How do you get smooth movement in Premiere?

[Mike Velte]

Right click on the clip in the timeline and choose Field Options…experiment with the 3 options.

[Mark Hollis]

I tried these steps..

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Micah Mcdowell]

You can (sometimes) simulate motion blur with directional blur in Premiere. Just set it to the orientation of the movement and keyframe it in when the movement starts and out when the movement ends. Maybe this would help?

However, it sounds like you may have some other issue as well. I’m on Premiere CS3 which has an anti-flicker filter in the motion controls, but I don’t think 1.5 has that feature. Seems like when I used Premiere 1.5 several years ago, I always had weird issues like what you describe… maybe it’s time to upgrade?

[Mark Hollis]

Oh, Micah, it’s way past time to upgrade.

I stepped into this job while production was sallying forth and there were upgrades in the works, destined to hit us in January if they’re not delayed again.

We will be moving to a Macintosh platform with Final Cut Studio for editing and we may be retaining After Effects CS4. Personally, I’ll be happy to get rid of the Windows platforms. I’m not accustomed to not be able to work when you have any dialogue box open — even the “help” boxes prevent you from taking the action that they’re telling you to take.

“Print Screen” records a copy of your screen or open window, but then you have to paste it into an application to see what you just did. If you tell Windows to print and it cannot find a printer, it will often crash Windows and all applications. I had thought that Microsoft had actually made the operating system better (or at least more modern).

We cannot work directly with P2 media (though we have Premiere CS4 on a more modern laptop to do the translation to AVI files) and we could really use a server to distribute media. I’m looking forward to having clean copies of everything we’re doing on a server ready for me in an instant instead of running across a street to get tapes or drives with AVIs from P2.

But our upgrade path will probably not include Premiere. I will stay in After Effects because Motion is still not up to snuff (as far as I understand) and we’ll be headed towards something that looks a little closer to what I could do on the system I used to use: The venerable Avid DS (a compositor that edits, an editor that does composite work, capable of any resolution from SD through 4K).

Sorry for the rant. I feel very frustrated about this issue.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Jon Barrie]

Hi Mark,
The issue you describe sounds like an interlacing issue. Premiere Pro 1.5 is not just old it’s not the best version either.
I understand you want to move to Apple, but your comments about windows crashing when trying to print and not finding a printer are just wrong. What version of windows are you using? XP has been around a long time and has been as stable as Mac OSX for some time. But this is not the point of your post.
If you know After Effects, why don’t you use it for your titles if you are not getting the results you want in PPro1.5?
There will be some simple reason for the text doing what it’s doing, but you are using a very old version of PPro and none of us here remember the can’s and can’ts of the app.
Try AE.
– JB

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Mark Hollis]

“None of us remember the ‘cans and can’ts’ of the app.”

Premiere Pro 1.0 was the tiny step above the home version and 1.5 was, supposedly, an upgrade and tweak. So I’m really squarely in the “wedding video” realm.

I have nothing against wedding producers and videographers but back in 1986, after doing one “as a favor” for a Pakistani friend of my employer, I pretty much resolved to never do another. When I was married there was a still photographer and no video.

I am just learning AE, having done pretty much what AE does on DS. DS lacks a lot of the cool pre-done effects that AE has, but the application is very capable in many ways AE is not, namely for editing, fine color correction, working with RED CINE, and other things AE was not designed to do.

Here is one fix that worked:

I had type (that was the same as some of the type that moved jittery) that did move nicely. I replaced the bad stuff with the good stuff and everything worked. Both sets of type were from the same .PTRL file, so I know the issue was with the movement and how that was achieved.

It takes a lot longer for me to do the work in AE but I suppose, since I’m paid by the hour, that may turn out to be a good thing.

As to Windows, I’m running XP Pro on two different computers in the same room (using one to capture material while editing is sometimes really handy). Since XP is 32-bit and the applications are pretty old (Premiere Pro 1.5 and AE 6.5), I get RAM hinkiness that does not exist on a Macintosh when I run them both at the same time. I’m doing this so that I can refer back to material edited on Premiere Pro in AE. With a Mac, if it has enough RAM, it just uses it. With Windows, you can never use what you have (until Vista or Windows 7) because Microsoft limits all application space to around 3.5G — and even then many applications cannot take advantage of more than 2G because they’re not written to use more. OS X handles RAM better.

I’m still working out workflows here. I plan to have AE completely down by the time the Macs arrive and that will make it essential to my FCP workflow. I’ll also continue to use Premiere, I think, because I will have legacy projects that may need reworking.

I do like how Adobe is chasing Apple’s FCS with their Production Studio. The winners are us, the users.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

The solution here is clearly Adobe After Effects.

I have just finished an under 5-minute presentation of the new laws in effect on October 1st in Connecticut that has about 120 layers in After Effects. There would be fewer in Premiere Pro.

AE is not an editor. I futzed around in AE for a while until I came up with an appropriate workflow which is as follows:

• Lay everything out in Premiere Pro first (I am using 1.5)
• Import the project into AE (Using 6.5).
• Add the graphic and text elements that, in Premiere would be an issue.
• Do the effects on the text and elements.
• Render.
• Import into Premiere Pro.
• Render.
• Output (with audio) to tape and to file.

I kind of wish I didn’t have to render again in Premiere Pro, but my AE output is a full-resolution uncompressed file (as it’s graphics and I don’t want to compress those). I totally love the pre-done text effects in After Effects, as well as the ability to save my own effects. All movement is smooth and looks good. Laying everything out in Premiere Pro simplifies everything.

AE doesn’t work well with audio but you can play back a short stretch of it so that you can mark places where things are supposed to begin and end, where transitions happen and where effects must be completed for easy perception by an audience.

I’m using an old (6 years old) PC and some old software, but it’s pretty clear that Adobe meant for these two products to work together. One caveat: Don’t have both applications open at the same time for a massively-layered project on a 32-bit system. Adobe made Photoshop CS4 into a 64-bit application in Windows Vista. They would do very well to similarly rewrite After Effects. When you get above 80 layers in a composition, AE doesn’t let you preview hardly anything and audio playback is limited to about three or four seconds. My PC has 4G of system RAM and I typically had WordPad as the only other running application (so that I could read the text my producer wanted me to be working with).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?