[Angelo Lorenzo]

In my experience some lag is normal when switching back to Premiere. On larger projects it may take about 10 seconds for it to kick back in on my system. I don’t know why it does this but I suspect it has to do with Premiere reclaiming memory for use.

I would experiment by adjusting “RAM Reserved For Other Applications” under Edit > Preferences > Memory to see if you can strike some sort of balance.

This is only a guess.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

In regards to #3, Premiere does have a rarely used feature called “Project Manager” under the Project menu. It consolidates by coping footage, preview, and conform files into one project location.

There are three inherent weaknesses:

1) It’s not automatic, it has to be manually run to consolidate everything. This isn’t bad on small projects that only need consolidation for archiving at the end.

2) Other than separating the preview and conform files, the Project Manager lumps all normal audio and video into one folder with the project file. It’s kind of a mess; I would at least like to see Premiere respect any folder structure in the Media Bin if you work in an organized manner.

3) After Effects and Audition need this feature as well for it to be truly useful.

It is, however, better than nothing.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

If Premiere Pro’s built in effects aren’t giving you an acceptable result, try Magic Bullet’s Colorista Free.

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-colorista-free/

It’s a free 3-way color corrector (you just don’t have the goodies like a second 3-way correction set, keyframed masks, etc. that the paid version does).

Short of a dedicated hardware color corrector, Colorista is my favorite software plugin for video color work.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

1) For the purposes stated above, should I check off the “Prevent upsampling when decoding” or not? what ramifications does that have?
I’m not familiar with Lagarith, is this a codec specific setting? For the life of me, I’ve never seen this as a standard checkbox in Adobe Media Encoder

2) Should I choose YUY2 or YV12 for colorspace? What’s better for Premiere encoding to MPEG-2 DVD after it gets converted/downscaled elsewhere to SD?
YUY2 is 4:2:2 while YV12 is 4:2:0. I’d pick the former.

3) Now for the kicker. The aspect ratio for HDV source material is typically set to 1440 by 1080. When manually typing in either one of those dimensions it automatically comes up with the other as “wrong”… Is there a square versus non square pixel issue here?
1440×1080 is anamorphic HD. When setting your size, unclick the chain between the two pixel dimensions (this locks their ratio, leading to the problem you described) and choose your aspect as ‘HD (1.333)’

4) Lastly, what does frame blending do? When should it be selected or left un-ticked? Does it make an important visual contribution?
This setting interpolates or blends frames if you have a framerate conversion, are using mixed footage, etc, to keep audio synced.

When turned off, if your output has a lower framerate than your source, it will drop frames, if it has a higher framerate it will duplicate frames.

For this to work properly, your timeline needs to be set to the framerate of your output. This may seem counter-intuitive to those who edit with their source’s settings.

Personal or situational preference. If you have a big conversion like 25 to 29.97 (PAL to NTSC) try both checked and unchecked.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

If it’s a stylized look then yes, as color grading, it’s fine.

Without throwing it on scopes, it looks like the overall image is cooler but the skintones are without a ton of blue/green contamination which, in my opinion, is a good balance.

In regards to the limitations of the Flash Player, the contrast levels look nuanced on my calibrated computer monitor.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I would have to say the car sequence in the first portion of 2006’s “The Killing of John Lennon” is one of my favorites, photography-wise. It’s insanely impractical to re-create with green screen, but consider that example and collateral when playing with reflections as part of story telling. I would assume this car is modified as glassless so there may be heavy post on these types of shots.

I would say look at the script and choose your line of action accordingly. If you need to break the line, try a round dolly move; take advantage of the green screen.

Chances are a 4 person scene is going to play flat, interaction-wise. Shoot profile a bit more, make the actors in the front really crank their body and neck to the back seat. Look at Reservoir Dogs for an example.

As a note to your director: most driving in a car and talking scenes SUCK. Make sure to have some kind of physical action/character interaction in the scene to keep your characters motivated.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Go to View > Info (ctrl+2 shortcut in Windows).

This will bring up your info window, click the more button (looks like a down arrow with a few lines next to it) on the info window and set your color to 0-255.

Your color picker follows this setting.

You see it flip flop because the setting is most likely saved per project/workspace.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

What is your animation like? Alternately, if it’s two faces meeting or coming out of that center post why dont you have:

background layer masked for the center post
normal face 1
normal face 2
fill background

Perhaps if you describe what is happening in terms of how things are moving, there may be a better alternate for this altogether.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

How much needs to be tweaked?

I do this when using the rotobrush:
1. I let the rotobrush run with adjustments as I go using the rotobrush tool.
2. I freeze the rotobrush tool.
3. I turn on quickmask (the default is a red overlay displaying the mask).
4. I use the normal brush tool set to alpha only and per-frame and using black and white (black for mask, white to reveal) I paint my adjustments on frames that need them.
5. On the rotobrush effect layer, I turn down all mask refinement settings to off or zero.
6. I add the “refine mask” effect on the layer and adjust as needed. This way it refines the mask that is comprised of the rotobrush and my manual adjustments; it helps get rid of per-frame jutter from manual adjustments.

I hope that make sense for you.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Angelo Lorenzo]

What exactly is the scene and shot? What camera are you using and how wide is your lens? What kind of budget are you working with? What time of day?

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience