Importing HD MPEGs into After Effects CS3

I have been trying to import MPEGs that were from a Sony HDR SR7 video camera.
We purchased a plugin from Main Concept Pro in order to import the MPEGs into
Premiere CS3, but I am not able to import the MPEGs into After Effects CS3
without getting the Media Pending yellow splash screen.

I've looked at all kinds of forums and asked other people, but am not getting
any responses that work.

Would appreciate help as my productivity has been very low as of late.

Thanks a lot,

I'm afraid you're out of luck. If AE goes into the media pending loop of death,
then it has no clue how to interpret the MPEG streams. If it's AVCHD, then it's
no dice, if it is MPEG-II, it may be worth a spin. All this stuff is handled by
MediaCore and respective plugins and if you cannot get them to run in AE, it may
never work. You could try placing your PPro I/O plugin in the common MediaCore
folder (Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Common/Media Core/Plug-ins/CS3) and see
if AE recognizes it, but that's pretty much it. Short of that you should look
into options whether your camera software or the plugin you bought provides a
way to create a quick transcode export to convert your file to a more standard
conform derivative of the MPEG specs.

Thanks Mylenium for your help. I'm fairly new to dealing with all the different
outputs of video. Since after buying the plug-in I am now able to edit the MPEG
in Premiere, I'm wondering what would be the best encoding to export it as so I
don't lose quality and bring it into AE as a different file type i.e. avi, mov?
These video clips are widescreen and HD. What would be the best output for it?

Thanks again for your help.

Uncompressed and lossless files are the best way to move files to and from AE,
but the file sizes will be very large.

Uncompressed Quicktime or AVI is lossless.

Try Quicktime Animation (100% quality) for lossless at slightly smaller file
sizes.

What I would do is look into the export settings. If there is something as a
"Canopus MPEG exporter", you might have a chance. In its options, it
would/ should provide an option like "quick export" "quick
transcode" or "conform MPEG-II program stream". We had a test
license of Edius once and while the software is crap, it had a ton of these
options (something which Canopus indeed do very well), so it's likely the
plugins they sell also share some of these features. If not, then you will have
to export as AVI or MOV indeed. A good compromise is Quicktime with the
Animation or PNG CoDecs, sometimes you may even use Photo-JPEG for not so
critical stuff. If this will be your regular workflow and Sony are not going to
provide updated versions of their CoDecs that may resolve the problem, you may
wish to consider buying a commercial CoDec such as Sheer Video or Cineform. This
would allow you to capture directly to these CoDecs in premiere and then move
them to AE without any extra conversions.