Adobe Premiere & Premiere Pro discussions from 2004

[Steve Kim]

I did the capture the images from XL1S to PC's Adobe and edited them.
The captured images were saved as .AVI format.

Then, I was trying to export the edited image(.AVI) to the DV Tape in XL1S from Premire.

I can see the blinking "DV IN" message on XL1S' EVF, but the EVF's color was stayed blue nothing else.

The export was not successful.

Could you tell me what I did wrong?

Is .AVI the best format for capture/export?

Can I use other format for the capture?

[Ed Smith]

How about trying a crash edit?

This is done by simply putting the edit line at the beginning of the project, and then pressing the record button on the camera, then press space bar on the keyboard or the play button (footage has to be rendered first).

Or if you want the IEEE1394 cable to do it for you as long as you have rendered all the footage in Premiere, put the edit line at the beginning, select FILE, EXPORT TIMELINE, EXPORT TO TAPE, select ACTIVATE RECORDING DECK, click ok and hay presto it should be copying down to XL1.

.AVI format should be ok. To give you the best quality the footage should be captured at full DV resolution 720x576

Hope this helps, It works for me,

Ed Smith

[Adam Brennan]

I have Adobe premiere 6.5. When I go to render a project to either to tape or mpeg 1 or 2 files, it takes forever to do it...more that 4 hours for 10 mins of video.

This is what I have:
2.2 GHTZ AMD processor
768 DDR Ram
Fast hard drive with 8mb buffer and 7200 rpms.

I captured an 8mm poject on an analog capture card as an avi file. I used premiere to edit it and special effects.

When I go to do the output on tape or DVD, it's taking soo long to render. Am I doing something wrong here? It doesn't make sense why this would be taking forever to render. I consider my system I have pretty fast. I use pinnacle studio in the past and a 7 minute video took less than 15 mins to render but adobe is takiing too much time. Is it because the 8mm avi file has to be rendered or something in a different format before it can be rendered by adobe? Help!!

[Ed Smith]

You mention effects. What are the effects, are they a major part of the production? If there are loads of effects in the production Premiere can take twice , 3 times or 10times to render than if there were none.

What codecs are you using to export to MPEG 1/2.

I take it by rendering you are meaning exporting?

How much space is there left on the hard drive you are rendering too?

You need at least 20% free plus how ever big your project might take up when exporting. You also need at least 2 harddrives, one for your system stuff the other dedicated to video.

Your computer specs seem fine.

Hope this might help,

Ed Smith

[Adam Brennan]

I am using the Microsoft codecs that come with 6.5.

When I render, I am guess that means the same as exporting to tape.

I have a total of 4 hard drives and the one I am using is not the same drive that my programs are on.

I have plenty of hard drive space.

I am using a lot of effects on the video. Film FX such as letter boxing, transistions, old film type effects with slow motion.

So are you saying that the effects will take a lot of time to render or export to tape? 7 minutes with about 13,700 frames worth would equal to about 5 hours of exporting or rendering? Ughh! There has to be a better way.

What suggestions would you recommend to speed up my process.? Better hardware and faster? I don't think there is anything that much faster than what I have for a PC. Infact my CPU is water cooled too.

I was wondering since I used the pinnalce studio 8 to capture my video with an ATI capture card and then importing into adobe premiere would have anything to do with the ridulculous exporting time? I need more advice..please.. thanks alot!

P.s. Would a DV Deck be better to capture anytype of analog video to a dv tape and then capture it from adobe premiere?

What codecs do you recommend to use? I really don't want to sacrifice quailty.

[Alex Taylor]

I am using a lot of effects on the video. Film FX such as letter boxing, transistions, old film type effects with slow motion.

There you go, that's why. FilmFX takes a lot of render time, plus slow motion and old effects would add some time too. I don't think there's very much you can do about it.. close your Monitor and Timeline windows before you render, sometime that helps speed it up a bit.

If you have something that's going to take a few hours to render, just do it overnight or while you're at work/school.

[Ed Smith]

Alex is right, the more complex the effect the more Premiere has to render.

Another thing. By the sounds of things you are using a generic capture card i.e. the one which came with Studio 8, you do not get any real-time functionality from this. So every effect, every transition you put in Premiere you will have to render.

If you buy a capture card like Pinnacle Pro One RTDV, Matrox RTX 100 or Canopus DVstorm you will get real-time effects. This means that it will use the hardware to render and so saves you having to render at the end. However in most cases you will have to use the manufacturers plug-in effects that might be limited when trying to create a certain effect.

Try exporting it as a DV AVI file and see whether that is any quicker. Then import it into a fresh timeline and export to tape?

I have created a 1-minute video with 18 layers various effects, motion, picture in picture etc. At the time I was running Premiere on the Pinnacle studio 6 firewire capture card on an over-clocked Celeron CPU with 256MB RAM, it took over 4 hours to render it out and about 2 hours to export as an AVI file. In fact you can see the finished article on my website (the show reel download area).

Hope this might help,

Ed Smith

[Adam Brennan]

Thanks Ed,

So what you're telling me is that my capture card is whats slowing me down? I'm a little confused. I use my capture card to capture non-dv video and when the tape is being captured by my pinnacle card, it converts it to AVI file. After my AVI file is captured, I import it into Adobe 6.5 and add the effects then render or export it out to tape through my firewire or DVD media.

So I'm not really sure if that is what's slowing me down.

[Jason Balich]

I don't know what happened or where i went wrong. But i need help so it doesn't happen again.

All the video I've captured in the past on my GL2 was brought in and no frame selecting for upper or lower for fields was nessesary. Now i have this footage from the weekend that is all jittery. What did i do? I was playing around with the effects and didnt totally turn one off, but it wasnt on. Coul dthis set this into motion?? Is it a setting on the camera that makes it record this way? Sorry, im still hazy on this and capturing. It is just weird. All the footage b4 this was ok and when captured, no field problems like this. I play around with aparatue alot and shutter speed, could this do it? I think I had it around 30fps. Any tips are appreciatted.

http://www.littlebearmedia.com/adam.htm

[Ken Tanaka]

It would help if you told us a bit more about your setup. PC? Mac? Which NLE?

[Peter Moore]

Definitely more info is needed. Define jittery. Are you seeing interlace artifacts (where you see lines in parts that are moving quicky?) If so that's normal and will go away when you watch the footage on a normal TV. It's because you shot in Normal mode instead of Frame Mode. If you shoot in Frame Mode, when you import into the computer you'll get perfectly formulated 30fps each time without interlacing artifacts.

[Jason Balich]

Thank-you Peter.

I have been through multiple courses with NLE and this darn interlace thing has been a hil for me to understand. I understand that all frames on tv are showing 2 frames that interlace themselves for broadcast. And sometimes u have to set the frames to lower or upper fields to get rid of this artifacting.
I thought that frame mode was for viewing, not shooting. So if I wanted to watch it on a tv screen, what I shot and pause it...there would be no interlacing. But your actually telling me that I would capture non-interlaced footage in frame mode, which in turn would be clips without interlacing when i captured?? So i guess I can still recover this footage in premeire -or- is there a setting on the GL2 to import as non-interlaced?? Thank you so much for any and all tips. Ill play with this frame mode.

ps ~ im on a pc, windows 2000 pro, dual 1.8, raid drvies...but i think the interlacing as peter said is due to camera set-up

[Peter Moore]

Interlacing has to do with the way the footage is shot by the camera, and the way it's displayed. Ideally, you want to display the footage the same way it was shot (interlaced or progressive (non-interlaced)).

Computer video screens are always progressive, and most NLE viewers don't interlace, so if you import interlaced footage you're going to see artifacts. But it has nothing to do with the way the footage is imported - you can't control the frame/normal setting anywhere except at the camera when you shoot. Once it's shot in that way, it's shot. You can convert with software but it's rarely very good. And you can never convert progressive to interlaced (you can, but it won't be 60 fps).

The reason you're seeing the wierd lines is because with interlacing, there are 30 frames per second shown but each frame is composed of two fields which are not at the same point in time. So at any given moment you're seeing 1/30 of the second but each field is only 1/60th of the second. On an interlaced TV monitor everything looks a little jittery close up so it's not a problem - you sit far away and it all blends together and the motion looks very fast and life-like (like watching sports).

Import that footage into an NLE, which wants to deal with 30fps and not 60fps, and you have to deal with these artifacts. It'll take every two frames and combine them to form one 720 x 480 picture. But since the two frames are not temporally identical, when there is motion of an object, the object in one field is displaced from its position in the other field, resulting in alternating lines where the object is in one position vs. the other.

There's little you can do about this, and if you're exporting back to TV, there's no reason to do anything about it - the artifacts will go away when you watch it on any TV. Sometimes Media Player will also show the footage in its proper interlaced format depending on the codec.

When you import the footage, usually you don't have to worry about field order - the default settings usually work right.

If you shoot in Frame mode, (and this can only be done at the time of the shot), you have no interlacing artifacts because, while the camera does take 60 fields per second of input, every two fields are temporally identical to each other and form a full, true image when put together. This also results in less smooth motion and mimics better the look of 24 fps film in that respect.

So if you shoot in frame mode, your footage will always look great on the computer or any other progressive source. *supposedly* the GL2 sacrifices a bit of resolution when capturing in frame mode but I've never noticed this myself. If you want life-like "sports"-look video, go with 60fps interlaced and just know that in full resolution it probably won't look right on the computer.

[Glen Elliott]

A friend of mine has Premiere Pro and I was able to work with it for the first time. I, myself, have been a long time user of Premiere 6.0 however last year made the switch to Vegas.

At first I enjoyed the familiarity of the interface. Once I started getting into editing I noticed lots of things I probably had previously gotten used to. For one the program seems a bit sluggish. There's a notable pause between hitting the space bar and the cursor actually starting to move- same with stopping it.

As I was moving through the interface and navigating around the screen paused...I still had a cursor but I couldn't click on anything. I thought to myself, "no way not a crash?!". To Premiere Pros credit it did not crash because after about 10 seconds I was able to start interacting with the interface again. Though this sort of thing is not acceptable. It acted just like 6.0 used to before it crashed with the whole non-responsive cursor.

I moved a digital image on the timeline and tried to create a make-shift photo montage. Something I've had a great deal of fun doing in Vegas. To my dismay the image didn't display correctly beings it was a much higher resolution than 720x480 NTSC DV. I guess I kinda got used to the way Vegas automatically formats images for output ratio. I had to manually resize it in the "motion" dialog to make it fit properly. Unless I was overlooking something. Plus I encounterd a weird flickering in the preview window that seemed to be intermittent when I hit stop then play again. Maybe just an odd glitch having something to do with how Premiere handles still photos.

I guess I was just a bit dissapointed beings it carried so much hype and I read previous reviews saying the interface was very quick and responsive making specific note that the delay I spoke of being eliminated....which it apparently wasn't. The interface just felt a bit sluggish and the pauses for no apparent reason were more than annoying.

Giving it the benefit of the doubt I wasn't working with it on a P4 w/ hyperthreading and the machine only had 512mgs of ram. Though a Vegas/FCP killer it is definitly not.

[Rob Lohman]

Thanks for your opinion. I had similar experiences with older
versions of Premiere and am not likely to return now that I'm
using Vegas as well.