TM700 1080p60 Editing on CS4/CS5

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Adobe Premiere Pro editing of the HDC-TM700 footage in 1080p60 format.

I have been able to view the 1080p60 format smoothly in the Panasonic HD Writer AE program. However, Premiere CS4 doesn't have a preset for 1080p60.

What is the recommended CS4 custom project setup? Here's what I found to work best (but not perfect) so far:

Editing Mode: Desktop
Timebase 59.94 FPS [should I be using 60?]
Fields: No Fields (Progressive Scan)
Display Format: 60fps Drop-Frame Timecode
Audio: 48000Hz
Preview: I-Frame Only MPEG
Maximum Bit Depth: Off
Maximum Render Quality: Off

I have a Core 2 Quad 9550 overclocked to 3.6Ghz, and CPU utilization ranges between 50-75% while playing previews in Premiere - similar to the utilization when using the Panasonic HD Writer AE software. I also have a pretty fast graphics card, Nvidia GTX 275, 8GB RAM, and RAID0 drives.

However, in Premiere the preview is not entirely smooth, it drops a few frames, and has some small glitches during playback. In HD Writer it's perfect as far as I can tell. Any suggestions on Premiere configuration settings to help make it smoother?

Finally, when I'm done editing, I want to output to a file that I can playback through Windows Media Center directly to a HDMI connected TV. What output settings should I use in CS4 to create such a file? When editing Mini-DV SD footage I just output it to a DV AVI file and it was simple, this doesn't seem to be quite as easy yet.

When using Windows 7 Media Center, or just Media Player it chokes on the raw 1080p60 format dropping loads of frames, so outputting the edited work to the same format as the original isn't going to work, unless there's some codec or other solution to getting Media Center to play the 1080p60 format properly. What format should I output the files to to maximize quality and yield a format that I can play from the HDD of a Media PC?

Thanks,
Roland.

Paulo - my CPU isn't maxed out, there's certainly no webservices or viruses in play, in fact it's only about 60-70% utilized with premiere, however it's not entirely smooth.

Windows 7 Media Center is much worse, and certainly the CPU isn't taxed, in fact it's often at only 5%, and while the AVCHD plays smoothly, the 1080p60 doesn't, but the CPU doesn't go above 10% utilization.

Are you saying you've been able to play 1080p60 raw native files straight from the camera directly in Windows 7 Media Center smoothly? On a laptop? What kind of CPU and graphics card does it have, and are you working at 1920*1080 resolution? I would suspect you have some additional codec loaded into WMC that I need to get if you're able to do this.

Roland.

On further inspection, when playing 1080p60 premiere seems to "tear" the image doesn't appear to be consistent, it looks like there's a band that is is tearing, either it's out of place, or part of the previous frame. This effect is only apparent when it's 1080p60 playing, and the video is panning, so I'm guessing it's part of the prior frame.

Windows Media Center shows a different behavior, no tearing, just skipped frames, so it jumps a lot, although the AVCHD plays smoothly, I'm getting way less than 30 FPS when playing 1080p60, I might guess something like 10FPS or less, but the CPU utilization is down at 5%, so that's really odd.

Roland.

I have since my original post found that some video cards do actually playback in WMP12 (default with Win7) successfully.

nVidia VP4 cards work, or at least that's my conclusion. I have tested it with my GTX470, and seen information from a few other people that they have it working on different VP4 cards.

Look up "nVidia VP4" in at Wikipedia.org for the list of cards.

Roland.

OK, all the settings above (except for the 4.2... 5.1 piece) are related to when you setup a new project. So, the easiest way is
1. Load up Premiere
2. During the startup it will ask you if you want to load a previous project, or build a new project, select new.
3. You'll first get prompted to select the project name, file location, scratch file locations, etc.
4. The second popup window (after the file and scratch decisions) will ask you what type of project, this is where you can choose AVCHD, or NTSC DV, or RED, or a long list of other options. It is HERE that you need to select something close such as AVCHD 1080i60 (not what you want, but it's a good starting point). However, don't press the OK button yet, next using one of the tabs at the top (I think there's 3) one will be something like "Custom" (I'm doing this from memory). It is there that you get into a page where you can select all the settings mentioned above. Once you're done with that there's another tab called "Tracks" where you can set the default audio track settings for the master channel and also define the number of audio and video tracks you have in the project to start off with. Once you're done with all this, you can save the new group of settings as a new default, and use that going forward.

One note of caution, once you enter the "desktop" editing mode, for 1080P60 you'll be entering a whole new world of hardware demands. This mode basically is a "raw editing" mode, any effects or transitions you create will be rendered in full raw format - this is 250MB/s for disk space and utilization, so you'll need a RAID array. Using a CUDA accelerated card can very dramatically reduce the amount of pre-rendering required, and make a huge difference to the disk space you need, and could in theory actually eliminate the need to pre-render at all if you use only CUDA enabled effects and transitions. Alternatively if you change the preview size to only 50% height and width then you'll reduce the preview file size by 4x making it fairly easy to deal with.

Good luck, and if you have any questions, it looks like I'm a step or two ahead, so I've already run into many of the pitfalls.

If you're going down the raw editing space, I've found CS5 to be unstable editing the native MTS files with effects and transitions, so I convert all my MTS files to a lightly compressed AVI format, using Neo Scene from Cineform. This is another $100, but the biggest issue with this is the CineForm AVI files are much larger than your MTS files, up from around 4MB/s to 40MB/s although that's of course a lot smaller than the preview files at ~250MB/s for 8bit previews or ~312MB/s for 10bit.

Roland.

I have come to the conclusion that editing the 1080P60 files is easier and smoother if done as AVI files. This involves the conversion of the MTS files to AVI using Neo Scene from Cineform. This involves a $100 licence for Cineform and around 14x for the disk space of the AVI files versus the MTS files.

You also need to download (a free) AC3 filter - there are instructions in the Cineform manual where to get it from. Using this, I was able to convert both Stereo and 5.1 files into 5 channel AVI files (dropping the LFE channel, as trying to get 5.1 didn't seem to work correctly).

Once I have the AVI files I'm able to load them into premiere, however, strangely, any source file converted through this process that is longer than 4 minutes loses it's audio in premiere (the audio is there in the file in all other players!). This is quite fustrating, but fortunately only a few of my clips are longer than 4 minutes. I'm able to get the Audio file from the original MTS file, by adding that to the timeline at the same time as the AVI file that's missing the audio. Then by "unlinking" the audio from the MTS file, and "linking" it back to the AVI file, then I've got everything back and working.

This is a fustrating hack, but it works, the bug is clearly a premiere bug as the files work fine in Windows media player.

Anyway, once I'm done editing, I then output to two formats. One at 59.94 Progressive in Microsoft AVI - using the Cineform Codec to create a large AVI, which I presume is a lossless quality as the files are very large. The other one I create at 29.97 interlaced, using the H.264 encoder and use that for playback on typical hardware. If I was to output to BluRay then I might start with the H.264 encoded file and see if I could get that working, otherwise I'd take my 59.94P AVI output and re-render it again down to 29.97 AVI, and then take that into Encore which is what you use to output to disk.

Not only is editing and playback of 60P a major hassle, trying to get 5.1 audio also appears to be extremely difficult. So run some tests before you invest an enourmous amount of time editing a project, as you might find that you've selected some wrong settings on the audio and not be able to get your desired end result.

Roland.