I recorded a couple different gameplay videos over the weekend in MagicYUV 2.0 using Dxtory. The first one was great, and had no issues. The second one appeared to go just fine, and the filesize looks normal. However, when I try and load it into Premiere, it doesn't properly decode the video. It shows only a black frame for the whole 90 minute file. If I open the file in VLC, it looks great and works properly. I've tried running the AVIFix tool that comes with Dxtory (no change), and re-encoding the file using the same codec settings with VirtualDub (no change in Premiere, REALLY slow decoding in VLC).
Does anyone have any suggestions for solutions? I'd REALLY hate to lose this footage, especially when I can see it in VLC. 🙁
Not /sure/ if this is relevant, but I realized today I /may/ have set my colorspace higher than I really need for what I'm doing. Since it was set that way for both recording sessions, it doesn't seem likely to be the issue, but maybe the different game engines present different data in the buffer. It's set to RGBA, and I almost certainly don't need the alpha channel.
Can you share a portion of the video? I mean like a few second re-encode with VirtualDub, which also shows up black?
I can do that this evening, sure. At my day job right now. 🙂
OK, I looked at it, and attached is what I can see in media player.
The problem was that as you accidentally selected the RGBA codec, it encoded the alpha channel, which happened to contain zeros, hence the whole frame was interpreted as transparent.
Dxtory presents RGB32 format to the codec, which is BGRXBGRXBGRX..., and X can be garbage as it should be ignored, but the MagicYUV RGBA codec encoded it as alpha (the MagicYUV RGB codec ignores it, but RGBA doesn't), and X coming from Dxtory was actually zero, making all the pixels and hence the frames interpreted as transparent.
To fix in your case, open the file into Premiere, right click on the clip (for me it is in Assembly, Project), select "Modify -> Interpret Footage..." and in the Alpha Channel section tick "Ignore Alpha Channel".
Aaaah. That's even better than the transcode to YUV I had started. Thanks again!
After discussions in other threads earlier today, I decided to try something, and I downsampled the footage from RGBA to YUV 4:2:2. And now it's loading properly in Premiere. I have NO IDEA why the other recording session I did with the exact same settings worked just fine, and this one didn't.
The reason it worked for 4:2:2 is because it dropped the alpha channel during transcode. It would have worked for RGB too, as well as all other non-alpha variants. See the answer below.