[Baz Leffler]

[Tim Kolb] ”
Oh, that’s handy.”

Well handy in so much as it saves you $25 for a firewire card… ;}.. but the real cost is “oops there goes another PCI slot”.

In all my Canopus systems I have a firewire card.. for the firewire drives… but they also come in handy for doing reverse system captures because I got bored with having to restart my computer everytime I switched NTSC/PAL on the Canopus card. (have I hijacked this thread now?)

[Baz Leffler]

Here is what I do when it seems “only I am having problems”… it is a bit time consuming but it certainly can yield results.
1/ unplug your system hard drive.
2/ By a new hard drive and install it in your machine as the system drive.
3/ install your windows XP + SP2 onto the new hard drive
4/ install Premiere Pro 1.5
5/ install the latest BMD drivers
6/ open Premiere and see if all your problems are gone

It is amazing how a zillion problems vanish with a totally fresh instal… but you notice I recommend not even going anywhere near the original system drive because there are many system settings buried deep in there somewhere so you know a new hard drive is totally free of them. What you do after you dertermine your “hardware is now deemed ok” is up to you; I normally go seek and destroy because I now know ‘I’ have a problem and it is in the operating system somewhere…. but for those that don’t want to delve into all the inner workings of the operating system may choose to keep the new drive in the machine and remove and reformat the old one. I may be stating the obvious to most people here but Microsoft would charge you $35 for that info after 3 weeks of umming and ahhing…

[Baz Leffler]

“I base that conclusion mostly on the stereo tracks design which any editor in a professional working environment would have screamed about like a raving banshee. ”

I find this comment very interesting, as I have past comments regarding this ‘stereo track’… I love working with stereo tracks AND most if not all my doco’s are shot split track. It is no problem for me to dup/fill left/right etc and it also gives me the ability to quickly see where these are in the timeline… but we all have our own techniques and work arounds for the shortcomings of each software product we use… and I couldn’t believe some of the workarounds I had to find on a recent Avid job I help out on trying to do things the way I do on PPRO. And by the way, I am one of those editors in a ‘professional working environment’.

One of the points that may need to be discussed here on the topic of ‘tight Adobe integration’ is that Premiere may have had is functionality deliberately limited so as not to cross over into other Adobe products; and that being said, when they get all the ‘Cool Edit Pro’ stuff out of Adobe Audition and integrate it into its current family will they then strip much of Premiere’s audio features out?…. or maybe they have planned that far ahead already.

[Baz Leffler]

For those of you who go right back to Adobe Premiere 4.0 (the first Windows based version) you will be very aware of the leaps and bounds the program has gone. Hell, I use to cut Australia’s Most wanted on it… but in those days it was Avid Avid Avid and a little bit of Media 100. Adobe was aiming at simple non-linear editing to compliment its other products; and of course the challenge was making it a DIY solution where it had to intergrate to 3rd party capure cards; that was their big problem… whereas Avid and Media 100 were complete systems. These complete systems had a major advantage in so much as non-technical people could just turn them on and use them and get the manufacturer to fix it when it failed; but that came at a cost… a very big cost.

I started playing with Premiere 4 and a Miro DC 1 because I was a techo and because I could.. I even started work on my own NLE program but gave it a miss having seen how well (and how cheap) Adobe’s solution was.

I still use Premiere today as my prefered BROADCAST EDITING SOLUTION and make major shows that get played around the world. I use it because I have grown up with it and am familiar with its functionality… and yes I have used all the others and keep on coming back to Premiere… but I still am a techo as well as an editor and I love to fiddle with the inner workings (I hate using anything that I don’t have an understanding of how it works).

I am seriously thinking that the next doco I edit I will have the editors credit as “Adobe Premiere Editor…” and look forward to collecting an award and saying “I would like to thank Adobe for making an affordable solution to a struggling editor”.

The saddest thing I find with Premiere’s poor acceptance into the broadcast market is that I have to avoid telling my prospective clients that I edit using Adobe Premiere. They can sit with me for 6 weeks straight and still refer to it as the ‘Avid’; and they leave none the wiser. I suppose another sad thing is the lack of good Premiere operators as compared to FCP and Avid… makes it hard for me when we get busy as I don’t like hiring freelancers that show inexperience with Premiere in front of my clients.

I would just like to finish up by saying ‘thank you’ to some of the “professional” card manufacturers who DO see Premiere in the broadcast market and DO spent a lot of time developing software and drivers for it; certainly well outside the ‘consumer’ level.

[Baz Leffler]

Bill… it may not necessarily be corrupt media but corrupt audio conform which I have also experienced.

A way to test that out is to close Premiere, rename the audio conform folder and reopen your project. Obviously Premiere will start to conform everything again (maybe an overnight thing for you) but you can still drop stuff onto the timeline while it is conforming. I have found a few problems are solved by re-conforming. btw. have you deleted your Premiere prefs file to gain a ‘fresh start’?

The enemy of the maintenance man is the word ‘intermittant’. Somehow you have to determine something that will (almost) reliably cause the problem. I do that by trying to ‘think’ the way the program is thinking but also having an insiders knowledge of how things work helps as well.

cheers Baz

[Baz Leffler]

Also Bill… another thought…. try using the project with all the clips ‘off line’. The quick way to do this is to rename the drive/folders where the clips are stored and then open the project and when prompted for the clips go “make all offline”. Then do what you usually do and see if it crashes then. BTW. DON’T SAVE YOUR PROJECT OR YOU WILL HAVE TO RELINK EVERYTHING AGAIN! (or you will have to go back to an autosaved version.)

The rationale here is maybe it is something to do with corrupt media (as I have experienced in the past). If you do not get the crashes then slowly re-introduce clips back in. This can be a very long process but your crashing problems seem far worse that what others are experiencing so maybe yours are more specific to the environment you are working in.

cheers
Baz

[Baz Leffler]

Bill… re the crashing problem… I am not experiencing what you described but I am getting a random crashing which I have traced down to a dramatic increase in VM usage. Can you try what you do while watching the VM in your task manager and see if it coincides?…. I have not yet discovered what I am doing in premiere that triggers it’s dramatic jump from 0.4G to 1.4G. This is usually caused by a memory leak within the system and I know a long time ago it occurred when draging a transitions duration in the timeline. This was later addressed with newer BMD drivers.

cheers
baz

[Baz Leffler]

[David Cherniack] “What do you think about Marisu’s observations – especially about the free disk space crashes?”

When doing doco’s there are not normally many layers so it really isn’t an issue. “Free disk space crashes?” – dunno about that one either. But maybe it is my technique that avoids these issues.

What I do is digitise all the tapes complete in DV mode as “off line”; that way I get about 30 x 40 min digibeta tapes into a 300G firewire drive (normally we have about 50 tapes per doco).

After the off line is complete I use the project manager to create a new “trimmed” version onto another firewire drive as and archived backup. Then I do another project manager to create a version of the project MINUS the media (Premiere creates media for this version if any clip has no reel number so anything that was captured manually gets copied across eg timeline vo records etc).

I then take this “trimmed minus media” project into one of our uncompressed Premiere Pro systems and create a new project and import the off line project. Ten all I have to do is batch capture the off line media and I have an uncompressed on line version of the doco. Out to digibeta it goes!

I hope that helps with what you are trying to do.

Baz
(ps. we also use Premiere Pro for doing multi layered compositing and again, not too many problems but remember, the capture card plays an important roll with a lot of this stuff)

[Baz Leffler]

David

I do many doco’s for Animal Planet using Premiere 1.5 with some extremely busy timelines and it never chokes on me. Go ahead, you will never look back!

baz

[Baz Leffler]

I am pretty sure the DVW250 is not supported as an editor from an external controller. I had a similar situation years ago with a BVW 35 trying to edit to it using ProVTR.

The 9 pin contol on these portable decks is there only to support feeding a computer or as a player connected to a recording deck.

It does get worse; the humble Sony J3 digiplayer has 9 pin control but Sony deliberately stripped out the ability to synconise the deck for an external controller and even worse, you can’t even do deck to deck editing; just so they can sell more full featured decks.