Deleting corrupted preference file in Premiere?
 

My Premiere has been acting oddly lately- and it seems like it started after I started messing with the audio mixer. The bug acts like this- when I highlight the timeline and hit the space bar to play, I hear no sound. I notice in the history palette that the audio mixer is the last action taken (even though it's not...the audio mixer isn't even open) when I hit the space bar again to stop the play head, the audio mixer in the history palette dissapears. Could this be caused by a corrupted preference file, because it was fine before I opened and worked with the audio mixer a few weeks ago. Can this be remedied similar to in Photohsop by simply deleting the preference file then running Premiere again? And, lastly, which file in the Premiere directory is the preference file? Thanks in advance.

The prefs file is probably not in the Premiere directory. I'm not at my Premiere PC right now, but the path to my GoLive prefs file is:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe GoLive

The prefs file has a key icon and a PICSRules File type. Instead of trashing it, either rename it or move it to the desktop. When you restart Premiere it will create a new prefs file. See if that fixes things. If not, you still have all your earlier settings to hand.

Nigel, is that the path via an XP machine? I do run XP, I just figured I'd ask because when I used to run 98SE all Adobe files were available via: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere

It's W2K, but I can't imagine that XP is vastly different. Following the path in Windows Explorer and see if it's there. I vaguely recall that W9x stores prefs in the application directory, but they're generally in the User settings folder under NT.

On my XP machine, the prefs file is located here:

c:\Documents and Settings\Paul Tauger\Application Data\Adobe\Premiere

If my memory serves me correct you can clear/reset the preference file by loading Premiere while holding CTRL+SHIFT. Is this true?

Changing headroom on shot in Premiere
 

Let me try to put into words what I am trying to do. I'm am wanting to create a pseudo widescreen look in premiere 6.5 with the titler by placing thin black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. The problem is that on one of the interviews I did, I failed to leave enough headroom to place the black bar- and so the guys head gets cut off. I've been experimenting with the "transform" section of the video palette (i.e. camera view, horizontal flip, roll, clip, etc). What I can't seem to do is create something like the "roll" effect, but that it would rather permit me to roll the entire screen down only about 2 inches and hold it there, and then later cover that two inch gap at the top with the black bar from the titler. Is that clear? Can anyone help me with this? Is there anything I can do? Thanks

I figured it out - thanks

I'm going to answer myself on this one because I think that this is
a pretty important issue. I don't know about anyone else but this
issue has been greatly troubling me. So I hope this helps anyone
who reads it, because I remember a discussion about doing a
pseudo widescreen look in post by using the premiere titler to mask the top
and bottom of the screen. I found however, that as cool as that
looked, some of the head room I shot was too tight to mask, and the
head got cut off. So maybe I'm just an idiot and everyone already
knows how to correct that problem, but after much research and
struggling, I figured it out, and it works great and is saving my
little neck because I had some shots I wanted to use, but had shot
prior to realizing that a widescreen look could be done in post.

I created a picture-in-picture (PIP) effect by placing the
background video in V1 and a copy in V2. I right clicked on the V2
video and selected "video option" then "motion." I dragged the
frame down a few inches (in "distortion"), and set both the start
and end keyframes identically to keep the video still throughout the
entire effect - and it worked. I don't know if I really need V1 &
V2, but that's the instructions I read somewhere for a similar
effect.

So if you've shot tons of video with tight headroom, and want to do
a widescreen look in post production, here is the way to solve the
problema!

That is true. Everything in premiere will be re-set to how it was when you first installed it. So you will have to locate all projects again i.e. it clears recent files etc

All the best,

Ed Smith

A re-install might help as well. Also non playing sound etc. might
also be due to external factors (like a missing audio codec,
corrupt one or incompatible codecs installed).

Good that it works Daniel. Perhaps newer cards have less
trouble with video on another monitor.

Such a thing does exist but they are integrated into the base
of Windows. So you will not have an option to point them out
(basically). Only way that I know off to get those back is to
re-install XP and don't install those other drivers. Sorry.

If I remember correctly Texas Instrument drivers are not
compatible indeed with all the applications out there that
support Microsoft's driver. Get rid of it!

Ed, yeah I did it last night and it worked- hehe, I even had to re-choose A/B workspace again. I was a bit startled at first when I clicked to open recent projects and none of them were there. At first I opened them from the "project archive" in the Premiere folder but it had a bizzare name like "wedding~1" thru "wedding~4". I then realized the location I should have pointed Premiere to was the video drive...it saves my project files in the same place it captures my clips to. So what is the "project archive" for?...To go back to an earlier saved version of the project?

Rob, I think my audio problem stems from the fact I use Premiere with hardware support via Pinnacle's DV500. I found an exerpt in the knowledge base on Adobe's website that stated the Audio Mixer doesn't work when using the DV500. And now that I think of it- that odd glitch (with the audio mixer loading in the history palette when playing clips on the timeline, w/no sound) started after I tried using the audio mixer.
Now I'm really starting to wonder if the DV500 is really worth it. After all it's not even a full-time real-time card. I'll just miss the break-out-box which allows me to monitor my edits on a television.
With Premiere 6.5 can you output the timeline via firewire to a mini-dv cam and then to the TV to acheive the same result?

I don't believe you will need a copy of the track to set motion
for it. Keep in mind that you might need to razor the clip if you
only want a certain part changed (unless you have individual
clips for each take/scene).

Thanks for the tip though! I myself was using After Effects for
this on some tests I did. Couldn't find an easy way in Premiere.
I am using a bitmap mask for the widescreen effect, not the titler.

Premiere 6.x can indeed do that. I don't know if performance
is good when going through your cam, try it out!