Video confusion...

[rpcrowe]

I downloaded some video that I shot with my Panasonic HDC-TM900 video camera using Adobe CS6 Bridge for the download. What resulted was choppy scenes that stopped several times in each take and was unusable.

The download was accomplished from this menu which is the standard Adobe Bridge Photo Download Menu:


Luckily, I had not deleted this from my camera's memory.

I then downloaded the same video from my camera using Adobe Premiere Elements 10 with an interface that looks almost identical to the CS6 Bridge interface...


The video downloaded in this fashion played exceptionally well. I wonder what the problem is. Photoshop CS6 is supposed to have video editing capability. However before you edit video, you need to download some playable footage...

[Colin Southern]

Hi Richard,

I'm pretty weak in this area, but from what I know, Adobe Premiere is the go-to for video editing.

[Manfred M]

Richard - choppiness is usually related to how processor intensive the video codec / image resolution (frame rate / image size) is, and in the absence of other information, I would look at this first. I find that the H264 codec is usually a good trade-off between good image quality and image quality. Feature length movies are done at 24fps.

[Colin Southern]

Richard - choppiness is usually related to how processor intensive the video codec / image resolution (frame rate / image size) is, and in the absence of other information, I would look at this first. I find that the H264 codec is usually a good trade-off between good image quality and image quality. Feature length movies are done at 24fps.

I'm confused - are we not simply transferring the complete video file from one device to another? We're not capturing it are we?

[Manfred M]

Hard to say Colin - the standard AVCHD codec that Panasonic uses is very high quality, and very resource intensive. I'm not totally sure that some transcoding is not taking place in one of the approaches that results in faster playback. Generally Adobe uses their Mercury Engine to make playback smoother and faster (it uses certain nVidia graphics cards to speed encoding).

It just seems very strange to me that Bridge is causing issues when Elements is not, so I suspect that there is something happening "under the hood".

[Colin Southern]

But surely if the camera is capturing and storing the stream on it's own hard drive, we're simply either transferring or transcoding the file - either way it's not under any real-time pressures, so not sure why it would drop frames due to processor overload.

[Manfred M]

Colin - I've seen video cameras do strange things when they transfer data. I ran into a similar issue with a GoPro camera a couple of weeks ago; some of the settings resulted in a similar choppy playback problem on certain computers with the downloaded files, but others played the files quite smoothly. It was only when I looked at the resource use on the machine playing back the file, that it became apparent that the CPU could not keep up.

The fix was re-transcoding the file using the H264 codec.

[Colin Southern]

Colin - I've seen video cameras do strange things when they transfer data. I ran into a similar issue with a GoPro camera a couple of weeks ago; some of the settings resulted in a similar choppy playback problem on certain computers with the downloaded files, but others played the files quite smoothly. It was only when I looked at the resource use on the machine playing back the file, that it became apparent that the CPU could not keep up.

The fix was re-transcoding the file using the H264 codec.

So you're saying it's not the transferring of the file, it's the playing of the file once it's transferred?

[Manfred M]

So you're saying it's not the transferring of the file, it's the playing of the file once it's transferred?

Yes, that's my guess at what the problem is.

[dje]

Richard my best guess is that it isn't the Bridge or Premiere Elements Organiser that is the problem but rather the way CS6 interfaces with the computer on video playback compared to Premiere elements. PEL may well be optimized more for video performance and it can also make use of temporary lower resolution render files during the editing phase to lessen the video load.

I tried a couple of h264 encoded 1080p 24fps video clips from my Canon (captured with 30MB/s video bit rate which is higher than your Pany) and had no problem with video playback in either CS6 or PEL 11. I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 with an i5processor. I'd have to say though, that the video looks better in PEL.

I think you would be far better off editing in PEL anyway as it is a more comprehensive video editor than CS6.

Dave