[Angelo Lorenzo]

Why not have the text portion of the animation removed? You can then use different title slates in Premiere in a second video layer. This, of course, is assuming the text itself isn’t animated.

The only other way is to copy/paste make copies of your template project in AE, adjust the text and dynamic link in the 5-6 different instances.

Cheers,
Angelo
AlexanderFilmCo.com

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I strongly recommend skipping cs4 fo cs5 since it’s 64bit. To hit your questions in order:

1) Maybe. CS5 is 64bit so it’ll use more muscle than FCP, but you’ll probably be working against a learning curve on your first few projects. After my company’s switch to Premiere CS5… we were seeing overall time improvements of 10-20%

2) The only thing I prefer in FCP is the better integrating with Soundtrack Pro, makes audio mixing more difficult sequences easier. As far as issues with graphics cards… I’ve not heard of any as long as it’s nVidia or ATI. That’s anecdotal though.

3) Yes. CS5 introduces the Mercury playback engine which supports a number of approved nVidia graphics cards. I’m on a PC, so I was able to alter a file to use the cheaper GT240, and I can play 1080p files with general effects (luma curve, color corrector, etc) without rendering the timeline. Hardware acceleration has also sped up my final renders to h.264 to about 3x

4) Yes, if you jam sync time code it should work extremely smoothly. Premiere allows multicamera switching, with the ability to record switching so you can attack it control room style.

Cheers,
Angelo
AlexanderFilmCo.com

[Angelo Lorenzo]

You’ll want to select your timeline (click into it so it’s focused) then in your menu under sequence, you’ll want to select “Render Entire Work Area”

This will render the yellow to green. Pressing enter or “Render Effects in Sequence” will only render the red portion.

Cheers,
Angelo
AlexanderFilmCo.com

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Get translucent powder in 2-3 neutral shades (for large differences in skin tone). The stuff is relatively cheap, and Ben Nye makes some good stuff. Also pick up a pack of sweat blotter tissue.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I’d say try to go for Boris Optical Stabilizer, it works in Premiere and AE (although somewhat better in AE, but I was stabilizing racecar footage, so your mileage may vary). To be honest, I don’t know of too many other plugins.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

If its like other consumer cameras that record to AVI, it probably uses some form of the MJPEG codec.

You should be able to convert it to an H.264 file, or whatever else you need in Adobe Media Encoder. For files that behave this way, I usually had to manually set the keyframe distance to every 1 frame to have it convert properly

[Angelo Lorenzo]

nVidia acceleration does support encoding, but not through Adobe Media Encoder.

You have to open your project into Premiere, go to File > Export > Media. This will open the normal export window you’re use to seeing so set your output settings. At this point you can do two things, you can export or enqueue to Adobe Media Encoder.

You need to export directly from this window while it is open in Premiere to take advantage of the encoding acceleration.

I use a hacked GT240 with 1gig of ram and I’ve seen a threefold increase in encoding time with 1080p30 footage in H.264 even with moderate adjustments (3-way color, luma curves, gamma, transitions, etc)

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Are all your layers full video clips or just little titles/motion graphics.

With that many layers my first concern would be the harddrive being the bottleneck because it may not be able to supply that level of information for that long.

You may need to invest in some kind of RAID setup if this is a regular occurrence.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Oddly enough, Adobe Media Encoder is not optimized to take use of the Mercury rendering engine.

For the fastest rendering, export media in Premiere, set output options and export right from that window. DO NOT enqueue and open Media Encoder.

Under the memory preference I have optimize rendering for ‘performance’.

I don’t know how heavy Cineform is on the CPU, but I regularly export 1080p30 footage at close to real time (limited effects) and I’m running 8gigs of ram on a AMD Phenom X4 (equivalent to a Intel i5)

Also make sure, for whatever reason, you’re not running Premiere with a low priority. Check your task manager for that.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Try sticking the plug-in into C:\program files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\CS5\MediaCore to share the plugin in both programs, or make a copy of the AE plug into Premiere’s plug-in folder.

No guarantees it’ll work, they share the same plugin architecture but faulty ones will probably crash premiere immediately upon the use of the effect.

Good luck!