Frame Blending Problem in Premiere CS4

Frame blending can be forced off in render.

When I do my Premiere setups prior to doing an edit on my HD video files, one of the first things I do is to turn off the ‘blend frames‘ option in the Clip menu. It is on by default.  A simple test on the clip in the timeline verifies the setting.  But a big oops appears in the output render.  Frame blend is still on. The ghostly look of frames that merge the before and after frames in the current frame.  It’s unnatural look is very to annoying to look at particularly when there are fast moving frame to frame scenes.

Initially I thought the ‘blend’ option had somehow been turned back on (a fact when the clip speed settings are changed from 100%) or an interlace setting has corrupted the video – I always use progressive when in HD.  I went through a number of video setting combinations on a very short test file and couldn’t get rid of the blending action.

But alas, after reviewing various forums and blogs on this problem it is an actual bug. I mean BUG.  Adobe, come on guys.  Previous versions of Premiere did not have this problem.  According to the Adobe people and users who have witnessed and attempted fixes, the problem is with the released version of the software, with no indication the BUG will be fixed, until, wait for it…… not until CS5 comes out.  Well CS5 has been out for awhile and I have no intention of spending more big bucks on this product…again, if I don’t have to.  I am considering CS5 only because it supports NVidia Quadro product with CUDA hardware acceleration, another issue in which to comment in a later article.

The Adobe blogs have suggested changing the frame rates of your projects to get rid of the problem.  FLASH based projects running at 15fps will work with this fix, but for HD video projects it is just not an option.

So the fix.  Most of my HD video projects are 30fps progressive scan.  I tried 29.97fps in the Media Encoder setting and ran a test.  Voila, no blending.  The big bucks for CS5 Creative Suite will have to wait.  Nuff said.

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