[Angelo Lorenzo]

What’s your composition’s background color? If it’s set to white because you’re doing something with black shapes, it needs to be set to black for alpha (transparency) to transfer over properly in Premiere.

That’s my first guess.

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

As help for others on the board, may I suggest posting an example?

Regardless, I think I found some clips from Bleach. Since your question is super broad, I suggest building a foundation with tutorials.

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/
In particular tutorials:
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/lightning_strike/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_light_casting/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/soul_removal/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/energy/
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/nano.php
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/lightsaber.php
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/light_sabers_v2/

These all kind of deal with “energy effects” which you can use as a foundation to probably accomplish what I think you’re thinking.

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s counter intuitive as to how this works. The mask opacity affects what is inside the mask… sometimes. It seems like setting the mask to “subtract” lets the opacity affect what is outside the mask, much like selecting “invert” in “add” mode. Dumb.

There is a work around:
1. Create a shape layer, any color.
2. ctrl-x (cut) your mask from your current layer and paste it on the shape layer (make sure the mask is in “add” mode).
3. Switch this new layer’s mode to silhouette alpha. That layer’s mask opacity setting should now work exactly as you like, fading in more detail into the masked area when set to 0%

Note: If you get some weird behavior like it punching through your entire comp, you may need to pre-comp this layer pair.

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I’m going to skip question number 1. and 2. Since I’ve worked with all three codecs and used them in some combination in Premiere, Avid, Virtual Dub (uncompressed AVI) and FCP without sync issues that can be viewed in a NLE timeline. This looks purely related to playback and I’ve also warned a number of clients about it in certain situations (relating to my MP4 example in my earlier post).

With that being said, some research says that +/- a full frame late is normal on digital systems because of frame buffers and the refresh rate of your monitor (since your NLE can’t sync lock your monitor to your footage)

I did a render test of a 640×480, 29.97fps file with a test tone for two frames exactly at the 30 second mark in a number of formats. Premiere did fine bringing back in the footage, as did After Effects and Virtual Dub (AVI and MPEG). Quicktime was consistently 6 frames early on audio sync for playback.

I also went back and reviewed some h.264 MOV files from my 5DmkII that were slated with a smart slate, and again I could read a 6 frame difference from the slate timecode and the actual clap; the audio was early in this instance too. This was to confirm the issue on a file that Premiere never processed directly.

Oddly, you can search on Google and 4-6 frames drift seems to be the sweet spot, with a full 15 frames (half second) reported in some cases. I’ve also looked up forum threads all the way back to 2003 with the same issue.

I would say it’s just time to educate your clients on using VLC or other alternatives. It’s like doing design work and your clients complaining about a color when their screen isn’t calibrated… there are just going to be discrepancies when using less that professional level tools.

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

What is your “trouble”? Error message? Symptoms? Tell me exactly what happens when you import your MP4 file into your media bin.

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

In After Effects, Under your media bin it should say “8bpc” or something similar, click on that and tell us what you have for the 6 color settings.

Off the top of my head, because it is too contrasty, I think it’s a gamma shift rather than a colorspace issue.

What codec/container are your source files and your export?

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Hi Tom,

Two things come to mind:

1. Kind of the dummy answer but I believe the Cuda setting is saved per project. Are you saving your project after you’ve turned Cuda hardware support on?

2. The “fix all” for awkward problems like this is to flush your preference file. To do this, hold shift on your keyboard as you start Premiere Pro.

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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

How do you know it’s directly related to your video card? Are you running it successfully on another laptop or desktop running OSX Lion?

Also, what is the error it gave you when you tried to update? Does the updater app crash or does it have some kind of other behavior?

Have you tried installing the 5.5.1 update manually? It can be downloaded from https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=98&platform=Macintosh

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us If you’re a filmmaker, you need to be here.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

No worries, I’m sure the web makes me come off harsher than I mean to.

I kind of what to see how his assets are managed. I believe Premiere matches up a project when you point to one file and it does some lateral searching to other folders around where the project is located. I’ve always success with minimal clicks relinking things.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Helping you sell your film online

[Angelo Lorenzo]

To clarify, are you experiencing this sync mis-match with every codec? In particular, this issue strongly occurs with h.264 when it’s wrapped in an MPEG container (mp4) rather than a Quicktime container and played back with Quicktime.

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Helping you sell your film online