Add & Render???
 

Hey there! I've been using Avid for 10 years now and have just recenty been tinkering with CS3 Premier Pro. So far I really like it but, is there a way to render an effect as you add it?? In avid I have an option to "add & render". I have a project with some pics and just a simple dissolve between them (total lenght four minutes) and looked as if it was going to take an hour to render the work area. Also, in Avid, I could render out the top line of video and every video layer underneath would play in the timeline with no problem. Any advice??

Thanks in advance!

Scott

Short of manually setting your work area to to the clip with effect you want to render, no, there is no simple way to do this the Avid way.

Thanks Jiri for the feedback.

Another Premier Pro "newbie" question....will render time always be an issue??? I'm really starting to like this software...but, seems crazy to have such long render times (again, this is just a four minute video with still pics). This really slows down my work.

There`s definitely something wrong with your project because simple crossfades on still images cannot take an hour to render, except if the photos were ten megapixel size or whatnot. I suggest you try to scale down your images (its physical dimensions) before importing to Premiere.

With SD and fairly recent machine, even if Premiere shows red bar (need to render), playback should be realtime (or close to) anyway, unless you stack ten effects on your clips.

I will try that.

Before importing into Premier, I resized pics to 1000 pixels so I could shrink or enlarge with no problems with quality.

Thanks again!

1000 x 1000 pixels is alright for Premiere of course. Did you really let it render for a while? It may show some absurd time but can drop to a minute or two after a few seconds.

No, I didn't.

I saw the projected time and freaked out!

Scott... PP can be a little dodgy when it comes to a string of large-ish still images. It takes a little forethought with stills to find the minimum you'll need or you could pay a price in system performance.

I did a project for fun about a year ago that exclusively used stills that I down-rezed from 6Mp to about 1k wide. On a dual core 2mHz laptop it was a bit slow and crashed occasionally but nothing that annoying. You can see the project here: http://vimeo.com/687749. It's SD and haven't tried anything using stills in HD, but I know that full rez images would bring my poor laptop to its knees.

Jiri's right. You should be able to apply simple transitions and effects without rendering, even in HD. I rarely render anything anymore unless there's a critical element I must see in full resolution. Premier's come a long way in the dozen years since I started working with it. My only wish is that the development team take 6 months to track down and kill the significant bugs that will pop up without warning like a gorgon in a haunted house.

Be careful before you migrate completely to PP. Workflows for complex projects can be convoluted, counterintuitive and time consuming. This is necessary to work around aforesaid bugs. Trying to do it the way you think it should be done can result in repeated crashes, mangled media and countless lost hours.

I think Premier 6 might have been the high water mark in the product's stability.

Migrating to Premiere may or may not be a wise idea, depending on what you do. For corporate/event/local ENG and basically any short outputs not intended for film-out, Premiere is wonderful.

It`s got really mighty editing capabilities, like rippling with CTRL, powerful UI, better audio handling than, say, Final Cut, more effects.

On the other hand, you will be pulling your hair out figuring out how to send your edit to the sound guy`s ProTools (basically, you can`t) or managing long-form projects. Premiere has a BAD memory management for larger projects.

Sorry it's taken so long to respond.

Just wanted to thank you guys for the feedback. I resized the pics and all it good now. I really like this software. Much more user friendly than Avid in my opinion.

Thanks!

Scott