 6?). Or that Windows can not frameserve to these 3rd party programs because they have not been registered during installation. Or both.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), November 25, 2001.

If you are able to use premiere 5 to capture the video, then there are at least 2 VCD export plugins you can use with it.

1st-Xing Mpeg encoder. This one is a bit tricky to install as you have to install Premiere 5.0 to begin with, followed by XING mpeg encoder, then the XING Premiere plugin and then you can update to Premiere 5.1 to 5.1c. The Premiere plugin will NOT install under Premiere 5.1 for some reason but if you are using Premiere 6, you might be able to copy the plugin from 5.0/5.1 installation straight into the plugins folder for Premiere 6 although I have not tried this so don't quote me on it. Also Xing only works under 95/98/98SE. Not sure about Win ME.

2nd-BBmpeg. This one works only under Premiere 5.0/5.1 (maybe 6) and is piss easy to install but is a helluva lot more technical.

Xing has the advantage of better quality as the plugin actually calls on the main Xing encoder App and it is able to rescale the video through the plugin. Xing costs $249 US but I'm sure you could find it for a little less if you know where to look *wink wink*. The premiere plugin comes seperately and may still be downloadable from the XING site (what's left of it anyway)

BBmpeg however needs to have the correct output size set in Premiere and Premiere does not resize video as well as Xing (It leaves this funny distortion every 50 or so pixels. Not too noticable). You can however make DVD or SVCD compliant content with BBmpeg. And I think it also works under NT/Win2000. This one is 100% free and can be found here:

http://members.home.net/beyeler/bbmpeg.html

hope this did not confuse you too much.

Also stay away from LSX encoder. It is faster than the others but it gives out such shit quality, I wouldn't steal it.

-- AS (bosss7@telstra.com), November 25, 2001.

Adobe p6 has several export features you need, build in. And there is a codec that enables you to share captured DV avi's directly @ www.mainconcept.com But mind the filesizes, 50 Minutes will be > 10 Gig :-) My tip : Get the codec from www.divx.com and reduce to 360/288 ( pal ) Set it at the default 780 Kbit rate for small files VHS like quality Sound in mpeg layer 3 naturally.

-- no comment (divx@crap.nl), December 28, 2001.

The xing mpeg encoder plug in does not seem to work when directly installed to Premiere 6.0 FYI. A shame since it seems to have better quality than any of the other enoders such as Ligos, MegaPEG, and Panasonic.

-- M Sean (msean@nowhere.com), March 05, 2002.

hey buddy. I have DV500 too and I had the same problem with yours, but just Download the last driver from Pinnaclesys.com (it's ver. 3)

and the bug have been fixed for all other external software like encoders and editors (Virtualdub and AviUtil) and etc...

With best regards. S. Mohammad NAjafi

-- S. Mohammad Najafi (mp3nick@yahoo.com), March 21, 2002.