Can anyone advise on the best approach to using GoPro HD movies (mp4) with Premiere Elements?

I recently got the GoPro and just pulled the first clips into Elements. Very slow to preivew, lots of judder and generally struggling with it. I’ve edited large HD clips from my compact camera (MOV) before without any problems.

A quick Google shows that this a common issue, its a bit frustrating that modern movie applications still have issues with common formats. I found a suggestion to use a free converter called Mpeg-Streamclip to convert the files into MOV files first, its improves it but its still not great.

Any better suggestions?

Transcode your clips to ProRes422 using mpeg streamclip (application).

If you’re on a PC…go buy a mac.

Some software really chokes on the vids unfortunately. Frinstance Sony Vegas HD is just as you say, can’t run the preview. Everyone says “It’s your system”, but I decided to try Vegas Premium HD and lo and behold, runs smooth.

Transcoding seems to be the best way round it but I figure I’ve got a stupidly powerful PC so it’s nice for it to get a workout from time to time

Can you get a copy of premiere pro cs5 – this is what i use and even on my 4 year old machine (dual core 2.4ghz 6GB ram), its smooth, no pre encoding required and for me the advantage of having a vimeo hd export setting is perfect…

What oink says, CS5 is great on a half decent machine. You don’t need a mac to do video work (though FCP is nice)!

Still need to Transcode on a mac for FCP….intermediate codec might work, might not. depends on the suns position in the sky. Imovie should work and can be used as in intermediary.

MPEG streamclip. (Anyone got any settings that are consistent???)

JVC have a Final Cut native camera. at around £2000 I’m sure more camera options will appear soon

I use Vegas Platinum HD on a quad core 4GB machine. Preview still runs slow, even when dropping the quality of the preview to lowest setting. If there is music and layers going on its not good. I ended up waiting 3 hrs for a render and then watching, taking notes and editing again.

Maybe Cineform Neoscene will sort it out:
http://goprouser.freeforums.org/do-i-need-cineform-neoscene-t465.html

But it costs lots and I cant find it elsewhere 🙁

+3 on premiere pro cs5!

need to be running a 64bit OS to use it but if you are then i can quite confidently say that it handles go-pro HD files, contour HD files and HDmax files fine

superfli – Member

“I use Vegas Platinum HD on a quad core 4GB machine. Preview still runs slow, even when dropping the quality of the preview to lowest setting.”

That’s pretty much exactly what I use- an old Q6600, 4gb RAM, Windows XP. Works a charm… Is it Vegas 10 you’re using?

Northwind, I’m using Win7 x64. Vegas 10. AMD phenom x4 955, so it really should be running it fine. Only thing is I’m using built in Ati HD4200 vid card, but my understanding is that Vegas uses CPU not GPU.

Hmm. Afraid I’ve nothing useful to add other than that I’d have expected that should be fine. You sure it’s running all the cores? One of the Vegas demos defaulted to 2 cores on mine for some daft reason. Oh I do have the CPU seriously overclocked on this (it’s a Q6600, not overclocking them is a crime) but still, it shouldn’t be making that much difference

it’s a Q6600, not overclocking them is a crime

I have a Q6600 and have read this before.. what exactly do you need to do with overclocking and can you actually notice the benefits for stuff like photoshop, video, audio work etc?

Depends on the rest of your hardware… Best bet is to google your motherboard model and see what the options are. I’m not that good at this sort of thing 😉 But mine was dead easy, I found a guide on a website and from then it was mostly trial and error. Oh but I did fit a gigantic cooler to it too as it was really noisy otherwise trying to keep cool. This one runs at 3.4ghz reliably and has done for years, the standard speed is 2.4hz so it’s a pretty big difference.

If you want to get the best results it’s time consuming but I’ve never really bothered, I just settled for a good quick reliable result.

It’s pretty noticable the difference, I mainly use this for games but the video stuff gives it the main test. Put it this way, from time to time the overclock falls off the settings for some reason, never figured out why but as soon as I start messing about with videos or recent games, I notice it… Takes about a quarter longer to process a video, struggles with multiple applications where normally it doesn’t, stuff like that.