Hello guys,

I have recently shot a fly-on-the-wall wedding on my Sony V1 (1080 50i), roughly 400 minutes worth of footage. The final product will be HD and will be going on a playable DVD.

However.

I have never worked with Adobe Premier, i haven't really worked with HD and i certainly haven't worked with so much footage before. In the past i have used Sony Vegas and my clients have never really requested HD. Im told by a friend Adobe Premier is very easy to use, but after searching these forums there seems to be a lot of over-complications and/or a lot to learn about the software. I guess i will find out tomorrow!

I won't be editing from home and will be using the companies 1tb hard-drive/3gig/quad brand new edit suite with Adobe Premier loaded. I don't have a very tight deadline but i will be trying to finish it ASAP.

I guess i would just *really* appreciate some help/tips so this can go as smoothly as possible. Is there anything i should do with my HD rushes (.m2t's) before i begin editing? What's the best way to approach such a large HD edit? Is there anything i should know about Adobe Premier? Best render settings?

I appreciate your patience and help and look forward to your replies.

I would say having used Premiere for 9.5 years now that it's setup just like any other video editing suite like Avid or Final Cut Pro. You have your basic tools for cutting, extending and shortening clips, layering. Apply the same principles you would in any other program. You could get "fancy" and use the dynamic link to After Effects and add some diffuse glows to the opening of your wedding video to give it that magical look (there may be a way to do this in Premiere, I just like having all of the control in After Effects).

Also you will want to open up Premiere and add all of your m2t files into a Premiere project so they can be indexed, otherwise you'll have to wait to start editing them.

To edit 7 hours of video on a system you are not familiar with will be nightmare. Why are you doing this?

@ Jarred thanks for the advice mate.

@ Brian, because my home system (Sony Vegas) only has a 500gb HD right now, with only 350gb free at the moment. It'll also likely take 2x as long to render a 90 minute HD wedding video over the companies new edit suite. Believe me i know it's going to suck, but i'd feel more comfortable using the studio's suite right now until i can look into getting an upgrade.

My advice would be to be prepared for lots of crashes, PP is (was) not good at large projects in the past maybe CS5 will be different. 90 mins is a lot of editing but depending on how you cut it together you may be OK if just using cuts and no effects. I use tons of effects, layers, keys and titles, audio and these massive project files can become beasts quite early on.You probably already know this but make backups of your project files every so often. You might be better splitting the video into multiple projects (20 min each) so it crashes less often and the final render is in sections. Avoid nested sequences if you can, they add to instability. If you have multiple raid drives for pagefile and scratch disks it would be better also.