Where to learn the basics?

[Hector Melendez]

You didn’t mentioned how you been capturing,(firewire, composite, Svhs) either the format (mini-DV, VHS, etc). Is the quality of the video being capture good?.
Premiere use .avi to edit and not MPG as I know.

Don’t know a cause within Premiere that make poor quality as you mentioned, if the PC meets at least the PP requierements. So revise you footage. What other NLE editing were you using before?

Once you get good footage in PP, (I recomment you to capture via firewire from a good mini DV camera footage) then PP is straigh forward.(You mentioned don’t have problems with making cuts and xsitions, etc)
Better yet if you read the shortcuts to know better the different tasks of each. Edit> keyboard cust.)
To export … (you didn’t mentioned how you want the edited footage}
use Encore. …but export as movie as avi. This will create an .avi file that you can import into Encore and finally convert it as Mpge2. Don’t bother with transcoding parameters within Encore. Just leave all in Automatic transcoding. It works for me.

For me the result are excellent picture quality.
Its a matter of time an patience to master this program. Continue reading this post and the Premiere manual as well as the help hints.
Search the web for more hints and free tutorials

Good luck…

[Andre Gagnon]

“I’ve tried encoding the .mpg format to .wmv format with no change once in PP. I’ve tried exporting the whole project to see if the videos actually did work”

To learn the basics,I recommend “Adobe Premiere Pro ClassRoom in a Book” available At Amazon for less than $45.00 USD.

BTW Premiere is a DV AVI editing software. From this format,after editing or not, you may export to the QuickTime (mov), Mpeg-1 and 2 (mpg,m2v,m1v), Windows Media (wmv) formats and others. If you want to start from a MPG clip, you must first convert it to DV AVI and then export it to Windows Media with the wmv option.

Don’t expect the greatest quality from clips that will have been submitted to multiple compressions/decompressions in this type of operation.

There are numerous utilites that will convert mpg clips to avi. This is only one of them:

https://www.blazemp.com/convert_mpg_to_avi.htm

[Cvm2002]

Very good….that’s what I’m looking for as far as the mpg to avi encoder.

The videos were originally recorded on a digital camcorder in .mpg format and uploaded to the computer via firewire, subsequently stored on an external hard drive.

Already have the Classroom in a Book text….and its already dog-eared. Also have The Premier Pro Bible by Droblas and Greenberg that’s getting its fair share of use as well.

Thank you both.

[Cvm2002]

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! Just downloaded the BlazeMP program, converted my files and its worked beautifully without a hitch! I can stop pulling my hair out now…..