Q on making slides show of still pics
 

i've got over 100 digital pics that i'd like to make a slide show with various transitions.
is there an efficient way to do it with premiere instead of dragging the transitions one by one?
same question applies to many other situations where you need to repeat the same function many times for different clips.
or any software can do the slides show easily and can be imported into a premiere timeline?
thx

This is a pretty well known bug. It is mostly fixed in PPro 1.5 but sometimes causes a problem. You might want to convert the pics to TIF, since that seems to help.

You can automatically apply the default transition, but not various transitions.

Just use the automate to timeline function. Select the entire bin and it will toss each photo in at your default setting for still frame durarion, and each will have your default transition applied. This is usually crossfade. If you want some circa 1997 peels and wipes a la powerpoint, you will have to change the transitions yourself.

You don't mention the format of your missing images, Brian, but many editors report problems with jpg, often because Quick Time is not installed on the editing system. As Steven says, using alternate formats, including BMP and PSD, is often the best choice.

David Hurdon

how do i add black borders
 

hi. i want to add black borders (like its 16:9) to my footage. how do i go about doing this on Adobe Premiere?

If you are using prem pro, just use the crop effect and drap the top and bottoms of the clip in the record window to add the bars.

If you're using 6.5 then create a picture in photoshop with black bars top and bottom, the middle can be transparant and add this to a video track above the video.

Jon

You can select multiple clips in prem pro using the arrow select tool, or shift click each clip.

Unfortunately in prem pro when you paste attributes it adds to any effects that are already on the clip. It's a real pain then if you want to change the effects as there is not a "remove all effects" command that works with multiple clips.

In 6.5 pasting attributes overwrote any previous effects.

Jon

Just in case you were using the camera in auto mode, this will probably add 18dB of gain automatically even with an on camera light. I also use manual in these particular situations and set the gain to 6dB

Jon

I don't know if this will solve it for you, but I had the same problem about 2 days ago on a documentary I have been working on for months. My heart started to pound as I hadn't made backups of the project.

The problem was that I had disconnected one of my hard drives that had Conformed Audio Files and Preview Files on it. When I went to edit..preferences, and changed my save locations to somewhere else, the project had to rebuild all my CAFs and PFs, but that seemed to do the trick, my project was ok after that. Might want to ditch your old preview files.

Here Today Gone Tommorow - A Regretful Problem in Film Making
 

When I first started out doing film projects as a hobby, I did a very dumb thing - putting my masters as AVI Divx files. Now as I look back on it, I regret it tremendously because now the quality is horrendous. Im thinking of trying to prevent something like this from happening again. Problem is, all my previous project RAW video files, have been backuped onto DVD-R and scattered in my collection of files. It was because I was working at the time at a computer with limited HD space. It was today that one of my colleagues told me about Batch Processing onto miniDV Tape. He said I could put all my raw movie files and master on miniDV tape without quality loss through batch processing, while at the same time conserving HD space (which I currently am working on a laptop). Everytime I need to pull up the movie project file on Premiere, I just have to put that tape in my Camcorder via Firewire. So how do I do this with Adobe Premiere?

Editing in 24p
 

Found some threads and I got my footage from a new XL2 to load into premiere. I'm shooting 16:9 24p 2:3. But the thing is, once I get this footage into the timeline, I have to render...and after rendering, I encoded with the high quality progressive encode setting, and the video looked like #@$%. It was pixilated, especially around people as they moved.

Is there a special encoder I should be using? Does premiere really work with 24p? All help is appriciated.

Rick

If you set things up properly, you can delete all your media from your computer and re-capture from mini-DV tapes. The Premiere project contains the timecode of all your footage so it can match it back to your mini-DV tape and re-capture that way.

So...
If you want to archive your project, keep the Premiere project file around and your mini-DV tapes. You can re-create your project by batch capturing off the tapes.

You don't want timecode breaks on your mini-DV tapes though.
Some camcorders have terrible deck control and can't do this (Samsung). Most can however.

This is not exactly what your colleague is describing but the closest thing I can think of.

*I haven't tried this in Premiere, but am fairly sure it can do this. Test things out first however- it will reveal any problems you may encounter.

perry, when you say that everything is on divx and raw formats, it sounds like the edited master is not in the minidv format... so if you put it on minidv avi's, there will be a transcoding loss, because you are switching formats.

the only way around it is to re-edit everything from the minidv source tapes, which could be a real pia.

Out of Memory - recording error
 

Hi,
I have a 28 minute AVI - taken from Canon XM2(GL2).
I was trying to export it to DVD and the PPro 1.5 stopped in the middle of pocessing "export to DVD".
I have 1GB memory and 30GB empty space on my hard drive.
I tried small AVI to export to DVD and it worked fine.
But how much memory/hard disc space is required to cover 28 minute video?
My encoding setting was Highest.
And PProd 1.5 said it needed only 2GB which is small enough for the disc space I have...

Any guide? ANything wrong???

Thanks!

I'm sorry but why do you guys not make backups? It's like people
refuse to make backups! It's as easy as saving the project file
under a new file every day and there you have your backup. If
you want to be even more safe back it all up to some other
computer or removable media once a week or so. I just can't
understand why people still do not do this with something as
important as this.

It is a well known fact that Premiere as problems (still) with
reading project and associated files. That they can become
corrupt. Just do a file save as instead of file save.

Jagged Titles in encoded DVD
 

I am working on a project, and I have created titles in Premiere. I am outputting and encoding to DVD with CCE, interlaced, BFF. When I preview my project on my T.V. through premiere, the titles look awesome, nice and crisp edges, etc. However, when I export to MPEG2, the As and Vs look "jagged". My larger titles however, look fine, it's mostly things that are smaller etc.

Can anyone throw me a bone?

Thanks
Christopher

Whats BFF and CCE?

Anyway could be down to data rate, what was it? Is it a high quality encoder? Is there much movement behind the text?

Jon

BFF= Bottom Field First (Interlaced)
CCE = Cinema Craft Encoder

No, there's not any movement behind the titles, and the titles themselves aren't moving, just fading out. My bitrate is 6,000kbps CBR. Ending scroller titles I produced in After Effects look fine.

6 mbps should be plenty for stationary titles with no moving background.

are you using something like a 1-pixel outline on the font? or is the color red involved in any way? did you use 2-pass encoding?

Yup, using 2 pass, and I do have a drop shadow behind the titles so there's contrast with white backgrounds. Lemme try it without that, I have a feeling that it's something to do with my fields, like I'm not setting the options right in CCE.

If it's only on small text, then it sounds like a symptom of actually losing a field as if you've halved the resollution.

So playing with your field settings may help.

Jon

What Eric said. But this works only if you wanna apply the effect to ALL the clips on the timeline.

Photoshop Dimensions for 16:9
 

Hi all, having only edited 4:3 PAL before and doing the logos/titles withinin Photoshop used 720x576 for integration with Premiere. We are about to start 16:9 and wondered what dimensons within Photoshop to use for distortion free output from Premiere. Thanks in advance for any help

I work with PAL, so my Avid will export frame grabs from 16:9 footage at 1025 x 576 (square pixels)
These look fine in Photoshop.

Robin

Works fine. Appreciate your help, thank you

1. if you output to a 24p format it will need to be rendered since the original is 29.97 fps, not 24p. The camera turns 24p into 29.97 fps in realtime when recording. The NLE needs to convert this back

2. how the output looks totally depends on how you are outputting

We need more information on how your outputting:

1. which file format are you using (AVI, QuickTime, MPEG1, MPEG2 (=DVD as well), Realvideo, Windows Media etc.)

2. which codec are you using for video (does not apply for MPEG1 or MPEG2), codecs are things like sorenson, mpeg4/divx/xvid etc.

3. what exact settings where you using

If I remeber correctly that field order selection is for the input
file (or was that TMPGEnc?) and not output. But it sounds like
an interlacing issue, I would change it to upper first (DVD default!)
and see what that does.

What was the exact error message pro gave you? Could be anything from video card drivers, to service pack 2.


John

Out of memory
 

The error message I got is 'Out of memory'.

But I have enough disc space(2x70GB HD and 50% of them are available space) and main memory(1GB).

Maybe try to defragment your drives. A program like "memo kit" can free up your ram before you render, or export. You would be suprised how a gig of ram can get broken up by a bunch of little programs running in the background(that you may, or may not know about ;). I honestly cant say ive seen that error message before, anyone else care to add?


John

This goes without saying, but.......... Did you compress it first to mpeg 2 first? I belive a dvd will only hold 20 mins of AVI.


John

Thanks for the help. I really think all the problems I'm having are not really problems with my encode per se, but my roomates crappy panasonic TV. I tested the DVD on another 27" TV and it looks fine, titles are not "jagged". It's also not having the "snow" effect I was having issues with before. Thanks for the help.

MPEG2
 

Hi,
I am not sure ...
I was just exporting it to DVD using PPRO 1.5
It seemed to me that it was converting it to MPEG2 first and then it physically write on the DVD.
Since I was able to create DVD from 7 minute AVI, it is definitely a problem with memory.
But how much Hard/memory is required for converting 28 minute AVI to DVD?
I did disc regrag aslo`and same error at the same position...
I am using DVD RW...

Could very well be, ofcourse. Might be good to test different
encoding parameters on different TV sets and see what does
which. It still might be something is "wrong" and the "crappy"
TV does not "hide" this defect as well, so to speak.

The problem is that it might not be memory related at all. The RW
might be a problem as well, hard to say.

You will probably need at least 4 - 9 GB free on your harddisk,
memory should be more than enough. Do you have multiple
partitions? It might be that your temporary drive for Premiere is
to a drive/partition that does not have enough space.

smushed/stretched export
 

Since i am not sure what part of my system is causing this problem, i decided to post here (hope it's the right area)

I am using premiere pro
capturing from a sony dcr-trv 22
using standard dv/ieee1394 capture settings
project settings are default ntsc

when i capture, the aspect ratio looks fine
but when i render or export (either by export movie - avi, or media encoder)
the resulting video is smushed vertically so everyone looks really stumpy
i played around with pixel aspect ratios in the export, but it doesn't
affect anything that i can tell...

what am i doing wrong? (or what are some of the possible things i could be doing wrong?)

thanks in advance!

Please provide us with the following information:

1. premiere version
2. exact premiere project settings

3. output format (sounds like avi)
4. exact settings for this output format including codec

5. which program/system are you using to play the resulting file with

Without this it's hard to say. Definitely sounds like an pixel or
screen aspect ratio. You might have set the project or export
settings to 16:9 screen aspect ratio when your footage is just
4:3 or the other way around. Otherwise it is probably a pixel
aspect ratio.

Windows Media Player might/will not playback DV AVI or MPEG
in the correct pixel/screen aspect ratios. If you outputted to
DVD for example watch that with a software DVD player on your
PC or an external DVD. DV AVI can be checked by exporting it
to your camera/DV deck and play that back on a TV.

Otherwise export to a web format like QuickTime/Windows Media
and set the pixel aspect to 1.0 on export and that should play
back correctly in Windows Media Player/QuickTime player for example.

i'll post the full settings when i get home, but i have tried exporting to:
windows media
microsoft avi
microsoft dv avi
and changed pixel aspect ratios where available in the video export settings

played back the files in real player or windows media player

project settings are d1/dv ntsc (0.9)
version is premiere pro (i'll get exact build code tonight)

same results no matter the settings or the playback program...

should/might real player have the same problems playing a dv avi or mpeg in the right aspect ratio? if so, is there another mpeg or avi player that i should use/try?

thanks for the help!

I can't speak for Realplayer, sorry. In my personal case WMP is
not playing it at the correct aspect ratio with a DV AVI at 1.0
pixels. The problem for me is that it is hard to see how much the
distortion is and whether it is normal or not.

If you output to something like windows media (or anything
besides DV AVI and MPEG2/DVD) you should set the pixel aspect
ratio to 1.0 (computer PA). That SHOULD play back correctly in
WMP for example. It does so here.

So your footage is NTSC 4:3? If so your project settings should
be okay. I don't need the exact Premiere build number, but I was
wondering whether you are running an old version or Premiere
Pro 1.0 or 1.5 for example.

I just checked and my Media Player Classic (MPC) DOES play my
DV AVI's back in the correct pixel aspect ratio, you can get it here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ease_id=227046