[ralphmalph]

Hi All,

I have a pansonic GS250 usd edition so it is NTSC.

I am using Premere Elements 4 and when I try to capture using firewire or USB I get an error. The error is random can happen after 5 secs can happen after 15 mins and multiple scenes having been captured. The error message i get is "unknown recorder error!" and capturing stops.

So my question is has anybody else seen this error?

Is it something to do with my camera being NTSC and Adobe working in a PAL environment. Do I need to change the capture settings or device control in the options.

When I use cyberlink it captures fine no problems so the camera works.

Next question, during capture does the capture software do any rendering or modification of the .avi or are they essentially just copy programs. What I really mean is if I capture the same scene in Cyberlink and Adobe are they exactly the same or does the different programs add to the scene.

Thanks in advance.

[senu]

Originally Posted by ralphmalph

Hi All,

I have a pansonic GS250 usd edition so it is NTSC.

I am using Premere Elements 4 and when I try to capture using firewire or USB I get an error. The error is random can happen after 5 secs can happen after 15 mins and multiple scenes having been captured. The error message i get is "unknown recorder error!" and capturing stops.

So my question is has anybody else seen this error?

Is it something to do with my camera being NTSC and Adobe working in a PAL environment. Do I need to change the capture settings or device control in the options.

When I use cyberlink it captures fine no problems so the camera works.

Next question, during capture does the capture software do any rendering or modification of the .avi or are they essentially just copy programs. What I really mean is if I capture the same scene in Cyberlink and Adobe are they exactly the same or does the different programs add to the scene.

Thanks in advance.

I have not had the error but then I dont use Premiere Elements 2 that frequently and never with USB ( Why usb when you have firewire )

However:
Using an NTSC camcorder in a "PAL" environment is only an issue if your default capture template is for PAL Dv avi: it shouldnt matter as the software should transcode the footage during capture: if it is the obscure cause of the problem then capture as NTSC then export as PAL after editing( provided you dont use any footage from elswhwere)
It is possible that cyberlink is importing as NTSC anyway

During capture, the software do not add or remove anything from the footage: in theory the captured files should be identical as there is no rendering or modification.
However they may use different codecs for capture and as such the captured files may not be exactly identical
Also due to the way in which software can make lots of different files from "scence splitting" the no of indiviual files may be different

In general using an NTSC camcorder in a PAL country is "hard work"

[ralphmalph]

Thanks for the reply. I use firewire by deafult, just tried USB to see if the error repeated itself.

OK I will set all capture settings to NTSC and see if it makes a difference. Cyberlink definately does all capture and editing in NTSC and then on export converts to PAL.

[ralphmalph]

I have just checked on the adobe web site and this is a known error when using Athlon X2 dual core cpus. Adobe have a new software release that they will send you (it is not available for download). Otherwise the work around is to lock Premiere elements to only use one CPU.

FYI for any other Premiere users looking to use the Athlon 64 X2 cpu.

[senu]

thanx for that info
Have you tried the workaround with any success?

Rather annoying that a dual core system supposed to work better is the culprit especially as Dual core is touted at giving a better experience to gamers and video editing (CPU intensive) activities. The Premiere Elements Specs state a P4 with SSE2 as minimum and my machine is a 3800 Athlon 64 bit fx single chip on which it runs pretty smoothly.

I think Adobe should make the fix available on the website and be a bit less discreet about it

Saying that you can capture with anything including this great freebee here if you want an alternative to cyberlink for capturing b4 Premiere gets "fixed"

[evans]

just to add ;codecs used to capture do play a difference in end result. The difference may not be much but on a high resolution TV you can see the difference. I personally use canopus HQ codec (only if you have the program edius pro 3) and have it on standard setting. Canopus DV codec also gives good results.Strangly Canopus HQ codec is actually supposedly used for High definition capturing as Edius only allows canopus dv codec to be used for SD capturing. But other programs allow this codec to be used for compression on Standard Def. capture.

I guess i am a perfectionist "wanna be" when it comes to video quality

[senu]

I suspect you can also get the Canopus codec if you have Procoder 2 or Procoder Express™ installed on your system . I do and have never had Edius installed ( I vaguely remember considering a trial version but dont think I got round to actually installing it)

As stated in different thread, I compared 3 AVIs captured from identical scences in the same miniDV tape via Sony Vegas 6, Nero Vision and WinDV.

There were certainly differences playing them thru VLC media player. with the Vegas captured Avis being the best and the Neros the worst ( not very scientific with only 3..... I know) but I suspect the Vegas captured ones used the canopus codec installed on the system
In a real world scenario I guess youll simply use what you have

[evans]

senu for sure you can get the canopus dv codec from procoder and it is very good, just that the canopus HQ codec is a little better. This codec I know you have to have Eduis installed in order to get the codec pack which comes with it. I guess it does a better job at compression since it is designed for High definition material. There is also a canopus losseless codec, havent used it but i suspect it is close to uncompressed and huge in terms PC space.

[ralphmalph]

I will try the fix later on today and let people know. Just to add the fix "to use only one cpu out of the two available" is only required for capture. During editing and encoding you can use the two cpu's, or so they say.

I will try editing and encoding on two cpus as well today because that is why I bought a dual cpu so I could still use my computer whilst encoding.

[senu]

Evans
I will install the Edius pro 3 trial version and check out the codec

Ralph,
All the best . Im my limited exposure to a recently obtained dual core Athlon machine, it seems the speed difference is not as huge as I expected .. maybe im a little impatient but in general it is thought that multitasking whilst doing video work may not be a good idea.... Lets know how you get on

[ralphmalph]

Well the fix works for the capture, just captured a whole 1 hour tape no problems.

Senu, I used to use an AMD Opteron clocked at 2.6GHZ, basically the fastest chip you could get at the time (i got it because it had 1 mb of cache), 1 GB of RAM, a striped scratch disk consiting of two Raptors for performance and the movie files on a seeparate mirrored array of 250GB hard disks. When I was encoding, the system could not be used for anything else. I had to do my encoding over night.

I now have an Athlon X2 (the toledo core with 2 x 1mb cache) clocked at 2.6Ghz, 2 GB ram and the rest the same. During capture I have had my stockmarket feed on, done my online banking and my email, the virus checker is on as well. And it works like a normal system. I will try encoding later, but my conclusions are that in single tasks my Opteron was faster, noticalby so. But in multitasking this X2 is very impressive, if I can encode and still use internet, email, etc at the same time, then considering these X2's cost a little over 100 quid, that is amazing.

[senu]

Good on you !

Kind of off topic:
I only do small projects on Premiere Elements ( having a bit of choice as I do)
but I also find that if a program is dragging the PC, I just create AVIs and let Canopus Procoder do the encoding : which it does in pretty good time for the most part ( never less than 0.5x real time) on even my slowest system: a P4 3.0ghz IGb DDR ram and 2 x 240 Gb. SATA HDD.
Still youve got the kit.. why not put it to good use ?

[ralphmalph]

Quick update, I have edited, rendered and encoded today and I put lots of fancy transisitons in to give it a good test and it all worked perfectly in dual cpu mode. I do not know if it is any faster for premiere elements as opposed to single cpu, but I can do my email and internet with ease while rendering or encoding so this dual cpu stuff works for me me.

On another subject I checked the captured file sizes between Cyberlink and Premiere elements and the same file was 29mb in Cyberlink and 102mb in Premiere elemnets so cyberlink is definately compressing the files during capture and compressing them quite significantly.