Real Time Editing in Premiere and Native Codecs

[Jeff Bellune]

What is your destination format? How and where will the finished video be displayed? The answers to your other questions depend on that.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Josh Weiss]

My final output format is DVD, however, I do want quality to be as close to broadcast as possible.

[Jeff Bellune]

It sounds like you are capturing DV footage into a Premiere Pro DV project. If you export your AE animations in any other format than DV, rendering of the AE footage in PPro will be required.

Even if you export from AE with 10-bit uncompressed, when PPro renders it, it will be turned into DV (to match PPro’s project settings). If you then render to an .avi file, the DV render files will be used.

If you set up a PPro project to match the format that you use to export from AE, then all of the DV footage will have to be rendered. As far as quality goes, you won’t gain anything from rendering the DV footage to a higher-quality format, and you may lose a little during the up-conversion.

My suggestion is to export from AE at the highest quality setting you can (QT animation will work, as you mentioned), import it into a DV PPro project that contains the DV footage and then assemble your program. Don’t waste time rendering in PPro because the Adobe Media Encoder will go back to the source files when you transcode to MPEG2 for DVD and ignore any render files that you may have created.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Josh Weiss]

To clarify, I may or may not be using DV footage. If I am, mixing DV footage and material completely generated in AE, what would the best method be. If I do an uncompressed 10 bit project, do I need any type of 3rd party hardware or software for real time editing using PP 2.0. If not, I think that would be my best bet. If I’m not mixing with DV I assume, if I don’t need 3rd party, then that is my best bet. If I am mixing with DV, you guys tell me. Is Microsoft DV the codec I would render to if I wanted real time with a DV project? If I want real time with 10 bit project, am I rendering AVI 10 bit Uncompressed?

[Josh Weiss]

When I say rendering, I mean from After Effects.

[Mike Smith]

For standard definition uncompressed editing with PPro, you will need a large, fast RAID for data storage and a card like the Aja Xena or Decklink Extreme – and a capable enough system to support all that.

For output to DVD, your footage is going to be compressed to MPEG 2 at rather less than DV quality.

Graphics from AE losing quality could be the DV codec compression, or it could be the result of your not observing PAL / NTSC safe colors and saturation : you are being careful to keep your AE RGB levels between 16 and 235, even after effects processing? Of course, as an experienced editor, you’d not miss that one.

So the amount of degradation you’d be seeing is from uncompressed RGB in AE to compressed 8 bit 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 YUV in DV: that’s what you live with for real time DV editing, whether in PPro or anything else. It’s the DV format.

As a workaround, of course you could render a DV proxy for realtime editing and an uncompressed file to lay in on another (PPro) layer, disable the uncompressed file(s) or turn off the layer when editing, and re-enable it when compressing to MPEG 2. You may struggle to spot the difference in your final MPEG 2 file, though.

For encoding, the built in MainConcept encoding is pretty good for MPEG 2, though no doubt you are also aware you may get better results by using Procoder or Cinemacraft and tweaking the settings to taste.