Action Safe Scaling
 

When I import my captured footage into Premiere I have to scale down the clip(s) to about 92% to fit within the action safe borders.

Do you scale down your footage so you dont 'crop' out the outer areas?

Does scaling down the footage reduce the quality to a degree?

Thanks

I don't scale down
 

I have always used footage 100%, both when I did standard DV on Premiere6.5 and now on PPro2 on hidef HDV. When projects are viewed on old CRT TVs with all their overscan you lose a bit off the edges, but thats to be expected. The newer the flat panel screen you have the less you will find it crops. When your project is viewed directly on a computer, there is no cropping at all. So overtime, the "action safe" area is becomming an anachronism. Really the croping should be done in the viewfinder while shooting (or when making still photo "proxy" copies for your project).

Don't scale down your footage. The reason for the action safe grid is simply to let you know what elements are likely to be seen on (mainly) CRT based televisions, due to overscan. It's especially useful when adding extra elements such as graphics. It is not meant to be used as a guide for scaling down your source video footage.

I just shoot with the issue in mind. It is a hassle scaling it down because you have to render more often.

24p pulldown interlace problem - help?
 

I have an XL2 and an HD100 which I used in a 2-camera setup. Both were configured identically to record 24p advanced in SD widescreen. 2 hours, 4 tapes total. I pulled in all the footage and edited it in a 24p project in PPro 2.0. All is well except...

On the second hour of the XL2 footage, when I go frame by frame, I get these wierd interlaced frames every 4th frame. I checked and the footage was interpreted correctly, with the remove DV pulldown box checked. Has anyone seen this problem? HELP!?

Webb, are you seeing the artifact within PPro or in rendered WMV using Windows Media Player? Last I knew, WMP doesn't handle 24pa properly. If the problem actually shows up within PPro, I'm not sure what's going on.

Losing Quality
 

OK, I have a 17 minute edit in Premiere Pro, incorporated in this is an After Effects composition inbetween footage clips. The AE composition was exported from AE as an AVI lossless, best settings. The AE comp is basically an photo montage with camera pans etc.

I have exported the movie from PPro is a 'maintain data rate' no compression AVI.

Then I imported this into Encore which auto transcoded it at 8.6 one-pass.

There is no other stuff on the final DVD.

WHen I play the DVD the quality of the movie (mainly the part with the AE composition) looks far from pin sharp, it's passable but not wonderful.

Is the way I am producing this DVD sufficient to get the best quality possible?

Thanks

Hi Pete. It's showing up on the PPro2 timeline.

Update. This is fixed. I dont' know the source of the issue, but I figured out a work-around at least:

- Open After Effects and import the footage.
- Default interpretation is 24p Advanced with WWWSW Pulldown.
- Change to WWSWW Pulldown
- Re-render the clip

When I imported my "tweaked" clip into PPro, the problem is now fixed. I have NO idea why the original clip had the problem, and it would be helpful if anyone here knew the source of the problem... but in the meantime I have a workaround.

Timecode with capture and scene detection
 

I've been trying to find some definitive documentation about what happens to timecode on tape when one captures an entire tape.

Our camera (GY-HD100) is generating free-run timecode set to time-of-day.

When I capture an entire tape into Premiere, however, using scene detection, the individual clips do not seem to preserve the time code from tape. That is, while the TC looks fine on the camera/VTR display during playback, the batch list, when exported, looks something like:

Tape 15 00;00;00;01 00;00;02;26 tape_15 24.avi
Tape 15 00;00;00;01 00;00;50;11 tape_15 03.avi
Tape 15 00;00;00;01 00;01;13;28 tape_15 45.avi
Tape 15 00;00;00;01 00;03;22;17 tape_15 32.avi
...

(and in that apparently random order, too).

Testing by renaming the last clip from the tape (so it goes offline) and trying to recapture it results in Premiere rewinding the entire tape to the beginning, and beginning to capture from the beginning.

Am I missing something obvious? Is there no way to have a captured clip reflect the TC from the tape?

For what it's worth, this is a Cineform 720/24p project.

Audio levels too low
 

The audio levels that my microphone recorded at are too low. In my project I used the audio workspace in Premiere Pro 1.5 to up the dB as high as it can go, but it's still too low.

Are there any other tricks or tips that I can do?

Thanks.

Render the track as an audio file, take it into another sound editing program (Acid, SoundForge, etc.) and further adjust the levels, and then drop it on the time line. You might even try the same thing in Premiere Pro.

Question: Is the problem in the playback on you system, or the track itself. In other words does it persist in renders to DVD, etc. If not, its just a playback volume problem.

Right click on your audio track in the Timeline and choose Clip Gain. You can then adjust the gain of the audio clip and further increase its volume.

Play from timeline moves head to end of sequence...
 

Hi there,

This is becoming quite frustrating as I have to restart Premiere Pro 2.0 whenever this happens.

For some reason, if I press the spacebar to play OR use the play VCR button, the play head jumps to the end of the timeline/sequence.

I tried just reopening the project, but it didn't work.

EDITED:
Ok, I did some more testing and it appears to only do this on Cineform projects that have clips that need rendering. Very strange indeed.

Is there some setting I'm not aware of?

Thanks,

Jim

No problem at all, a 4200 rpm hard drive in your laptop will work just fine. I own a 3 year old Vaio laptop and the hard is indeed only 4200 rpm - much to my dissapointment... I wasn't really into DV when I bought it, so I wasn't really looking for a faster hard drive at that time. I have also tested laptops with external (USB) 4200 rpm hard drives and they work without problems.

A word of caution: it is mostly not your hard drive or any other component but your software that can cause problems - a $300 1 GHz/512 RAM used IBM thinkpad with a $20 PCMCIA FireWire card will do it as long as the hard drive is large enough. I would recommend reformatting the hard and installing only Premiere if possible. It'll work like a charm!