[David J]

Unlike earlier Premieres, PPro rqeuires moving matte clips to be embedded in a separate sequence before the motion ‘takes’. Something to do with using After Effects code.

Put the moving matte clip into a new sequence and use the sequence on the main timeline in place of the matte clip.

Must be in the FAQs by now.

[David J]

Look up Garbage Matte in the help file.

Place one clip on top of another, apply the garbage matte effect to the top clip and adjust the area revealed of the underlying clip to suit.

[David J]

Maybe you are trying to cram a quart into a pint pot?

What resolution are your Camtasia captures? If you limit them to something quite close to the video frame size, maybe you’ll get better results?

In any event, DVD is never going to give the crisp text that you see on the original computer screen.

Better to think about a computer-based replay alternative that uses larger frame sizes and a more suitable CODEC. I seem to remember that Camtasia includes a replay CODEC – otherwise WMV is worth a look.

[David J]

I would guess that your captures at in Type 1 AVI format, which Premiere spits out at 1Gb (=4min 52 secs approx).

Use Premiere or Scenalyzer Live for capture in Type 2, which removes this restriction.

[David J]

You can’t get what isn’t there.

Mini DV is recorded to tape at a set frame size and using 5:1 lossy compression and however much you might regret that, you cannot recover to the full quality seen through the lens. However, the process of transferring from camera to computer via FireWire is, to a first approximation at least, a data transfer process that involves no further loss of quality. At a more-subtle level, the process of recovering data from DV tape involves a degree of automatic error correction which can change the bit-level output from that originally recorded, so it would be very brave to use this medium for data storage.

If you don’t change CODEC and don’t apply any FX or transitions to a particular frame, Premiere will play it out without recompressing. Any change of CODEC or frame causes further lossy recompression except if you use an uncompressed format in intermediate files, although until you’ve done DV recompression a few times to the same footage you probably won’t notice much degradation.

[David J]

Open a 25fps project.

Import your footage.

Highlight the clip(s) in the project window and choose ‘interpret footage’ from the right click menu to force to 25fps. This will play out your frames at 25fps.

[David J]

Need some information to help here.

How did you capture these files? Are they DV AVIs? If not, what CODECs?

[David J]

You might want to try capturing using Scenalyzer Live (www.scenalyzer.com). Try before buy with watermark, but it will allow you to test your capture system with non-Adobe software. If you still have problems, I would suspect your capture system/source material rather than the Premiere end.

[David J]

Have you tried Qucktime with NONE as the CODEC?

[David J]

If your target output is NTSC, then ideally you would film in NTSC, not PAL.

The thread I pointed you at discusses many of the conversion issues you will need to investigate for cross-format work. One of the posters seemed fairly content with using Premiere to do the conversion, but better quality is achievable by using a good format converter on the AVI before editing in Premiere in the target format. Optimum workflow depends on your final target – the bigger the output frame size and/or displayed screen size, the more the quality of conversion becomes important.

A forum search, as I suggested, will generate even more useful information.