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MPEG2 in Premiere?

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I recall someone mentioned here somewhere that there's some way to trick Premiere into editing straight MPEG2 video? Would anyone mind helping me out there?

Also, can you get it to edit AC3 audio?

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I'm not sure about the first, but I'm pretty sure there's not a whole lot of software that can edit AC3 tracks in their native form.

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You can use AVISynth in conjunction with DGMPGDec to frameserve the MPEG2 files (I'm assuming you mean VOB files) to Premiere using a plugin. I tried that once, but I don't remember what the plugin was called or where to get it.
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Well, if Premiere can open AVISynth scripts (I think there's a plugin that makes this possible) then you can use MPEG2Source() (from the DGMPGDec package) to open the video files directly.

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to "edit" the video like in Womble, you would have to re-encode the whole stream to a new file.

:: Edit - sorry wmgan, I didn't see your post.

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There may be a less technical way to do it, though you're final output isn't guaranteed.

I edit on Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 which will import actual MPEG2 files and allow you to edit them; I rip the DVD files via ULead DVD Workshop2 which muxes them into MPEG2 files. I have exported the edited MPEG2 video in the Premiere timeline as a DV AVI movie file (the default file type for exporting a movie), and the file looks and sounds good.

The only problem occurred when I re-encoded the AVI file for DVD through ULead DVD Workshop2; playback became very stroby. I think I found a clean way around this, but I can't remember right now.

A work-around would be to export your edited MPEG2 timeline to tape and then recapture the video. Not sure if that would be an acceptable loss in digital quality for you. If you find out something else, would you mind posting it here? Best of luck.
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I've never tried editing directly with MPEG2 sources, but for my very first video editing project several years ago I used MPEG1 sources (ripped directly from VCDs) and the output was horribly "stroby", as you put it. I solved the problem by converting them into AVI files, but obviously that means deterioration of picture quality. (A better alternative to file conversion would be frameserving using AVISynth, which brings us back to what Moth3r and I said in our earlier posts. I should heed my own advice and edit using frameserved video next time.)
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Thanks guys, I'll give the AviSynth method a shot (even though I've never been able to figure out how to properly use it).

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I've had good luck with VideoRedo. It edits mpg2/VOB files directly without reencoding, that is, it only renders the few frames you change. The rest of the file is left as is. It is blazing fast, too. It's $50 and well worth it.
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More specifically suited to your needs (although Video ReDo is great and I use it from time to time) is the MainConcept MPEG Pro HD v1.05 Adobe Premiere Pro Plugin.

This is what is said about it:
MainConcept MPEG Pro is a full-featured MPEG editing solution for Adobe Premiere Pro. Although Premiere Pro will import MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 material, it does not offer native MPEG editing or smart MPEG rendering. This means that MPEG data needs to be converted to another format (such as DV) for editing, and each frame must be re-rendered even if no changes have been made. And if your target format is MPEG, you'll need to convert your finished project back to MPEG. The MainConcept MPEG Pro plug-in eliminates these limitations and turns MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 editing into a productive, high-quality workflow.


I have this but have not had time to try it out yet (uni ends in a few weeks). Hopefully you can make some use of it though.

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I very much like what that says in your post, klokwerk. How much is that and can I get around the money factor?

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I to am after the Mainconcept Plug in to sort out my editing woes. Iv been going back and forth with various video files for the past 3 days! Imagine my relief when i come across the Mainconcept Plug in.

I intend to re-edit whole movies but i dont want to go to all that trouble and suddenly spot a problem with an avi etc. So editing without converting to avi sounds superb.

But I need the v1.4 or v1.5 version. I can only download the v2.0 from their site.

Does anyone still have the executable on their system? If so could you upload it to the net? Or better still, email it to me?
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Email me and we'll figure something out.

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Originally posted by: Sober
I intend to re-edit whole movies but i dont want to go to all that trouble and suddenly spot a problem with an avi etc. So editing without converting to avi sounds superb.

Actually, the DGMPGDec/AviSynth route gives you the highest quality video without the need for any video conversion -- it would be exactly equivalent to converting the video to uncompressed AVI (say, using DGMPGDec/VirtualDub) but doesn't require any significant amount of additional hard disk space (the only files you'll create in the process are .D2V and .AVS files, which will be very small compared to the source MPEG files). If you encode your final output with a good MPEG encoder at the right settings, the quality loss should be negligible -- the main drawback being the time cost (high quality MPEG encoding can take forever).

But I need the v1.4 or v1.5 version. I can only download the v2.0 from their site.


What's the advantage of getting versions 1.4 or 1.5 instead of 2.0? (I've never used the plug-in before so I must admit I know very little about it, except that it allows "direct stream copy" MPEG output.)