Help! When I import video it only shows up as audio

Question

Every time I try importing video or even try previewing it, it will only playback and show up as audio. I have tried both Quicktime and AVI video formats and nothing seems to work. I have been able to import an audio only file with no problem, but I really need the video clips and I don't understand why they won't work. I tested them on my computer and they work with other programs. Is there a setting on Adobe Premiere Pro that I neeed to change, or am I just doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Hi ya Jacob,
For honor sake let me say that I hope you aren't downloading files to more or less steal them. I, for instance, have a sort of religious/philosophy channel at YT and I'll sometimes use short excerpts from movie clips for teaching purposes. I don't know if it's technically legal to do so, but no one seems to object to my using 30-seconds or so from a clip in this way.
I'm sure there are people here who can tell you some easy way to do this with a program you have to pay for, but having grown up watching too much Jack Benny has made me a such a tightwad that I will always do things the cheap way even if it means jumping through a number of hoops. So let me tell you my process of hoop jumping before someone else tells you the easy store bought method (otherwise known as the "right way").
There are a number of ways to get something off YouTube as you've no doubt learned by now. However, most of those ways will only download the low quality version of the file. YT also keeps high quality versions of many of those files (depending on what codec was used in uploading them to begin with) on a separate server. Sometimes a YT video will have an "HQ" button you can toggle to see the file. Sometimes they don't see it, but there is an HQ file somewhere anyway a lot of the time. To see that file place the following after the url:
&fmt=18
Here's an example. If you go to the following url it will take you to the regular low quality version of this particular YT video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVAZGNAxUNw
Now you'll notice that there is indeed an HQ button you can push on this video to watch the high quality version, but let's pretend it isn't there and instead we'll use that little shortcut on the end of the url that I showed above so that the url now looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVAZGNAxUNw&fmt=18
No matter what download tool you use to get the video from YT, try to remember to use that shortcut ending piece for the url so the app will know without a doubt that you want the HQ version if one exists because sometimes these apps aren't able to find the HQ version without some help.
I recommend downloading the free version of
Any Video Converter. It will both download the YT video (the high quality version will be an mp4 file) and then it will convert it to something more usable of your choice.
Another good download tool is called
Orbit. It can download videos from other sites besides YT, but it always downloads the flv.
Any Video Converter, unfortunately, won't let you change the file to an uncompressed AVI, nor to a DV-AVI. The highest quality it has available to convert the file to is NTSC mpg2 DVD standard, or you can choose to use the HD setting for a wmv file, but it takes a long time to do the latter, and considering the low quality of YT videos to begin with, seems kind of senseless to me.
I then bring my new mpg2 file into the mpg version of
VirtualDub and change it to an uncompressed AVI. And then I can easily bring that AVI into Premiere and either work with it natively or change it to a DV file (which I usually do before editing).
There's a DV codec you can download that will allow VDub to convert the mpg2 directly to DV-AVI, but I don't trust it as I've noticed a lot of posts by people saying that it makes some of their other programs unstable.