Long time lurker, first time poster.
I have captured stacks of VHS on a recently rebuilt homebrew ca. 2006 mobo/processor combo with an ATI AIW 9000 and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. 640x480
HuffYUV AVIs out of
VirtualDub, settings per the guides at this site. Tapes are all lectures, start-stop. No edits, I only trim the excess from the start and end later. All from 1991-2004, SP, most of them stored untouched, all 2nd generation dubs from a small production house. Each captured to a completely clean dedicated drive, each immediately moved to storage to make way for the next one. The captures look great, all were started on signal and not snow, the files play nicely out of VLC (even from my aging laptop to my TV via HDMI), and everything was going terrific.
Until I bring a clip into Premiere. Then my timeline (if I zoom down to frame level), my renders, my previews, everything ends up with periodic black frames, or a weird repeat of a nearby frame. If I close out Premiere and just bring the file into Media Encoder to transcode it to something else, the black frames end up in the new file. I go back to the original AVI to check in a few more players besides VLC, and the file still plays smooth with not even a dot of a dropout at the points where black frames are consistently substituted by Adobe. Nothing visibly dropped, nothing visibly added. Smooth motion.
I have searched and tried all the many recommendations from Adobe and others (pref resets, cache resets, software vs. hardware rendering, h.264 acceleration off, nudging the in/out points, sequence settings, drop vs. non-drop timecode, preview render formats, video card drivers, reminding Premiere that yes the footage is interlaced, etc). The fact that a straight transcode on a fresh installation of Media Encoder fails tells me that there is just something in Adobeworld that now hates these files, perhaps due to Win11, perhaps Adobe 2024, don't know. As people frequently mention at Adobe help threads, I don't have the patience to be their beta tester, and does anyone even bother customizing Premiere anymore when their default recommendation is trashing preferences?
Anyway, if this is yet another case of the old meeting the new and failing, OK. I've been on Premiere since 1995, am used to it, have soldiered through many wacky situations and solutions over the years, but am not going to spend more time on it if it's just yet another screwball thing - one of their help thread mods suggested a user transcode their footage in Handbrake first to get around the black frame issue, which sounds like an admission of defeat to me.
So I am looking for recommendations as to whether I should pursue: converting the footage to something Adobe likes a bit better and just sucking up the hours of transcodes, or bail on Premiere entirely and go in another direction. Note: I'm not learning AviSynth. Scripting is a struggle for me.
But it occurs to me that I do not need any of the super bells and whistles of Premiere on this project, I simply need to tidy up the ins/outs, drop in a few titles at the start and end (don't even need a titler, I've got stills ready to go), some light color correction, audio level adjustment and other fussing, then out it goes to final files (DVD, stream, archive). Anything nice and simple that folks recommend? After I sat grinding my teeth for an hour last night I looked around a bit and started to sniff at VirtualDub2. Thoughts? I need to keep the footage interlaced, as DVDs are a must.
NOTE: I have an older but quite good machine (4 Ghz quad with 32GB) that used to be my workhorse (replaced this summer because it was whining about Win11 compatibility, and I thought a new machine would be fun, silly me). I am not averse to setting up an older OS on that one and loading up an older copy of Premiere. It's currently on Win10 and whatever version of Premiere it had as of, say, May 2023. But if I did that, what might be the safest combo of OS and Premiere version? I sound like I'm married to Premiere, I'm not, but my subscription is free, so - seems like a waste not to use it.
-- merged --
Answer seems obvious now, but I've got an excuse: when I started fooling around with digital video it was 1995 and I had a Mac 8500 - the one with the a/v ports built in. My 4GB drive was enormous for most purposes, but severely limiting for video of course. I got used to not preparing intermediate files, there was simply no place to put them! Since I've been an infrequent video user since then (I end up with a project ~every 5 years), I got away with not preparing them any other time either. It simply didn't occur to me anymore.
But should have. Intermediate files generated. Problem solved. Thanks, all.
