Help importing and exporting SD to DVD and web
 

Hello-
I am importing 16x9 from XL2 into Premiere 1.5 with the intent of authoring to DVD as well as uploading content to sites such as youtube. I have ran into a number of questions and problems which I would appreciate any insight into.
When I attempt to export an .avi to DVD with Premiere it fails unless the file is only a fraction of the 4.37 gb capacity. I had about 20 gb of free hdd space but I suspect my lowly sempron 2500+ proc (1.75 Ghz) to be a possible culprit to be remedied asap (it has 2gb ddr400). Does an underpowered processor easily foul up a render/export/write if overworked?
When I try to export my work via 'Export to DVD' with maximize bitrate and use variable bitrate checked (which should use the maximum space on disk for maximum bitrate in theory?) I never encode a DVD successfully though I don't recall a useful error message. I wonder if problems will disappear with a solid Mobo and chipset upgrade? (Amazing mine was $59 yet it somewhat handles NLE!) Could someone tell me their preferred method of exporting my work to a DVD including any specifics to codecs and settings or direct me to the best post?
Regarding video for web content I have tried many different combinations of compression codecs and settings trying to maximize the quality allowable within a youtube upload. I am currently experimenting with exporting via export movie function or Adobe media encoder to mpeg2 or .avi and then using RIVA encoder to create a .flv file for upload. By uploading in .flv format, (a step the site would have performed had I not) I can get a lot more content into my 100mb upload. Regarding calculation of a .flv output closer to 100mb in size to utilize maximum allowable hosting resources I wonder if a better .flv encoding program allows for a target file size or preview size?
I don't have any concept of when a video should or should not be interlaced and what the affects of using interlaced versus progressive would be. Any insight into the basics of when to use interlaced and why would be awesome.
Thanks in advance and please excuse my rambling and probably misguided questions. Let me know what I forgot to include :) Respectfully- Dan

A few answers to your many questions.

Your processor and RAM are more than enough for SD work with PPRO 1.5. What would you call my 1.6 GHz AMD with 2GB of 3200 RAM if you label your Sempron as "lowly". I can run basically the whole Adobe suite (using one app at a time of course) with no crashes or errors - mind you, this is a $100 dollar computer from Fry's when they opened a new store close by, a piece of junk made special order just to attract clients...
- Your hard space might be an issue, depending on the length of youf video, you may need more space.
- I suspect a rather overloaded computer to cause your problems. Let me just say that I had all sorts of issues until one day I had enough, I erased my HD clean installed an XP with no service packs and no other programs than what I really needed - it runs like a charm ever since! Stay away from sloppy freeware - Riva might just be one of them, besides, it's an extremely low quality flash encoder, I've tried it!!!
- You do NOT have to submit a flash file to Utube. They will convert to flash whatever you upload. I would recommend using the free Windows Media Encoder instead, it does a pretty decent job.

Regards,

theres no difference

Auto Save Problem in PP 1.5
 

I'm using Premiere Pro 1.5. I have it set to auto save every one minute, owing to a problem where every once in a while it freezes the pc and has to be restarted. The weird thing is it was doing it last night, but it's been fine all day, until about 5 minutes ago. I changed the setting to make it auto save every one minute, BUT, it hasn't done it. I just restarted due to a freeze up, ran chkdsk, and then reopened the project. It seems to have lost about the last 35 minutes of work.
Does anyone know of a remedy for this problem ?

Farily new to PP 2...Please bear with me!
 

How come I can encode a finished project (which averages about 45-50 minutes of video) directly from the timeline with Adobe encoder with the settings at 2 pass VBR at the highest quality (i.e at level 5) with the min,max and target bitrates all set at 9.00 MP) in about 2 hours however it takes double that to burn it directly to dvd (or so) create a iso image? IMHO that's pretty slow!How long should a 45 minute project take to burn a dvd?

Also,from your experience and observation is there much difference in quality between 1 and 2 passes with VBR?

Is VBR or CBR better and why?

Why can I encode a project with Adobe's media encoder at very high settings (at the fullest possible quality,9's across the board) BUT when using the encoder to burn directly to dvd it shuts me off (gives me an error message that the rate is "too high") with the bitrates set higher than around 8.3-8.4?Que Pasa?

Can one create a custom dvd menu using your own choices for background,background music,font,font color,size of font,etc?or are you stuck with the rather limited selection stock templates/presets that they give you from the pull down menu?Where can I find other templates,possible?Can anyone point me out to a source?

Is there a way I can normalize the audio of the whole timeline at the same time?How is that done?

Is it advisable to pick PCM or MPEG audio when encoding a project?Does it make a difference/what do you do to create a playable dvd with audio?

After waiting over 2 hours into a burn and encode to dvd process,I got an error message right at the beginning stages of the 2nd pass which stated(MPL Loader... whatever that is):"The DLL inf32.dll can not be loaded.OS reports:The specified module could not be found."How can I successfully rectify this shortfall and burn a project to dvd?After that message the encoding stopped,it ceased to do anything and I was forced to hit cancel which wiped out the whole time spent on this particular burn.I uninstalled,then reinstalled the entire program and still can't find this DLL.What do I do now?Does this mean its curtains and I can't burn directly to a dvd anymore from the timeline?

Please help me get jumpstarted.

Thanks in advance.

The Seeker

There's something about DVD encoding that limits the bitrate of the actual video to something aroun 6 or 7 to leave space for subtitles, etc. I can't remember details but it's not Premiere-specific.

Nature of the beast. MPEG encoding is pretty time-consuming, IMO. Add to the fact it's got to burn it on a DVD, I can see 4 hours being a reasonable time constraint for a 45 minute project. Sucks, but that's how it goes I guess. If the burning is what takes so long, export it and use another program...

Err...is this Encore you're referring to? Or Premiere? Premiere has no titling function as far as I know...

Export the audio, reintroduce it to the timeline and mute all other tracks, then normalize that master track. But that's probably not what you want. Each clip has to be taken care of individually. Otherwise, export and use dynamics compression.

You obviously need to ask the people at Adobe if you're having technical issues, but a quick Google search of "inf32.dll" reveals you probably have a spyware problem. You need to run an anti-spyware program such as Spybot or Adaware.

At such a high bitrate it makes no sense to use VBR, because it will only add to the compression time. Use CBR, one pass. The quality will be the same, since the encoder cannot exceed 9 Mb anyway. VBR is useful only for low bitrates like 4-5 Mb.

As for the limit - 9 Mb is the tops for everything - video, audio, subtitles etc. If you export your video at 9 Mb, you leave no place for audio. Actually 8 Mb is a good preset to use.

Audio should be normalized on the timeline for each clip separately during editing.

If you use MPEG encoding, some DVD players may not be able to play it (been there, done that). Use PCM. The best would be Dolby Digital, but PPro has only a trial version of encoder.

You can make your own DVD menu templates in Photoshop and import them into PP2. There are also companies out there selling this kind of stuff, just Google them. Keep in mind that PP2 has a limited capability for DVD authoring, if you need complex navigation, you need Encore DVD or some other software.

Cinema Craft is a much faster encoder, if you really need speed... and if you're willing to pay $$$.

Not only can you import any template that you want, you can modify those in the pulldown menu just about anyway you want. Change out or modify backgrounds, buttons, etc..

Deck Doesn't Support 24p
 

I'm trying to log some tapes shot on a DVX 100-b and a 100-a. Premier Pro 1.5 recognizes the time codes as 24p, time code breaks and all. The problem is that when I go to capture, the program seems to look to my deck (panasonic gs-200) for timecode; and all that it's going to find there is a big fat 00:00:00:00.

Anyone know any settings or plug-ins that could help me out? I've got 8 tapes here and I really don't wanna cap them the old fashioned way.

** Audio drops to half the level for 2 seconds **
 

I'm back with another question.

My issue is that the audio levels drop to half the volume (or there abouts), for about 2 seconds. The level jumps back up to the normal setting and is great the rest of the way through the clip.

This issue happens always at the beginning of a new audio clip (but not every time). In other words, it happens at the beginning of a sequence or anywhere in the middle of the sequence. But at this point it is random. I have not figured out a pattern. I have looked at the way I have edited to see if any video or audio transitions are causing the problem, but nothing jumps out at me.

Let me also say that this issue happens when I play the audio on the timeline and when I burn a DVD of the project.

This seems to happen with WAV files only. I have converted interview clip to WAV files to clean them up and make adjustments to them before I reimport them back into Premiere.

Any help would be great!

Jon

PS: I am using PP1.0 on a Win XP machine with 2 gigs of RAM.

Night Vision Effect
 

I've been using the solarize effect, and than colour balancing...

It's okay, but not quite what I'm looking for.

Anybody know of a straightforward way to get this effect?

If you are replicating passive intensified night vision, my personal preference would be to desaturate all colour, soften the image to about 450 TV lines vertical resolution, ramp up the contrast so that white highlights begin to burn out, introduce subtle video "noise" to replicate the scintillation noise of the dsplay tube, then apply green hue to your image to replicate the display tube colour.

If this is still not conveying the hint of night vision, you might consider circular vignetting of the image corners and maybe introduce a slight magenta cast to the blacks.

Hardware Questions
 

Currently I have:

- Athlon x2 4800+
- 2gb RAM
- 160gb 7200rpm SATA system drive
- multiple internal 7200rpm HDs (200, 320, 400)
- 7800gt 256mb PCI-E
- Creative Audigy 2

To improve performance, I was wondering:

1.) How much does my 7800gt help? Would an 8800gtx 768mb see much improvement for video? What exactly does this do?

2.) How does a quadro FX board compare to having a 7800gt/8800gtx? How much improvement will a quadro FX board give and exactly what does it do?

3.) What exactly is a scratch disk/what does it do, and why is it best to have it seperate? If my understanding is correct, I should have (A) system drive (B) storage drive, ideally in a RAID0 config (C) scratch disk...??

4.) Will a creative X-FI soundcard show any improvement in performance/features over my audigy 2?

You have a great system. As far as that goes the only improvement I could see is bumping your ram to 3 gigs. But you are just fine with 2 gigs.

As far as some of our other questions. I really don't think you will see any improvement in video-editing by going a large more high-powered videocard. Large videocards are most useful for creating 3D animations and such in programs like Maya, and maybe the newer ones for taking live-video and applying 3D affects to it realtime in as an encoder machine for live broadcast. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I'm still trying to get these things straight myself. But as far as Adobe is concerned, video-editing is processor intensive, meaning that when you start to apply effects and such they will need to be crunched on by the main CPU.

I don't know too many specifics about the Quadro series but I do know that they are supposedly top of the line. And they do have very large bandwidth capacities. Maybe someone else and shed some light on that for both of us.

For disk arrays you should have a system drive along with some video editing drives in Raid 0, like you stated, expecially if you are trying to capture and playback HD or anything 8-bits and above SD. A 3 drive minimum depending on the drives. The scratch-disk as you have called it, I believe is for Input/Output PageFiling. What I mean by that is when Windows is operating if the RAM is filled up to capacity, it creates a PagingFile on your Harddrive. This PageFile acts as an extension of your RAM and is ideally kept on the outer ends of your Disk for fast access. From my understanding that is why it is suggested that you have seperate System Drive from your VideoEditing files Drive. Your systems needs the ability to access your videofiles while also accessing your PagingFile but since it is not possible for the needles of you diskdrives to be in two different places at the same time you should have seperate disks. The same principle applies for this "scratch disk". I have read that for Ultra Optimization, it is best to have your PagingFile on a seperate disk from your System Disk. The idea that being able to access systems files, PagingFiles, and video files all from different locations would be ideal. Or atleast that is my understanding of it so far.

In fact I was just going to start researching into adding a small, think they make a 32 gigabyte Raptor drive, as a paging file drive. Although, I have read that when tweeking your PagingFile, windows already sets your pagingfile to 1.5 times the size of your RAM, but you can tweek it to 2X your RAM when working with Premier because of the way it utilizing memory. Which would only leave me with a 6 gigabyte PageFile. I don't even know if windows would utilize it or have a heartattack if that was made bigger. I'm just assuming you would want to have a fast drive for doing such. Maybe someone else can shed some light on all of this because my assumptions might all be wrong? I'm new to this all.

As far as your sound. I'd say that your Audigy will perform exceptionally beyond what you will need.