Editing HD in Premiere Pro CS4

[Eric Monroe]

my machine has 8 gigs of ram….is that truly not enuf?

as far as importing…..so what you are saying is to import the whole folder from the camera to the drive that i use to hold footage….and then in ppro…import that same folder?

Checked out your site….nice work man.

https://www.shadowstudiosllc.com there is my site.

[Eric Addison]

Thanks!

Ahh…sorry, I was responding to the original poster who had 4GB of RAM. 8GB should be fine – that’s what I have in my workstation and it cuts the footage fine. Are you running a 64 bit OS? That helps too.

Yes – copy the whole BPAV folder from the SxS card to your drive, then in PPro, use the import folder selection and choose that folder.

What I normally do on shoots with more then one card worth of material is create (on my hard drive) folders called Card 1, Card 2, etc., and then as I dump footage I put it in those separate folders…you don’t want to combine BPAV folders. Then once in PPro, I just import the whole “Card__” folder. That way the footage is somewhat organized in my bin.

Hope that helps!

—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com

[Eric Monroe]

Awesome …..thanks a bunch for the help….will give that a try and let ya know what happens.

[Tim Kolb]

[eric monroe] “the problem lies with the fact that the CS4 and the FCP studio are both 32 bit applications….which only recognize a maximum of 4 gigs of RAM. I believe that is where the bottle neck lies. You could have 128gb of RAM and it still will not use more than 4gb of it.”

Well…one clarification. While it’s true that a 32 bit application only recognizes 4 GB of RAM, a 32 bit OS also only recognizes 4 GB of RAM. A 64 bit OS recognizes a boatload of RAM. A 32 bit application running on a 32 bit OS will have to share 4 GB of RAM with the OS and any other stuff running (in Adobe’s case, there are about four executables that launch when you simply fire up PPro), which means that the app actually gets access to far less than 4 GBs of RAM, and I’d guess that PPro running on a 32 bit OS has access to less than a GB far too often…

A 32 bit app like PPro CS4 running in a 64 bit OS can access 4 full GBs of RAM…dynamic link to AE-which gets its own 4 GB of RAM…send the timeline to Media Encoder-which grabs another 4 GB of RAM…you get the idea.

Even though a 32 bit app has limitations, running on a 32 bit OS compounds those limitations considerably.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Warren Morningstar]

For what it’s worth, I’m running CS4 on a Boxx W4800 (great company, great support) with 6 gigs of RAM and Vista 64. I have no problem with AVCHD video (only have tested Canon cameras) nor with P2 nor with video from Sony X1/X3 cameras. However, I have learned that I have to have everything that’s on the card. I tell the videographers to copy over everything. I import just the video files, but Premiere needs to see something else in one of the other directories. Haven’t figured out yet what really is extraneous and what’s necessary.

[Alex Udell]

Eric

“but what i was saying about using the camera and a capture device, goin from the camera out through an hdmi cable, completely bypasses the AVCHD codec. you use your camera as a playback device, and it bypasses the compression to AVCHD allowing you to have an origianl full quality signal from the camera goin to your capture device, which can then go to an edit friendly format like pro-res, motion jpeg, or uncmprsd HD (if you have the drives to manage the throughput) ”

taking a signal in via HDMI or HDSDI only bypasses the compression block if it’s live from the camera, and not the camera playing back a file. Once a file is recorded to file, it’s already been compressed.

Cineform makes a great intermediate codec that plays very well well with Premiere (as I’m sure Tim Kolb can attest to). They also allow for capturing to that format from signal so it’s a 1:1 time ratio to capture the material into the machine (as opposed to converting files which is CPU dependent).

Alex

[Joseph W. bourke]

Here’s a link to some useful Adobe info in PDF format:

ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/business/provideo/whitepapers/Editing_Avchd_AdobeCS4.pdf

Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com

[Eric Monroe]

Alex, thanks for the insight. I was told by someone that you could you the camera as a playback device and it seemed to make sense. What your saying does make more sense though now that I think about it. Thanks again….learn something new everyday. :o)

Tim, thanks for your input as well….appreciate it. I see what you are saying as far as each application being able to have access to it’s full amount of RAM on a 64-bit OS. I am super excited however about CS5 being a full 64-bit software that should open the floodgates even more….would you agree?

[Fraser Coull]

Thanks for the tips guys – I did a shoot yesterday on the EX3 and this time I took all the folders across to Adobe and it worked fine – instead of MOV’s the clips came out as MP4’s and are working fine.

Definitely going to get some more RAM tho – maybe 8gig or 16gig.

Cheers.

Fraser