Editing in Premiere? Avoid WMV!

First, let me say that I absolutely love working in Adobe Premiere Pro. The interface is clean and snappy- I can get things done in an organized way without a ton of fuss. Now with batch export through Adobe Media Encoder in CS4, it’s just a real, genuine pleasure to work with.

Now, I also use Sony Vegas Pro on occasion. It is also a nice piece of software. The one thing Vegas really has over Premiere is the ability to handle just about any file type without the potential to choke and die. Lots of material that I’ve needed to edit has had to pass through Vegas for simple conversion before bringing it into Premiere for cutting. I know that formats such as WMV are not meant to be edited, but sometimes you have no choice- you have to work with what you’ve been given.

Over the weekend, I struggled for a few hours trying to import some NTSC format WMV files into Premiere. The import maxed out my CPU and my RAM for quite some time. Premiere did crash on a number of occasions. I had the idea, finally, to process the files through Vegas (AVI conversion) as I would normally do, but then thought perhaps AME would be able to handle this task for me. Sure enough AME was able to convert the WMV files into AVI with no problems whatsoever. Taking these into Premiere, editing them down, and moving them into an Encore project was quick, simple, and really such a day and night difference from my original work flow.

Having done a little research after the fact, it seems there is actually a knowledge base article about this very issue.  I can vouch that leaving the task to complete will work- but it takes forever, and editing WMV files even when the import is successful is not a pleasent experience.  Most of the time, I work with native video, but when confronted with a distribution format like WMV- I can safely recommend Using Adobe Media Encoder to transcode to a workable format.  I may not need Vegas anymore…