What formats and data rate can you edit in elements?

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere Elements uses the same basic engine as Premiere Pro 1.5. It’s optimized for DV, but you can put other formats in the timeline, they’ll just need rendering. That does mean a generation loss going to DV, but it shouldn’t be a significant quality hit.

People on the Adobe PrEl forum have seen a variety of results when using non-DV codecs, so it can be hit or miss depending on what you’re trying. In general, I’ve never had a problem that wasn’t solved by rendering the timeline, so my guess is that results are dependent on what format you’re using and the condition of your system. If you have a lot of weird codecs installed or drivers and startup apps that are weighing the system down, you’ll get worse results.

[Richard Milner]

The reason for my questions is focused on the possibility of using elements for proxy editing with PPRo and other software components.

There would be thousands of hours of low rez stuff that corresponds to some higher rez stuff. XMP or MXF would be the standards that a relational database would track between the proxies and the high rez stuff. The proxy stuff would be time coded mpeg4 low bit rate – maybe as low as 1 or 2 mbits a second.

Does this sound like a possibility?

[Tim Kurkoski]

It could work. I’ve heard that MP4 works relatively poorly in PrEl, but if you had a decent DirectShow codec installed or were using QuickTime MP4 files, it should work fine.

I’m a little mystified in general what advantage you gain in using PrEl to edit your proxies over PrPro, and how you intend to take your data between the two. PrPro 2.0 can open PrEl projects, but that’s about the extent of it. PrEl doesn’t do EDL or AAF, much less MXF or other formats. Maybe if you’re just using it for rough cutting and will deal with the data in a different way at a later time…

[Richard Milner]

Tim,

[Timothy Kurkoski] “I’m a little mystified in general what advantage you gain in using PrEl to edit your proxies over PrPro, and how you intend to take your data between the two.”

You make excellent points about PREL. The idea behind elements instead of PPRo was to find a less expensive solution to use on producers’desk tops or others in the enterprise to search for video using the low rez proxies-putting them into a timeline. If I had 20 or 30 seats of browsers, the cost for PPRO would be pretty high. For the producers, you don’t need much more than cuts and dissolves with very little additional stuff.

Right now PrEl couldn’t do the job I want, but maybe this will get the Adobe folks thinking. It doesn’t have to element. It could be something a little more sophisticated than a flash player with timecode referenced to MXF(XMP?) or some other metadata scheme that would point the EDL to the H Quality stuff to populate the timeline in PPro or some other craft editor.