not able to capture certain clips?

okay here is my problem - i will try to put it in as few words as possible:
Ive got some surfing footage from the other day, and i captured to my harddrive like always w/ no problems (used dvgate motion) - since it is going to be for web, i needed to lighten it a good amount and to make the colors how i want them i played with some transfer modes and curves in afx. this made the file sizes huge and obviously this is bad for the web so i took the avi files and exported them back to dv tape. my plan was to recapture these enhanced clips again at 25mb/s so i could have great quality stuff and not worry about the huge file size.
this isnt happening though, everytime i go to capture the footage back to my computer i get problems - premiere 6.5 and LE both give up when they see this new footage and sometimes say the dv device is in use. dvgate will play all my original footage w/ no problem but once it gets to this enhanced footage it turns the monitor to blue and wont let me capture.
ive never had problems capturing footage and i have been happy with both of these programs so i am a little confused as to what the problem might be?
if anyone can offer some help it would be greatly appreciated as i am on an informal deadline! thanks!

[Rob Lohman]

My guess would be that recording to tape is not going correctly
(hook the camera up to a TV and playback, see what happens)
or perhaps you are using a wrong format somehow.

I'm not understanding how you say your footage is getting much
larger when adding effects. Where are you seeing this? Going
back to tape is the wrong thing to do to "fix" this. I'm guessing
you are outputting to uncompressed or something. You should
output to special formats for the web to reduce size.

Can you give as much detailed technical explenation as to what
you are doing and where you are seeing things?

[Mark Jefferson]

Why bother to export it back to tape in the first place? Just encode the file from your editing/fx app.

If your using AP 6.5, just export the movie as a wmv/DivX/Xvid/MPEG (or whatever, but wmv works really good for web). If you use AE, use the render queue to encode the file in one of the formats listed above. I have examples at my web site, www.slakrboy.com

If you need more help with this, contact me mark@jeffersons.org. I'm pretty handy with these apps.

Cheers,
Mark Jefferson

Sorry I know I didnt do a good job explaining it...
Let me give an example: I took a 5 second clip and duplicated it in AFX, changed the transfer mode to hard light, adjusted the curves on the lower layer, changed the opacity of the upper layer, and enabled fram blending. When I export it in the render queue with teh proper settings and the microsoft DV codec, the 125mb file becomes 300megs.
This happens with each of the 25 clips i have and increases the size of my video in the premiere timeline immensly when i try to export it.
I figure that by making all these changes and then exporting it back to DV and then back from DV to my computer, I can get the same corrected video clips but at a much smaller size.
Am I missing something w/ this approach?

Rob: the playback is fine, it works normal when put through a tv

A little update: after hours of trying to capture this footage, by some miracle (i didnt do anything different) the footage was finally captured... but i wonder what was causing it in the first place?

[Rob Lohman]

I don't know why it happened.

As I said before you are looking at the wrong places to solve your
issues. You should never ever use a back to camera approach
to bring down the filesize. That is just the wrong way to approach
the issue.

You should do everything within the computer. Reading your
posts and your calculations I'd say you are doing something
very "wrong".

What program and settings are you using to capture footage
in the first place?

You say you had a 5 second clip that was 125 MB (which just
cannot be DV) and it turned into 300 MB. Now if any of this was
DV then it would be a file of around 18 MB since the DV datarate
is around 3.6 MB/s. Now if you had this in full uncompressed
4:4:4 YUV 8 bit you would get a file of 148 MB which more
closely matches your 125 MB (probably just under 5 seconds
then).

Now to get 300 MB you would have to increase to 16 bit YUV
uncompressed.

This concludes me that something is very wrong here if you are
saying you are using DV.

To try and help you to narrow down the "issue" (and since you
didn't post much detailed information), please follow and fill in
my list below:

1) which application did you use to originally capture the footage

2) which EXACT settings did you use to capture and in what file format?

3) what resolution and frame rate is this file EXACTLY

4) how long in seconds and/or frames is this "5 second" movie EXACTLY

5) what are your After Effects project settings EXACTLY

6) which export settings did you use from AE EXACTLY

7) and lastly what operating system are you running (be a specific as you can) and which hardware are you running (CPU, memory, harddisk and what filesystem you are running on the harddisk(s) if you know)

thanks rob, you are being a TON of help! I will try to answer your questions to the best of my abililty...

let me preface this by saying that i think i either struck an extra number key or was looking at some wrong data when i said 135megs for a 5 second clip or whatever it was that i had said. I am using DV also...

) which application did you use to originally capture the footage
sony DVGATE motion (came installed w/ my sony vaio)

2) which EXACT settings did you use to capture and in what file format?
DV codec(720x480) 29.97 --> this is the only info given under the 'capture' settings box in DVGATE


3) what resolution and frame rate is this file EXACTLY
720x480 at 29.97

4) how long in seconds and/or frames is this "5 second" movie EXACTLY
5 seconds - 20megs

5) what are your After Effects project settings EXACTLY
standard ntsc comp settings. the render queue looks like this http://www.digitalskate.net/v3/images/13.jpg and this http://www.digitalskate.net/v3/images/14.jpg

6) which export settings did you use from AE EXACTLY
see above

7) and lastly what operating system are you running (be a specific as you can) and which hardware are you running (CPU, memory, harddisk and what filesystem you are running on the harddisk(s) if you know)
adobe premiere 6.5 (and 6 LE sometimes - i trade off in b/t them accidently sometimes) AFX 5.5. on a sony vaio desktop with 512ram, two 80gig HD's, windows xp, dont know the file systems, and its being captured from a gl2 or a 1ciop i use as a deck

so there it all is, let me know if you need more. and i know im sounding pretty stupid and maybe a little ignorant/stubborn too but if you wouldnt mind explaining to me the reasons why you would and should never export back to tape to save file size it would mean alot because im the kind of person who has to know why not to do something before i stop doing it .. haha

thanks again rob!

[Rob Lohman]

Thanks for being detailed, that always helps things. So the input
is 20 MB. That's more along what I expected. And the output file
from AE is still 300 MB for 97 frames (that's only 3.2 seconds)?

Are you sure you are not misreading the filesize? What options
do you have in the format pull down besides "Video for Windows"?

Can you also post a screen grab from the Format Options
screen where you choose the DV codec?

I'm also wondering why you have stretch turned on if the project
is already set to 720x480. Also keep in mind that DV uses 48000
hz audio and not 44100 as you've selected there.

The reason to not use the camcorder is that:

1) it isn't doing the file size reduction, your print to tape application is

2) your computer can do it as well (as point 1 demonstrates)

3) you don't want to introduce extra wear and tear on your camera

4) you don't want to have additional problems like frame drops (with recording or capturing) that you might not notice or other tape based problems that might occur

DV is fully digital. So anything your camera can do your computer
can as well (in regards to working on an already recorded image)

so the print to tape option command in premiere does what specifically?

as for stretch, i dont click that, those screenshots came from an afx tutorial and im not sure why he selected that.
as for the audio, i work with surfing clips so theres no audio but thast good to know, i will be sure to note that change

[Rob Lohman]

Print to tape renders parts of the timeline that need rendering
and then outputs ("copies") it to the tape device.

is that any different than export to video?

- rob, i cant thank you enough for your patience and help!

[Rob Lohman]

You can argue whether it is different. An export puts the file on
your harddisk. A print to tape sends it to a device. Both render
parts where needed. A print to tape might render to a temporary
file first before sending it to the device.