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I am a newbie to video editing and I've been trying to take some files I downloaded from a stream online (public government videos), to make an Adobe Premiere Pro video out of them. Here's an example link to a file I downloaded that I want to edit:

mms://stream.miamibeachfl.gov/tv20%20archive/design%20review%20board/drb_20130806.asf

The problem I am having is that the ASF files have an issue when I try to import it or just open in the Source Monitor in Adobe Premiere Pro. The "Conforming" notice shows at the bottom right, but it stalls there after about 1% and I have an error in the Events dialog which says the following:

"File importer detected an inconsistency in the file structure of XXX.avi. Reading and writing this file's metadata (XMP) has been disabled."

I thought the files were possibly too big to use in Premiere (some are over 1GB), so I used some freeware programs to trim them down, thinking this would help. However, even then it doesn't work, or if it does work to trim the file and convert to AVI, I get the following error when trying to open the new file in Adobe Premiere Pro: "Unsupported format or damaged file"

Here are the properties of a sample file I am having problems with, which I get from the Premiere Pro menu -> Get Properties For -> File:

"File Path: C:\Users\Daniel Desktop\Documents\Google Drive\Consulting\Activism\DATA SOURCES\VIDEOS\plb_20120327.asf Type: Windows Media File Size: 1.4 GB Image Size: 320 x 240 Frame Rate: 29.97 Source Audio Format: 32000 Hz - 16 bit - Stereo Project Audio Format: 32000 Hz - 32 bit floating point - Stereo Total Duration: 11:03:16:05 Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0"

I am not sure why this issue is happening but based on the file issues, maybe there is some setting I am missing?

Any tips or help would be much appreciated. I can't start video processing if it's not possible for the video to load. Thank you!

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  • Premiere Pro will handle files much MUCH larger than 1GB, I've been working with files upwards of 8GB since Premiere 6 (not CS6, but rather the version before CS was a thing, so like 8 versions of Premiere ago.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Jan 3, 2014 at 14:25
  • Also, did you simply rename the file to AVI to try and get it to work? ASF has nothing in common with the AVI structure, so you can't just change the extension. (I noticed that the error is talking about an AVI.) Is the error wrong or did you do something to transform it to an AVI?
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Jan 3, 2014 at 14:30
  • @AJHenderson, no I used a converted program to convert to AVI. However, based on your answer I believe this is more to do with the low quality of the stream than the conversion to AVI
    – Daniel C
    Jan 3, 2014 at 19:39

1 Answer 1

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The link you gave is for a streaming media file, not a download. Most likely, whatever ripper you used to pull down the file did a poor job and produced a faulty file. It may actually play back since most playback applications are rather permissive when it comes to errors in the file, however a professional editing package like Premiere will tend to throw errors if there are major problems in the file since it won't be able to generate suitable output from the file. The best bet is probably to try and find a non-streaming version, particularly since the quality of the streaming version is VERY low.

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  • Thank you - the only option I have is via this stream. In this case, is there anything that I can do in order to download the stream and convert it to something suitable?
    – Daniel C
    Jan 3, 2014 at 15:38
  • You can use a stream ripper to download it, but you'd have to play around with different stream rippers until you find one that works well. I don't have any particular experience with stream rippers.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Jan 3, 2014 at 16:45
  • OK great thank you. I have requested the full files on DVD from the government office, hopefully that should do the trick.
    – Daniel C
    Jan 3, 2014 at 19:39

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