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WMV to AVI
I did some (animated) screen captures with Windows Media Encoder. I thought I’d avoided the expense of Camtasia because the captures looked great in Windows Media Player. But the text was unreadable when the files were imported into PPro. So I converted them to AVI, trying five or six different coverters and dozens of different settings and codecs. The best results were mediocre and resulted in huge files (raw uncompressed, for example). Most of the conversions looked terrible whether viewed in WMP or imported into PPro. Is there a trick to getting my WMV captures to render well in PPro? Again, they look great when played in WMP, so I know there’s decent data there. I’d like to avoid recapturing everything if possible, as I spent awhile getting everything jsut right. Note: The height/width of the captures are non-standard–I don’t know if that complicates things. Any ideas?
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7 Replies
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Whatever you are trying to achieve in PremPro, the result will always be mediocre at best and terrible in most cases. PP is not suited for this work flow. Try another program.
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Screen capture in Windows Media Encoder is the final product. Editing and then recompressing an already highly compressed file results in lousy stuff.
There is a workaround for straight cut editing into pieces using Windows Media File Editor (comes with the encoder) and then joining the pieces with a joiner tool like Rejump Movie Joiner that does not recompress things.The solution of choice is Camtasia 4 for creating some really cool stuff. With the latest version you can export uncompressed video for use in DVD authoring.
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Thanks for this. So bottom line: sounds like your workaround, Mike — using the Windows File Editor — would still not allow me to successfully incorporate my captures into a larger Premiere project? No way to get them in a format Premiere likes? On the other hand, if I invest in Camtasia I’ll be able to import animated screen captures into a project and they’ll look beautiful and be fully editable? Pete
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[PeterM62] “On the other hand, if I invest in Camtasia I’ll be able to import animated screen captures into a project and they’ll look beautiful and be fully editable?”
No exactly. The .camrec files are not editable in Premiere either, although one could export from Camtasia as uncompressed, the end result will not be as good as using Camtasia alone.
Camtasia can import video files, so you could export from Premiere DV.avi files for use in Camtasia.
Camtasia is pretty powerful app, but you might describe your project and delivery mode {cd/dvd/web) before going on. -
I’m wanting to insert a few short screen captures (mostly scrolling text, with a few curser clicks) into an 80-minute DVD production. The inserts will only cover about 1/2 of the (16:9) screen. They’re really not a major part of the production, so I was not hoping to spend tons of time (or money) on them–but they should be clear and readable. If it gets to be too much of a hassle I could make them stills, but I’d much prefer they were animated…
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Screen capture for the stills and then animate the cursor and scrolling text using Premiere titler is your best bet for limited use.
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Sounds like a plan. Thanks for walking me through the thought process.
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