MPEG Problem?
by Brian Lynn
on
May 5, 2008 at 12:12:41 am
I have this problem in After Effects and other programs, but I figured I'd post here since I am mostly an AE person...
I have been doing work for a client, and they continue to bring me MPEG clips that I can't seem to do anything with.
This is not an After Effects problem, but I wasn't sure where to post this since it happens in any NLE and AE whether I'm on Mac or PC, doesn't seem to matter.
The video plays just fine in WiMP... being the PowerPoint person I am I have to drop these clips into PowerPoint. But the MPEGS the client brings me will not play in PowerPoint. They play in Media Player just fine, but not PowerPoint...
So typically I re-encode the video into .WMV and that solves it... So I drop the file into After Effects... After Effects recognizes the length of the clip easy, but there is only ONE frame. Its a strange frame, multiple languages all saying "Media Pending? and then no video...
I get this same problem in Final Cut, Premier, After Effcts, MPEGStreamClip says I have to buy something more from Apple to use MPEGStreamClip on it, or install QuickTime Alternative, and GSPOT tells me that I have the correct codecs installed for the video to play.
Occasionally I've been able to get Windows Media Encoder to recode into .WMV for me, but typically it crashes or won't even load the source video file.
I have included a screenie of what Premier shows me when I try to add the clip to a timeline... I get the same single frame that Premier is showing when I load these clips into After Effects, or Final Cut, or anything...
What the heck is my client doing to these videos? I can't edit, I can't fix, I cant't typically do anything that I do to support clients when it comes to these clips!!
Help! LOL! I will be seeing a lot of these clips over the next few months and this is going to kill me =(
Thanks for any help/advice anyone can give! Available for questions as well if you need...
Re: MPEG Problem? by Dave LaRonde on May 5, 2008 at 2:38:52 pm
Dave's Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following -- Native HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 -- you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
When clients come to me with .mpg, I usualy open them in quicktime player (mac) and export them to any other format, although aftereffects do import them but on previewing mixes all the frames up.
Do you have a program that opens the .mpg and is able to export to other formats?
If not, maybe QTPro is worth buying...
Re: MPEG Problem? by Brian Lynn on May 5, 2008 at 10:36:33 pm
I have MPEGStreamClip.
It won't open the MPEG file.
I am well aware of interframe interpolation issues with editing and working with AE and NLEs... unfortunately I can't get this MPEG to recode to anything else. Typically I recode to uncompressed QuickTime and work with that if I can but:
I have QuickTime Pro. It won't open the video file.
I have MPEGStreamClip. It won't open the video file.
Premier - same thing
AE - same thing
Final Cut - same thing
Compressor - same thing
Some of those programs will re-code the video but if you look at the screen shot I included... you see that "Media Pending" frame in the video window? I get that frame across the entire video. All NLE will show the true lenth of the video but none of them will show any of the frames other than that one. Or, like in the case of Windows Media Encoder all I get is black across the entire video.
Playback of the video in media players works fine, and I don't see that "Media Pending" frame anywhere in the video if I watch it Frame by Frame.
The only NLE I've found that can open the video and show me the true frames is some simple consumer thing by Sonic. But even that program can't recode the video into something I can use!
I have the video clip and I am totally willing to provide an FTP download to anyone who would like to take a gander at it and see if they have the same issues!!
Re: MPEG Problem? by Frank Thomas on May 6, 2008 at 2:34:55 am
I had no problems re-encoding the file to various formats, using Sorrenson Squeeze 4.2 under Windows XP. I've uploaded a sample (smaller than original) .wmv file to your ftp server. Other formats I succeeded in re-encoding to were .mov and .swf.
