Problems With Footage

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Emily,

If most of your footage is HDV, by all means create an HDV sequence. Keep in mind that the type of sequence you pick will not affect the quality of your export.

You haven’t mentioned your computer specs and drive type. My guess is that it could be a combination of both.

For drive, you will likely need a nice RAID array, especially if you are running multiple tracks of footage and audio.

I think the best approach at this point is to throw all your footage in Adobe Media Encoder and convert to a low bit rate format like DV, edit with that, and replace in the project panel when you are done.

The frame rate however should be solved prior to starting since interpreting afterward will mess up your edit timing.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Emily Backman]

Thank you for the response Vince.

I must admit that I although I have over 3 years of experience using the Adobe programs, I always using a specific computer and a specific camera; creating my projects with ease and familiarity. Now I am using a totally different computer that only recently had Adobe installed on it and footage sent to me from two cinematographers. (frame rate issues previously discussed.)

The computer that I am using has the following stats:

Intel Quad core
Windows 7 ultimate
4gb ram
500 watt power
Graphics card: Radeon HD 5750

If you have any suggestions on how to upgrade this computer to be an efficient editing machine, please let me know. From what I know…it was designed to be a massive music storage device with good graphics for playing video games.

Are you suggesting that I convert the original footage to DV for editing purposes and once my project is complete, to trade out the lower quality for the original HDV footage and export? What is the success rate of this type of process? I’ll do it if it means I can complete this project.

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Emily,

Here comes a looooooong post, you can tell I’m waiting for a client…

To the most urgent question, yes converting to DV would get you a fluid edit. The caveat is that it’s not HD, so you will not be seeing full quality while editing.

The process I would recommend:

1 – Open Adobe Media Encoder, import and convert all the footage to DV widescreen. (Note you could do a test with 4Mb/s H.264 and see if you are able to edit real time)

2 – Create an HDV or a desktop sequence with the desired resolution and frame rate (Go to the custom tab if needed). If you want full HD, it’s 1920×1080 Square pixels (desktop mode)

3 – Bring in the DV converted footage and do a quick test. Drop it on the timeline, right click scale to frame size if you want to see it at full frame, do a couple cuts. Then go to the project manager and replace the footage with the original, make sure everything looks good (and it should, especially since you are dealing with separate audio).

4- Now do you edit in DV and replace at the end. You could also set your preferences to scale to frame size prior to importing the DV footage if you want to avoid doing it for every clip, but that could mess things up if you are bringing in images as well. You would get a quality hit with zoom ins for example.

Onto your hardware questions. If you do, or plan on doing a lot of editing, some things would likely need to be upgraded. For one, your RAM should at least 8 gigs, 12 Gigs recommended, especially if you are running a 64 bits OS. It matters more if you upgrade to CS5.

For drives, it’s going to be expensive, but I wouldn’t even be editing without a nice drive array. A couple of streams of video can easily overrun the fastest single drive, that’s without including the overhead needed by the OS and cache from Premiere itself.

If you are doing After Effects export, you’ll be dealing with uncompressed footage and that’s a real headache.

The cheapest “great” array I can recommend is the HDElement from Caldigit (looking at about $1800.00 with drives and taxes) for 4 Gigs.

Great support, very, very fast, and reliable system. I tried cheaper stuff and it just doesn’t compare. You also get the added safety of RAID 5 allowing a drive to fail.

All of this can get expensive and it depends on how much you are willing to put up with, but if you have a client in the room… well you want something that just works 🙂

Cheers,

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area