color correction in Prem 6 or AE
 

hey guys, ive got a problem here. Ive got an old version of premiere (6.0) and an old version of after effects ( 4 something). Ive got soem footage and i need to color correct it but i'm not finding anything thats satisfactory in prem. and i;m totally lost in the hugeness of after effects. anybody have any suggestions for me? I'm a despearte man.

I would go down to a large book store and see if you can locate
some books on After Effects (4). That might help you along.

Can only export 20 mins
 

Hi all,

Im a trying to export a file that is about 1:20 mins to a DV file so i can atleast archive it in a less compressed version before i compress to mpeg2.

I can only export 4 gig files.

I seem to recall something about this, is there a way around?

You are most likely attempting to write to a FAT32 drive instead of a NTFS drive. There is a 4G limit to FAT32.

A retro slide show transition
 

For a slide show I wanted to run during a party that I would build on Premiere 6.5, I thought it would be fun to use a default transition that resembled the sound and look of a traditional carousel slide show.

Any thoughts?

thanks rob, i found a decent one ant it shed some light on the whole situation.

16:9/ letterbox problem
 

hey guys. Ive been using premiere for a few years now but very recently ive encountered a problem that i dont know how to solve. I'm about to shoot a project and i want to shoot it in 16:9, however, i'd like to edited it and spit it back out in a letterbox format. get it? i cant seem to figure this out and its making me crazy. any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance

Hi Jason,

This topic has come up many times before, please try our search ^

Basically, the way that I have done it is:

Capture your 16x9 footage in a 16x9 project,

Start a new project that has a 4:3 template, and then import your 16x9 footage into the 4:3 project.

Put your footage into the timeline and then right click on the footage and choose video options and then click on maintain aspect ratio.

It will then need to be rendered

Thanks,

Ed

Scanning photos for PP1.5
 

I need to work with some very old photos...and I only have one shot (one day) to work with them. I want to add them as a montage to my 16:9 project that will be exported to DVD. How should I scan these...meaning at what resolution do I scan them in, what dpi? Also, how do I resize them for 16:9? Do I just pull them into PPro and transform them in the window to the size i want for my pans and tilts? Thanks so much.

Best Wishes
Tony

thanks for your help ed...it was driving me nuts. you'd think that they would make it easier.

My suggestion is that you capture them at a high resolution, perhaps 600dpi.

That way you can change your mind later and resize the image if you just want to see it at the size of the video frame, but you can still zoom in and get a lot of detail if you wish.

Just make sure that the picture is less than 4000X4000 pixels when you import it into Premiere Pro.

Having said that, if you know that you are merely going to show them at the size of the frame, don't bother to scan at more than 150dpi or so. There is no advantage to a higher resolution unless you are going to zoom in. And that applies to small pics too. Make sure that smaller pics are scanned at a higer resolution so they fill the frame.

To make them fit a 16:9 video frame will be difficult in most cases since photos are generally not that shape. But if you are zooming, it doesn't matter. But do all of the work in Premiere Pro. There is no advantage to doing it in Photoshop or AE.

Scanning photos for PP1.5
 

thanks for the tips...one last question...which file type should i save the scans as and which are best for importing into PPro?

tony

Help!! Problem with exporting into smooth avi
 

Hi, I am new to the world of DV and all that comes with it, including Premiere Pro 1.5 which i bought to do the editing.

My problem is that I wanted to take some of the new footage captured by the xl2 thats been posted on the dvx website. Its in 16x9 and 25p- and after I mess with it in Premiere (trying to see what I can do to make it look a little more film like) I save it and then export it as an avi, and when I open it in WMP it starts stretching vertically and horizontally and just flickering up and down and left and right. Its really weird! It looks almost like the program doesnt know what format or shape to make it. It changes from regular shape (16x9) to stetched verically (16x13)
then stectched horizontally (20x9)--- and it does it randomly and sporatically very fast. It looks like it almost has a black matte all around it and the footage is trying to fill it, but cant stay or something.

Ive edited footage before without problem, but this is the first time ive tried editing 16x9 with 25p.- I'll lay out the things i did to the footage and if anything sticks out to what may have done it, please please let me know, thanks:

First I opened a new project and opened it under the folder that has 24p widescreen- the folder said Panasonic 24p-

Video effects:

-color balance plugin
-gamma plugin
-contrast plugin
-channel mixer
-and a crop plugin (I had to bring the sides in alittle. the footage wasnt longenough for the default 16x9 workspace. so it had black bars showing on each side- so I cropped it to fit)

And to my knowledge, thats all ive really done.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!!

--- Ok, I just rechecked it and the footage has a black border around it now-??? where in the world did this black border come from??? The original footage that i imported didnt have it. hmmm... i cant seem to export it without it.. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Make sure your project, footage and export settings are all the
same. It sounds like you are exporting at a different resolution
then the file is in etc. I don't believe WMP knows a file is 16:9,
so it will play it as 4:3 and it should look stretched.

TIF seems to work well.

How do I import an avi file?
 

I want to import an avi file into Adobe Premiere 6.0 and get an error telling me the file uses an unsupported suppression format. I thought, "No problem. I've run into this before and I'll just import the file into Vegas and render it as an mpeg. Then I can import it into Premiere."

Wrong. Vegas will let me import the file but not add it to the timeline. I'm at a loss as to how I can accomplish this. All I need to do is add a logo overlay image to the track before publishing it to a web site.

Any ideas as to how I can get this file either imported to Premiere or reformatted? Thank you.

Capturing Oddities w/Premiere 6.0
 

Hi there...

I recently shot a wedding video for a friend, just one camera, with my Canon GL-1. At the end of the reception, one of the musicians came up to me and gave me a DV tape that he'd shot with his little Sony Handicam. Since it had some other angles (and the cake cutting that I missed later on) I planned on using the tape for a few cutaways here and there.

The oddities came when I put that tape into my GL-1 and tried to capture in Premiere. The tape plays fine, both video and sound play fine. I can start the campture in Premiere and it will count the captured frames and all that...

But...

I have a Pinnacle RTDV RT card, and when the project is set to Pinnacle DV, the tape will suddenly pause and it will stop counting frames, but there is no "Save File As" dialogue from Premiere. It just stops.

When I opened up a new project, hoping I could at least get the footage onto the hard drive, I picked standard NTSC DV, and started the capture. It worked fine, when I got to about 10 minutes, I stopped it and got the Save File dialogue, but when I tried to drag the clip onto the timeline, all it added was the audio. When I double click on the clip to view it, it won't play.

I used Window Media Player to play the clip and it played just fine. I then fired up Vegas 4.0 and the clip was also fine. But of course, Premiere is my main editor (necessary because of the Pinnacle's limitations) so I'm kinda at a stand still.

The only thing I can think of is to load it into Vegas and re-export as a different kind of file, but you lose quality, and of course this handicam isn't as good as my GL-1.

Any ideas what the story could be? The handicam footage is full sized DV, 16 bit audio, but the captured clip in Premiere says that the frame rate is -809877567 which didn't make much sense.

Any clue?

THanks!

Jeremiah

Addendum...
 

Some other info: The DV tape was recorded at LP, would that throw off all the capturing?

I tried to capture with Vegas through the firewire...I have full device control, I hit play, I can see the video in the little capture window, I hit record, and it doesn't record any frames...just plays, no recording.

DV Tools (comes with Pro One card) will act like it's capturing, but the capture log says 0 frames captured.

My last resort is to try to capture it through the S-video, but I"d like to avoid that if at all possible.

Jeremiah

Hi Tyge,

Can you tell us how the AVI file was made, and what codec was used to create it, etc?

By the sounds of things you do not have the correct codec installed. Can you play it OK in windows media player?

Thanks,

I can play it in Windows Media Player. iI'm not sure what codec it was made with. These small clips are from a remote video system with a satlilite link up which transmits the files and posts them on a web site. I want to add a logo overlay image to the files and maybe render them as wmv files before I make them public. Does that make sense?

One of the "problems" of the Windows platform is that there are
two codec types. Directshow and Video For Windows. The former
is the new type which programs like Vegas and the new Premiere
are using. The latter is the older platform which WMP can still play
but newer editors usually cannot edit.

One of the things you can do is get Virtualdub and use
that to load the file and export it to uncompressed AVI.

You should be able to load that just fine.

Figured it out...
 

It turns out that LP speed wil usually screw up the ability to capture if you are capturing in a camera that isn't the one that shot it.

The timecode and the amount of information included in each frame screws up the capturing.

JR

Thanks a lot!

The Virtualdub program worked like a charm.

Previewing Timeline On a TV - ADS A/V Link Okay?
 

While editing in Premiere Pro 1.5 I want to preview my work not in the little monitor window but on a TV.

Plan A - NO GOOD. I learned that hooking up the TV to the second head of my Radeon card I could get XP Pro to spread my work across both and I could get the timeline monitor preview all stretched onto the TV but it still isn't a preview of what will wind up on a TV with the finished project on DVD.

Plan B - WORKS BUT I HATE IT. I can send the preview out via firewire and through my DVX100A and thence to the TV for a good TV preview (subject to real-time rendering limitations) but I don't want to use the camera for that purpose.

Plan C - HOPE THIS IS IT. Please tell me if this will do what I want. Use a Canopus ADVC-100 or ADS A/V Link bi-directional A-D/D-A converter instead of the camera and then on to the TV via S-video.

Plan 9 From Outer Space... No, my bad. Slaps hand.

If this Plan C is a bad idea please yell at me now.

The ADS is cheaper, only $139 on eBay for a new one so I'm leaning that way. Would anyone warn me off?

Thanks a million for tapping into all the experience and knowledge here. I talk brave but you still know I'm a raving newbie.

Hi Steve,

I can't tell you how good the ADVC is, since I have not used one.

However connecting one like you said should be no problem. It will act just the same as connecting through your DVX100A.

I'll let people who have experience with it, tell you how good it is...

Thanks,

My configuration is "PLAN C" using the Canopus ADVC-100. Works perfectly for me.

That fuzzy circle
 

This one strikes me as something that is probably much easier than I am making it out to be...

In Premiere Pro...is there an easy way to create that fuzzy little dot used to block out faces, phone #s, brand names, etc.? I wanted to use that as it tends to be less distracting (in my opinion) than a big black dot on the screen.

Thanks in advance, folks!

There is a tutorial on blurring faces using Premiere Pro at http://www.wrigleyvideo.com

mmm

maybe you could do up a storyboard, and use one of those slide transitions as default.

As far as the audio, maybe you could record something yourself and pop it under each transition.

Probably pretty obvious!

Tyler

NTSC to PAL to DVD
 

Hi all,

I'm probably about halfway through a project that my camerawoman and I have been working on.

She has a Canon XL1 (NTSC) that she bought from America when they first came out. I am working on a laptop with premiere 6.5.

I'm not at the stage yet where I have a final cut, but to save stress later I wanted to know how easy (or hard) it was to convert NTSC to PAL and then burn it to DVD for public airing.

We also shot in widescreen, which I've been told isn't such a good idea for conversion etc.

I can't wait until this thing is done, we have shot about 4 - 5 hours of short clips around the area I live, so as to paint a picture of the area in the style of Baraka. Its going to be shown at an annual cultural fesitval (Viva la Gong) in about three weeks.
Pretty full on considering its the first time I've worked with moving images in any capacity!

Anyway heres hoping!

Tyler

Preview = best quality?
 

This may sound like a dumb question:

When you apply effects in your premiere timeline (such as color correction) and then you hit preview and it renders the timeline, when it finishes rendering and you get your preview, is that full quality or just preview quality?

In particular, if I hook the firewire up to my camera after the footage is rendered and hit play, and record with the camera, is that full DV quality or some kind of lesser quality?

Do I have to print to tape, or export the movie in order to get full quality? Nobody's had an answer on three different forums, I hope you guys can come through.

Thanks!

JR

Please do a search on "ntsc pal" because it has been discussed
a lot of times already.

Basically you can do it with any NLE. However, especially the
conversion form NTSC to PAL is the most difficult one. It will
probably NOT look good. There are houses that can do this
conversion for you as well, usually a lot better.

There is also special software for it, but I don't have any
knowledge about which packages there are and how good
they are. Ofcourse it would've been better to just shoot in
PAL (with a rental for example). Ofcourse it's too late for that.

Good luck.

Never trust a preview to be full quality. It might be or it might not.
Who knows. The output will be DV since that is the only thing
your camera understands. However it might not be full quality.

I would always do a final render / print to tape. This way you
know for sure you will be getting the best quality.

What you see in the Monitor window is not 100% of the quality you get out the firewire port.

If you render first, what you see on your camcorder is as good as it gets. If you have rendered.

Okay...
 

I have an RT card with an external monitor and that's what I was going by. I added a matte and did some color correcting (contrast and saturation) then the little RT box said "project needs rendering" and then I rendered it .

Thanks for the response...I came up empty on the official adobe forums, the pinnacle forum for my RT card, and another DV forum. I'm learning all of this as I go, trying to be dependent on less people from now on, but it's sure a process!

Jeremiah

Thanks Steven, I will check that out.

Thanks very much all. Plan C it is.

Premiere Pro: 16:9 and 4:3 modes
 

Since we are living a transition period between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, many of us has material in both formats. Now, my problem is this: I'm filming with the new camera in 16:9 but also have to edit new material mixed with old 4:3 format. For the time being the TV company will broadcast the 16:9 material in the letter box style with the black edges. It's only in the future they will change to true/native 16:9 braodcast.

To maximize quality I'm planning to provide the TV company with two master tapes: one in true 16:9 and another in 4:3 format with the black edges. (That is, for 4:3 broadcast there is no stretch of the old material but only cropping.)

Now, I have not figured out any easy way how a Premiere Pro project can be converted from 16:9 to 4:3 mode retaining the same timeline. Is that possible at all? (If nothing else, what about copy-paste exploiting the clip board and having two projects running simultaneously?)

I assume you can change the project properties like you can
in Vegas for example. Change the project to 4:3. Right-click on
your footage and select "maintain aspect ratio". That should
auto-generate the letterboxing you are looking for.

<<<-- Change the project to 4:3. -->>>

Rob,

That's precisely the problem. There seems to be no way to do this. If there is a way to do this, then the next move by selecting "maintain aspect ratio" is clear.