-
Creating Training Vids with Adobe Premier – assistance appreciated
Oh Mighty Cow,
I have been using Adobe Premier for a few years now. Indeed, I have gone through several permutations of the beast and have even been able to get Adobe After Effects to actually do things that I wanted it to.
Now I have been tasked with creating some training videos for my company. I have all the greatest toys and software and use Camtasia 3.12 to capture my screens so that when they play back, Windows Media Player kicks into full mode and I find myself trying to click along, thats the quality of it.
Here is my problem and I hope that the mighty Cow or noble CowDog (or is it Cow-Dawg?) can help me out.
When I import the raw camtasia AVI into Adobe Premier, I am able to spruce things up, jazz things up, do my titles, transitions and all that wonderful stuff.
The problem is that when I try to export it not only is there a horrible black border around the entire screen, the quality goes down considerably!
I have been playing with export settings, frame rates, etc., and its getting to the point where I am thinking of just using the Camtasia package to produce my final product – that is, until I found this forum.
I am using the techsmith codec that comes with Camtasia and even used it to create a custom project inside of Adobe Premier Pro 2.0. My problem is that I cant seem to find that magic formula.
Oh wise cow, cowdog and members of this forum. . . I know that there are those out there who have done this and I know that, eventually, the formula will present itself to me. But for now, I am going to have to switch to skim milk.
I thank you for your anticipated courties,
Regards,
Walter Ellena
The dumbest question is the one that is never asked.
-
7 Replies
-
Well…I’ve never had much of a problem with this situation BUT,
-I set up the PPro project with the screen size of the Camtasia capture with the compression set to “none”.
-After editing, I master out to some filetype that is framesize agnostic…like uncompressed.
-Then I take the master exported clip and use Windows Media Encoder (independent application-free download)to create the final distribution file at the framesize of the capture.
(I can’t seem to recall why I didn’t export back to Techsmith codec…it’s been a while since I’ve done it.)
-
I stick with editing and exporting in Camtasia…much simpler.
-
There is no doubt that camtasia is an easier product to master. My problem is that some of the richer features in terms of editing are not available in Camtasia and I know that its possible to create this with Adobe Premier.
If anybody out there has any pointers, or forumulas, it would be great. There was a chap here that wrote some dynamite Premier articles and had some rather impressive videos for training – do you guys think that he would be amicable to sharing the way he does it. If I have to buy his videos, so be it, the knowledge can only be used to improve my skills.
The funny thing is that if I capture DV video right through firewire from my DV Camera and do my edits, etc., the files that come out are crystal clear. So there is something here that I am missing. Its my blindspot and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Walt Ellena
The dumbest question is the one that is never asked.
-
Okay, this is good information!
You say that you set up the Premier project screen size of the camtasia capture. So thats a custom project setting with the screen size to the same size as camtasia. I am a little sketchy on that. If you could elaborate I will name my first born after you.
Now the after editing part, about mastering out to some type of filetype that is framesize agnostic. Okay, uncompressed. I am still a wee bit confused as I am not completely familiar with that.
The last part I can understand (Duh), so thats when I would use the Windows Media Encoder to generate the final wmv file with little loss in quality. Now the part of using the export back to the techsmith codec? What and where do you do that?
Sorry for the dumb questions. Like I said earlier, I know how to edit and do all sorts of wonderful things, but this whole part about output sizes, etc., is what is driving me up the wall.
Advise is greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Walt Ellena
The dumbest question is the one that is never asked.
-
I think my point was that I never go back to the Techsmith codec…wmv is easier to distribute.
I’ll assume you have Premiere Pro…you need to go into custom settings tab in the new project setup window and under editing mode pick “desktop”. Then set your framesize to whatever it is that you have there…and if it’s 15fps, you may want to select a 30fps timebase instead of a 29.97…see how it works.
Then under video rendering you have to set the codec you’ll use to edit in…I now remember why I was editing uncompressed…
I was combining some other footage that was DV with the Camtasia stuff and it was the easiest way…BUT
If you are simply editing Camtasia stuff you can pick the Techsmith Capture codec from the list…that way you can simply edit and export to Techsmith if you want. I hapen to like wmv as a distribution format myself, but it’s all about what works best for you.
This should do it I would think…
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Dear Tom,
Its just what the wise Cow ordered! Yes, the whole uncompressed bit seems to have done the trick in terms of bringing in footage and what not. Now, when I export it as uncompressed it takes a hell of a long time, but I figure that I can chomp that down by simply using a lower framerate when rendering. I am going to be experimenting with this a wee bit more, but I think that thanks to your advise I am on the right track.
Thanks for all.
Walt Ellena
The dumbest question is the one that is never asked.
-
Dear Tim,
Its worked like a charm thus far. I agree that this should be agnostic since, in my case, somebody not being able to play this training video would be tantamount to saying they could not be trained because they had to obtain a codec and even if I put that codec on the CD itself, they are still going to find issues.
Okay, so my only last issue is that the input and output in terms of Premier are set to 1024 x 768. So long as you have that screen resolution set on the target machine, you are good to go and the quality is good. The moment that you set your screen resolution higher or lower, the playback quality goes down.
Any suggestions on how I can get this agnostic wmv file to play with various screen resolutions set on the playing machine.
Advice is always appreciated.
Regards,
Walt Ellena
The dumbest question is the one that is never asked.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up