AVI file from still camera won't play

I have an AVI file taken on a digital still camera which I have tried to import into my free trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. It plays very slowly - like every 10th frame or so. It plays ok in my version of Ulead studio 8. All captured files from my video camera play OK in Adobe. What am I doing wrong?

John Dory

I'm assuming you are talking about HD video from a ViDSLR or are you talking about a point and shoot? PPCS4 just doesn't deal well with H.264 compressed formats that it has to turn into its own editing codec then back to output format.

Thanks for getting back to me. I am talking about a video file from a point and shoot - just a small clip that I would have liked to include in my final film. Is there any way around it? I also had the same trouble when trying to include some stills taken on a compact camera for some stop motion I wanted to include - do you think this is the same problem? The stills were a jpg format

John Dory

Try to convert your camera's AVI file to some other AVI formats that Premiere may prefer. You could try to do this by rendering the clip out of Premiere as another flavour of AVI then re-importing it. Not sure what codecs you have access to but you could try codecs like Cineform, Huffyuv or even just ucompressed AVI. If you download and install Huffyuv it should show up in Premiere. It's a lossless codec. Aside from Premiere you could try to convert the file with programs such as MPEG Streamclip or Super.

For your stills, the resolution may be the problem. Try to reduce the resolution to your project/output resolution in Photoshop or similar then import it into your Premiere project.