• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Transitioning to HD: Newbie Questions

  Posted by Phil Lochner on February 11, 2009 at 7:12 pm

  Hi Everyone,

  Last year for an intra-office corporate video, I transferred footage from my Sony DCR-HC40 miniDVD Handycam and used PP CS3’s Capture tool to create .AVIs that I would edit together and output to DVD. For this years video, I want to transition to HD. My company would like higher quality and they have provided me with several items to allow me to create something better.

  For this year’s video, I have access to a Sony HDR-SR11 AVCHD camera, a fast editing rig (two quad core Xeons, 8GB of memory, etc), as well as some lights and even an entry level green screen setup from tubetape.com.

  From last year’s video, I still have access to PP CS3 and After Effects CS3 and while I’m not totally up to speed on everything that CS3 does, I’m a fast learner and used to be pretty good at them back in the mid 90’s when I created industrial training videos using SVHS and the old DPS PVR (using massive 9GB WD Barracuda drives no less!). I’m not a professional editor or video guy anymore but I still retain some knowledge of the process from 14 years ago (as well as a re-introduction from last year), which is why I volunteered for this video project to begin with.

  Unfortunately, after a few hours tinkering with settings and presets, I feel that I am back in newbie land when it comes to HD.

  Here’s my specific questions.

  I have decided to go with the Cineform NeoScene program to convert my AVCHD files to Cineform AVI files. I recognize the editing nightmare that raw AVCHD files have created for some people, and we will not be upgrading to CS4. From what I understand, AVCHD is an acquisition format anyway, and for $129 worth of NeoScene I’ll have a much better editing experience.

  My camera will record up 1920x1080i. However, I think that level of quality may be overkill for what I’m working on. Therefore, I’ve recorded some sample footage at 1440×1080. When I run it through NeoScene, it creates 1920×1080 AVIs, which is slightly confusing. My frame rate will be 29.97.

  My final output will most likely be shown in widescreen on a standard def DVD player, but if we can secure a HD projector for the video’s presentation, I’ll burn it to Blu-Ray instead.

  With all this in mind, what should I be setting my Premiere Pro project to? I don’t see any Cineform presets, and I have read that I should create a new preset and use Desktop as the initial setting. What should I be putting the other settings to?

  When I startup a new After Effects composition, what should those initial composition settings be? I see a HDTV 1080 29.97 preset that creates a composition that’s 1920×1080 with square pixels.

  My camera seems to be recording 5.1 audio by default. When I bring my Cineform AVIs in Premiere, it adds a 5.1 audio track to the project. I don’t really have any experience in audio mixing or using 5.1 audio and won’t use it for the final output on this year’s project. Should I just disable 5.1 audio from my camera and save myself some complexity issues during the editing process? Last year, I used Soundbooth to edit chunks of recorded audio and will probably do the same this year.

  Thanks in advance for your patience with my newbie questions!

  Phil Lochner replied 17 years, 2 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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