Not sure if this is the proper place to post these questions, and I'm sure someone will inform me if it isn't. But I'll ask anyway.

I'm new to video editing, and am having a few issues at the moment, and web searches aren't helping. So, I'm hoping to get a bit of help from the community here, or really those that have used Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

1. Not sure if PP has the ability to add plugins to support more file formats, but was wondering if they updated the software...besides releasing CS4, to use .MTS files?

2. If no on #1, what is the best format to convert .MTS files to that doesn't lose quality of the video? Basically I'm having to convert the original .MTS files in Aunsoft before editing in PP, and then having to export the file from PP and with all the conversions I've lost a good deal of the quality. What I want is to not lose any quality when I finally hit up PP, and I know I'll lose some quality when I export from PP, but am hoping for a middle ground of a decent file size accompanied with a decent video quality. Also, what is the best format to export from PP?

3. And lastly, this is definitely a noob question (do people still use the word noob), but I finally figured out that in order to drop video in the timeline of PP I need to create a new sequence. What exactly are sequences? And why does PP create one automatically, but I'm not able to use the timeline?

In case anyone needs to know, I'm recording from a AVCHD camcorder, I believe at 1080i at 29 frames a second. Any help is greatly appreciated. And please remember, I'm extremely new...so be gentle.

did you get your answer?

is your premiere updated & is there a special patch that has been released? the main thing you're trying to do is load AVCHD encoded video, MTS shouldnt be the problem as it's a container (hey what happens if you rename it to M2T?)

a sequence is.... like a spreadsheet in excel, it's just a document of timelines in a project, you can have more than 1 sequence per project & then export a sequence as a final video file, so yes it will create one automatically

if there is no way to load the videos in CS3, here are your options i guess...

• use something like avisynth to pipe the video into premiere, this will be more cpu intensive & confusing to almost everyone
• transcode the video to one of those formats designed for editing, the filesize will be much larger than the original video & the quality loss will be minor compared to what you tried before
• get a newer version of premiere (make sure other people are loading your camcorder model's videos properly)
• move to a different video editor

now... once you're finally editing your video, you better pay attention to certain settings like frame-blend (disable it!), & dont mix framerates like 30fps video in a 24fps sequence

@kn00tcn: Thanks for the reply!

I didn't think anyone was going to answer my post, so I was just going to let it die...but thanks for answering my questions.

My biggest issue, which I finally learned, was that I completely ignored the opening project resolution. Premiere Pro, if you don't tell it otherwise is set to default a pretty shitty resolution from the start, so I pumped up the resolution to whatever video resolution I'm working on at the moment, and my quality woes were fixed. Essentially, what I was running into was that I had to convert the video files before importing them to PP, and so I wasn't entirely sure where I was losing the quality...turns out it was all in PP.

Thanks for the explanation on sequences, that makes sense now. And thanks for the heads up on frame-blend and mixing framerates, I'm sure that will come in handy once I start making videos in the future.