Fluid Workflow: Importing AVI files into Premiere Pro

Having problems import AVI files into Premiere Pro CS6/CS5 for further editing? In this guide, you can get the easy method to achieve your goal smoothly.



According to Adobe official website, Adobe Premiere Pro does import AVI files. However it only imports DV-AVI. If you try to add other AVI files like DivX-AVI, MJPEG-AVI, Xvid-AVI, 3ivX-AVI and more to Premiere, it either ends in fail or encounters some audio or video problem. And there some frequently asked questions quoted as below:

Q1: "Why doesn't my .AVI file Import, or play properly in Premiere? Hey, it's an .AVI file. Why can't Premiere work with it? It played fine in Windows Media Player (WMP), and VLC Player. Even QuickTime Player does a good job. What’s up with Premiere?"

Q2: “Premiere Pro CS6 cannot play avi with MJPG codec… I have installed Premiere Pro CS6 and wanted to import an avi file exported from 3Dmax 2009. The file IS imported, but it is black in the Monitor (Source Monitor, Program Monitor… everywhere). So I have checked the Media Info in VLC, and it showed that the codec of that file is MJPG (not MJPEG with an E, but MJPG.) Has someone had those problems?"

Unsupported AVI video often comes from Sony camera, Canon camera, Nikon camera, Carton videos, and downloaded websites. When importing an AVI file, Adobe Premiere Pro including the recent Premiere Pro CS6 sometimes returns the error "Unable to open that file. File uses an unsupported compression format." This often happens with AVI files that were created by digital still cameras or software that doesn't correctly support the AVI standard. Plus, sometimes it doesn't show video, only the audio with. That looks as if it’s one those naff mpeg-4 format AVI's. The problem is that video files have been overloaded to contain different sorts of data, which is very annoying and now it’s almost impossible to support them all.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix the issues. The easy workaround to import AVI files into Premiere Pro is to convert AVI to a more editing-friendly format, such a Premiere's MPEG-2 or WMV. To get the work done, you can use the well-known third-party software app Brorsoft Video Converter, a powerful high-quality video converter, player and editor, and available for Windows and Mac users. Get the Mac version here and the Windows Version here. With it, you can quickly change avi into Premiere Pro's MPEG-2 MPG or WMV format with zero quality loss.

So, what does the workflow look like?

1) Import AVI files



2) Choose Premiere Pro preferred format. After that, do remember clicking "Convert" button to do AVI to Premiere Pro conversion.



3) Load converted AVI files into Premiere Pro

You're now ready to get the result files into Adobe Premiere Pro to do further editing. Launch Premiere Pro on your Mac, choose "File > Import to import any file. If you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, press Command+I to open the standard Import dialog.



You're done.

Comments

[David]

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[daveclark966]

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