Rob, why would you advise to upgrade if you don't use the program yourself?

Ron, I just upgraded to 1.5 but before that I was using 1.0 for a short while. I never had any problems with the group or ungroup function. Maybe an uninstall/reinstall would fix it.

I would advise this since it is known that a lot of problems where
fixed in the 1.5 version of Premiere Pro. This makes sure your
version is not a problem. I'm using Vegas 5.0b, not 5.0a since it
had bugs as well that where fixed lateron.

Thanks for the quick responses - but they both don't seem to be options. I tried reinstalling - with no luck and upgrading to 1.5 is not free and I won't be able to shell out the $$ for the upgrade. I may just be out of luck.

Okay - so I'm not totally hosed. I just had to start over since most anything I tried to do after that gave me the "serious error". I reinstalled and started over and it seems to now allow me to group and ungroup.

Thanks for your help

<<<-- Originally posted by Ron Quizon : Okay - so I'm not totally hosed. I just had to start over since most anything I tried to do after that gave me the "serious error". I reinstalled and started over and it seems to now allow me to group and ungroup.

Thanks for your help -->>>

i had that one once too, and others like it when working with nested sequences. i cant get the 1.5 upgrade either as its not here in Nepal yet. Other than that i find 1 pretty stable - everyone here is using it!

jigs

Glad Ron's problem is solved.

FWIW, I felt like the upgrade to 1.5 was well worth the $99 for the additional features...not to mention the bug fixes, which I don't believe we consumers ought to have to pay for. (IMHO, it is the responsibility of manufacturers to make their products function as advertised, which is not an easy task for any of the software companies these days, given the complexities.)

Jiggy, if availability is the only thing preventing you from upgrading, you can purchase through any internet connection from Adobe's online store -- although a broadband connection would be highly desireable.

Cheers!

<<<-- Originally posted by Pete Bauer : Glad Ron's problem is solved.

FWIW, I felt like the upgrade to 1.5 was well worth the $99 for the additional features...not to mention the bug fixes, which I don't believe we consumers ought to have to pay for. (IMHO, it is the responsibility of manufacturers to make their products function as advertised, which is not an easy task for any of the software companies these days, given the complexities.)

Jiggy, if availability is the only thing preventing you from upgrading, you can purchase through any internet connection from Adobe's online store -- although a broadband connection would be highly desireable.

Cheers! -->>>

thanks pete for the news on the upgrade! there are hundreds of us here that would love the upgrade, but EVERYONE buys from the local shops for economic - and bandwidth reasons. I get my software from the most reputable dealer in town, so whatever comes into his store i buy. but as i am starting to use Premiere everyday now - i'm going to look into the upgrade - wow, 99$. the adverage national income here is now up to 256$, so that sounds like a lot of money to me.

I had the same problem with 1.0. 1.5 doesn't have it.
I found what worked is make a cut next to (or inside? can't remember) the group/ungroup clip. Then that annoying bug might fly away. The consensus is that version 1.5 is much more stable, and I have found this to be true.

What am I doing?: Compression and Codec Questions
 

I apologize if these are some extremly trivial questions, but I need some basic answers for a project I'm working on. I have been asked to compile 2 hours of DV footage, instructional material that demonstates the uses of a machine for the bigwigs of a company, and using Permiere 6.5, I've reached the point where some things I've avoided asking about have come back to haunt me.

Because of the nature of the footage, it must be faily good quality, and I plan on presenting it on DVD. However, I have no idea how exactly to export it with the best results for this. I don't understand which codec to use (someone said MPEG2?), if I should increase the frame size or not, what changes to bitrate do, the whole deal, and get it to fit the DVD size.

It's been a guessing game in the past, pick a random codec, select the quality percentage, and cross my fingers and hope it comes out at a reasonable size. Now I'd like to know how to pick and choose that size, and the quality, so I could come up with a result that wasn't a guessing game. Any help would be vastly appreciated.

Thank you

I think it's best to direct you to http://www.videohelp.com/

For dvd you need mpeg2 video at about 8000kbits/sec for good quality - that will give you an hour of video on one 4.3Gbyte dvd

Jon

First a couple of things:

1. DVD only supports one compression format that you'd want to use and that is MPEG2 indeed

2. I'm not sure if Premiere 6.5 already came with an MPEG2 export engine (think it did)

3. You are going to need an authoring application to turn the video (MPEG2) + audio (see below) into a DVD that a player understands

So I need to know if point 2 is true or not and which DVD
authoring application you have (point 3).

Now I believe most new/modern DVD authoring applications can
do the MPEG2 encoding as well and usually have a fit to disc
option where it calculates the correct bitrates to fit your movie
onto the disc.

HOWEVER, 2 hours is taxing for a DVD-R/+R to store in a good
fashion, so quality might be less than what you would like.

With MPEG2 encoding you have two options:

1. constant bitrate encoding (CBR)

2. variable bitrate encoding (VBR)

All encoders support at least CBR and most also support VBR
(usually gives better quality).

For CBR you only have one bitrate and for a 2 hour project 4.5
or 5 mbps should about fill the disc.

VBR is a bit more tricky where you usually have a minimum, average
and maximum bitrate which probably needs to be 0 - 4.5 - 7
or something in this case. These numbers may be a bit off and
as always some experimenting and checking final filesizes might
be in order!

Do NOT encode your audio as MPEG, export the audio seperately
as WAV (uncompressed PCM encoding) or PCM and load that
directly into your DVD authoring application, or use Dolby Digital
AC3 encoding for your audio if Premiere has that (doubtful for
version 6.5).

Hi Neal,

I guess we are all assuming that when you say, "plan on presenting it on DVD" you mean that you want to create a DVD that behaves like a commercial DVD, so people could take their copy and play it on their TV from stand-alone DVD players?

You can use your DVD-R / DVD+R burner to either (1) create computers files of any format (video, Word, whatever), just like with CD-R, or (2) to author a DVD with functionality similar to commercial DVDs, ie, will play on most stand-alone players.

If you just need to create your own copy to do a presentation from computer, or the material can be stored on a company server as one or several video files for people to reference as they wish, method (1) will work fine.

Just choose a file format and codec that works for you, export, burn the file(s) from your hard drive to the DVD, and play them on your computer. Which file format to use involves as much opinion as fact. In the Windows world, I've been pretty pleased with the newer Windows Media (WMV). Looks great and plays well on Win systems at relatively small file sizes. I'd anticipate that with a little experimenting, you could get 2 hours of good quality WMV video on one disc.

If you need method (2), then you do need a separate DVD authoring application.

I'm using PPro 1.5, so my memories of Premiere 6.5 are fading, but I'm 99% sure that it can export MPEG2. Still, Adobe Encore, for one, does exactly as Rob says...it'll import AVI with no muss or fuss. Then once you've created your DVD's menus, chapter points, etc, you can choose your specific MPEG2 settings for the burn.

So, it may be more straightforward to export from Premiere to an AVI file (if possible, uncompressed which would be a HUGE file...you might have to pick a compression codec just to fit it on your hard drive) and then use your DVD authoring application to import. Your authoring app will be certain to burn to DVD-compliant files.

For the actual burn-to-DVD settings, I think Rob has done about as well as can be done without being there to see the output. Especially considering different programs use different transcoders, there just isn't really one set of export settings that'll be best for every DVD-burning project. In general, the higher the data rate, the better the video at the expense of the running time that'll fit on one disc. VBR is generally said to be better than CBR, but harder to calculate. Similarly, 2-pass is said to give better results, but does take a lot longer than 1-pass.

I'd suggest picking a SHORT segment of your video with a lot of complex scenery and/or motion and run that through the whole process to a "disc image" written to your hard drive. Burning DVDs is pretty time consuming; testing things out on a short sample using a hard disk image, rather than actually burning to a DVD, will speed up your experimentation with various setting tremendously. You'll be able to quickly see what works and estimate how big the project is in terms of MB/min.

BTW, if you do use Encore, the manual has a brief but detailed section on calculating final project size, and their web site has great 3-5 minute video tutorials on the whole process, as well as integration with other Adobe apps.

I hope that the combined info from Jon, Rob, and I will be enough to get you through.

Happy Holidays!

Thank you very much for all the help, this has answered all my questions wonderfully!

Premiere Pro and 5.1 audio...
 

ive always had an issue with this..

now ive started projects with a 5.1 soundtrack, however i then import a stereo track and thats all good, L/R are working fine.. BUT how the hell do i set it up so i can create keyframed pans and multiple tracks so i can create a 5.1 mix??

Im from the vegas camp and its dead easy to do this, theres no need to go into any menus or anything, i jsut d it on teh timeline.. so if anyone would like to enlighten me on this, that would be great.
Im running Prem Pro 1.5 without any hardware assistance (ie no RTx or Canopus systems)

Premiere Elements ?
 

I am thinking about buying Adobe Premiere Elements.
Premiere Pro is way too high priced. Has anyone any experience or review on Preimere Elements?
Thank you