5/31/99
 

Do I need any special software to run Adobe Premiere?

The Silicon Graphics® 320 and Silicon Graphics® 540 workstations come
installed with Video for Windows® (VFW) and QuickTime® software
components and are Adobe Premiere certified for QuickTime editing.  For
more information about Adobe Premiere check out
http://www.adobe.com/premiere

What version of Premiere should I run on a 320 or 540 workstation?

We recommend Adobe Premiere 5.1a (5.0 and 5.1 users can download the
free update from Adobe's www.adobe.com/premiere web site). 

What version of the SGI HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and PROM should I be using?

The latest software revision will always give the user the best performance and set of features. Check
the Supportfolio site for updates. http://support.sgi.com/nt/software/index.html and to verify you are
running the most current software.

How do I know if I need to upgrade my SGI specific digital media modules?

A quick date check will verify if you're running the current set of digital media modules for the NT
visual workstation.

Directory C:\WINNT\system32 contains the following modules and all should have a creation date
of later than 4/27/99

sgidmedia.dll
sgidv.dll
sgijpeg.dll
sgilivfw.dll
sgiqt.qtr
sgiqt.qtx
sgival.dll
sgiyuv.dll

Directory C:\WINNT\system32\drivers contains two more file also requiring a creation date of later
than 4/27/99

sgijack.sys
sgilivid.sys

If you need to update please visit our support web site at http://support.sgi.com/nt/

Note: in order to see these files you will need to select show all files from the Windows
File/options/View menu

Are there any SGI specific preset files available?

How do I output SGI QuickTime CODEC movies to your NTSC/PAL monitor?

To have your SGI QuickTime CODEC video clips play on the NTSC/PAL
monitor instead of your desktop VGA monitor, you will need to add a
setting to Premiere's initialization file.  Make sure you have Premiere
5.1 or later.

1. In the Premiere folder (default path is C:/ program
files/adobe/premiere 5.1), open the file "Prem50.ini" if it exists. If
the file does not exist, open any text editing program, such as WordPad,
and create a new empty text file named "Prem50.ini"

2. Add the following text to the file. Capitalization and carriage
returns are important.

[proxy]
use_video_out='SGVO'

3. Save the file into the Premiere application folder.

4. Now you'll need to launch the sgiqtvout application (\winnt\system32\sgiqtvout)and select the
appropriate output jack and output standard (NTSC or PAL).

5. Restart Premiere to take advantage of new settings.

IMPORTANT: With this setting turned on, video clips using SGI QuickTime
CODECS will play to the NTSC/PAL monitor only; the VGA monitor will not
update since the video is being redirected.  You will only get still
frame updates in Premiere's monitor and clip windows when the video is
not playing and you toggle window focus.

Note: Quicktime 4.0 users will need to use the QT4 update found in the tools section.

How do I play files to video output in Video for Windows editing mode?

 The step-by-step instructions are:

a. Define Video for Windows as your editing mode in Premiere's General Settings dialog.
b. In Premiere's Video Settings dialog set the compressor to SGI YUV-RGB Codec
c. Import or capture an AVI file into the project.  The file must be in 16-bit UYVY format.
d. Go to the project window and drag the imported file onto the Timeline window.
e. On the monitor window, there are two windows for playing back the file.  The source window
    uses the ICM_DECOMPRESS message and will just play back to the graphics screen.   The
    program window uses the ICM_DRAW messages and will play back the file to video output (you
    can toggle whether it also draws to the graphics screen in the VFW output control panel).
f . Press play on the program window.

In Video for Windows editing mode, why doesn't the Print-to-Video command go to
video output?

Adobe does not use ICM_DRAW messages on the Print-to-Video command.   To play files
to video output, play it from the program monitor window instead.

How do I output video to my monitor under VFW?

Video for Windows (VFW) does not specify a video output architecture
like QuickTime does.  However, a de facto standard for video output
implementation has evolved where video output is done through video
decompression modules.

Windows recognizes some RGB formats as uncompressed and most other
formats as compressed.  VFW applications that play compressed AVI files
to the computer screen call the video decompression modules to
decompress the data to RGB.  Since most PC video boards capture in
compressed formats, they often implement their modules to send the data
to the video output jack while decompressing.

SGI has several decompression modules for decompressing AVI files in
Motion JPEG, Photo JPEG, and 16-bit UYVY formats.  Currently, only the
UYVY module plays back to video output.

Note that SGI's output component for QuickTime supports playing back AVI
files as well as QuickTime MOV files, so if you need to play back JPEG
AVI files to video output, you can do so using QuickTime applications.
 

What format should I use to capture uncompressed video to a QuickTime
file?

For uncompressed real-time capture, we encourage you to capture in: SGI
2vuy, SGI ABGR, SGI BGRA or SGI RAW (grayscale only).
 

What format should I use to capture compressed video to a QuickTime
file?

For compressed real-time capture, we encourage you to capture in the
following formats: SGI™ Photo JPEG and SGI™ Motion JPEG.  The JPEG
compressors do not use any hardware acceleration and are CPU-intensive.
Depending on the quality selected, two processors may be necessary.
Quality settings greater than 85 will result in dropped frames!  The SGI
prefix in the formats listed does not imply that these formats are
proprietary; it is inserted to indicate accelerated capture support for
these formats.  The format to capture video in can be specified through
the QT video control panel.

When I capture in VFW mode the preview is jerky and slow.

VFW allows two modes for displaying to the computer screen: preview and
overlay.  For the SGI capture component, the preview mode reflects what
is being captured, i.e., the same pixel formats, image size, etc., but
it does not preview in real time.  The overlay mode does display the
video in real time, but it displays uncompressed 32-bit BGRA regardless
of the capture settings.  For example, if the user sets the pixel format
to 8-bit Grayscale, then in preview mode the video display would be
grayscale, but in overlay mode the display would still be in color.

Note: It appears that Premiere sometimes does not switch between modes very well and will
crash when enabling Overlay. To fix just remove the prem50.prf file from the directory where
Premiere is installed, and restart Premiere.

What capture sizes are supported under Video for Windows?

The supported capture sizes are listed below:

NTSC PAL
 Non-Square Pixels  Square Pixels  Non-Square Pixels  Square Pixels
   720x480                   640x480            720x576                768x576
   360x240                   320x240            360x288                384x288
   180x120                   160x120            180x144                192x144
      88x60                       80x60               88x72                    96x72

For NTSC, the capture region starts at line 23 and ends at line 263 for
Field 1.  For Field 2, it starts at line 285 and ends at line 525.  For
PAL, the capture region starts at line 23 and ends at line 311 for Field
1, and for Field 2, it starts at line 336 and ends at line 624.  For
sizes less than the full active region, the video is down-scaled per
field, then interleaved.  We are currently working on a way to support
capturing 486 and 487 lines for NTSC.

The capture component currently does not support arbitrary capture
sizes.  If you need to change the size of the captured video, use a
video editing application to edit the captured file.

What capture formats are supported under QuickTime on the 320 and 540?

Uncompressed Formats

FourCC Codes  Pixel Formats
'2vuy' CbYCrY
'ABGR' 32-bit ABGR
'BGRA' 32-bit BGRA
'raw ' 32-bit 32-bit ARGB
'raw ' 16-bit 16-bit big endian RGB 555 (Mac)
'L555' 16-bit little endian RGB 555 (PC)
'5551' 16-bit SGI's RGBA5551
'raw ' 8-bit 8-bit gray
'UYVY' AVI files CbYCrY
'DIB ' AVI files 32-bit and 16-bit BGRA
 

Compressed Formats

FourCC Codes  File Formats
'jpeg' Photo JPEG
'mjpa' Motion JPEG A
'dvc ', 'dvcp' DV
'JPEG' AVI Photo JPEG

The JPEG and DV are SGI optimized software modules installed on all base
model configurations.

What capture formats are supported under Video for Windows on the 320
and 540?

The supported capture formats are:

FOURCC Code Real Time Output via VFW
32-bit BGRA 'DIB ' Y N
16-bit BGR 'DIB ' Y N
16-bit UYVY 'UYVY' Y Y
8-bit Grayscale 'DIB ' Y N
Motion JPEG 'MJPG' N N
Photo JPEG 'JPEG' N N
 

Here the term "realtime" refers to consistently being able to capture full
active region on a disk with appropriated performance without frame
drops (for more information on disk bandwidth, see the uncompressed video page).
The JPEG formats are compressed using software CODECs; their performance is much
more dependent on other running processes on the system.

The 16-bit UYVY files can be played back to video output; for more
information, see the video playback page.

Issues with Adobe Premiere

In QuickTime editing mode, if I move the Premiere window around while
previewing video input, the video input picture does not follow the
video capture subwindow.

This appears to be the way it functions in the 5.1 release of Adobe
Premiere.

In QuickTime editing mode, if I capture a movie clip, then close the
movie capture window, the next time that I try to adjust the QuickTime
video capture settings, Premiere crashes.

This appears to be the way it functions in the 3.0.2 release of
QuickTime, and is expected to be addressed in a future QuickTime
release.

When attempting to output SGI QuickTime CODEC movies to my NTSC/PAL
monitor Premiere crashes.

Your output channel could be set to the incorrect output standard. If you want to use PAL as
the output timing or switch between NTSC and PAL, you need to first check the timing in the
SGI QuickTime video output control panel (sgiqtvout.exe in c:\winnt\system32) before restart
Premiere.  In the SGI QuickTime video output control panel, there is a check box to turn on the
Square-pixel size to non-square pixel size conversion.  If this box is checked, the capture size
In Premiere needs to be in square size, i.e., 640x480.

In Video for Windows (VFW) capture mode, with the movie capture window
open, when I change the capture dimensions in the VFW configuration
dialogs the preview window does not change size immediately.  Why?

This appears to be the way it functions in the 5.1 release of Adobe
Premiere.  Premiere needs to change the size of the preview window.
However, any captures to disk will have the correct (new) settings; it
is just that the preview is not updated.

In Video for Windows (VFW) capture mode, when I try to capture 640x480
size images or larger, and during the capture compress them using the
Radius® Cinepak® compressor, Premiere crashes or the capture fails and
pops up an error dialog saying "Warning: Some frames were dropped or
none were captured. The video source may not be connected, or your
capture h/w may have an IRQ or other conflict."

This appears to be issue with the way Premiere functions in the 5.1
release.  Premiere can only capture Cinepak at less than 640x480
resolutions. As a workaround, use vidcap32 to do the same capture, then
import the resulting file into Premiere.

In QuickTime editing mode, sometimes when I bring up the video capture
settings at the same time that the movie capture window is open, the
Premiere application stops responding to input.

This appears to be the way it functions in the 3.0.2 release of
QuickTime, and is fixed in the 4.0 version of QuickTime
release.

As a workaround you can close the capture window, change your capture
settings (Project/Settings/Capture) then reopen the movie capture
window.  Never have any window or dialog box overlap the movie capture
window.

Why does Premiere sometimes misbehave or crash when I switch between
QuickTime and Video for Windows editing modes?

It appears that Premiere sometimes does not switch between modes very
well. Just remove the prem50.prf file from the directory where Premiere
is installed, and restart Premiere.

Export->Print to Video didn't render correctly the first
time. The output on the screen was colored still even though black
and white filter was used.

Workaround: Try again and it will work.

In VFW mode, Compressor setting won't be honored at all.

Workaround: User has to select the compressor through VFW
video settings dialog and click on the ok button. Clicking on the ok button is critical otherwise
no compressor will be used for capturing.  You have to do that every time you
restart Premiere even though you didn't change the compressor setting.

In QuickTime mode, video Preview window can't overlap with transition
window, navigator window, or video settings dialogs.

Workaround: This is fixed in QuickTime 4.0, upgrade to eliminate this issue.

In QuickTime mode, Clip window loop playback fails IF speed < 0, e.g., -200%. Clicking on the play
button won't generate any effect.

Workaround: Use Source Monitor window instead.

In QuickTime mode, both Manual Rec. and Time Lapse options under File->Capture->Stop Motion,
crash Premiere right away.

Workaround: Use Video for Windows mode.
 

The folowing are open Premiere bugs without fixes or workarounds and are listed
here only to inform the user of current product limitations
 

Import movie files into Premiere from the network, providing a UNC
filename or using the file browser over the Network Neighborhood, later
when we reopen the project,Premiere will have problem finding those files.

In VFW mode, capturing single image with Still Image option under
File->Capture->Stop Motion, will not generate any image file.

In VFW mode, Source Monitor and Clip window playback fails IF speed <
0, e.g., -200%. Clicking on the play button won't generate any effect.

In VFW mode, Source Monitor and Clip window loop playback fails IF speed < 0, e.g., -200%.
The first click on the loop playback button usually won't have any effect. The second click
starts the loop playback but the speed is +100%, i.e., normal speed. The minus sign and
value were both ignored.

In QuickTime mode, a bitmap file will be generated by using Still Image option under
File->Capture ->Stop Motion. QuickTime doesn't understand the format, so the file can not be
previewed inside Premiere
 
 
 
 

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