[David J]

The major problem with the lack of hard ends on sub-clips is the ease with which material can be introduced from outside the chosen sub-clip segment when adjusting edits, especially using the trim window. It can then become extremely confusing as to which sub-clip goes with which shot when ins and outs have been moved into a different clip area. This can be a real problem when editing from a number of similar takes out of a longer capture.

OK, I know that careful shot logging etc can mitigate this issue, but I find it very much easier and more time-efficient to capture and sort through the clips using Scenalyzer, which also gives me hard ends on my clips when editing in PPro. That way there is no confusion ever.

[David J]

Premiere’s handling of sub clips is far from ideal for both the audio conforming issue and, more importantly for me, the lack of hard ends to the sub-clips.

For that reason I prepare my clips in advance using Scenalyzer Live. The latest beta from http://www.scenalyzer.com is vey stable and allows trimming, cutting, joining and deletion of captured clips as well as a host of other really useful features. Well worth a look.

[David J]

Have you investigated ‘Duplicate Clips’ as described on page 27 of the manual?

[David J]

Insert can cause problems if you have mutliple tracks already populated to the right of the insert point. If this affects you, then use the multitrack tool (track tool + SHIFT) to move everything to the right to make room, do the insert, then move it all back again.

[David J]

Flash font rendering can be a problem if you use an non-embedded font. Could this be part of the problem?

Nevertheless, since have AE, I would have thought that you would do very much better to make your complex title animations in AE rather than Flash and take advantage of the interoperability between AE and Premiere Pro. By exporting from AE using Uncompressed in Millions+ colour space you should end up with a viable alpha channel in Premiere Pro.

[David J]

In older versions of Premiere, ALT+BlockSelect copied sections of timeline using the mouse with the ALT modifier. As far as I can see, this facility didn’t make it into PPro (yet).

[David J]

You can create an empty track above or below the current track by right clicking the track header, choosing ‘Add Track’ and picking the placing option of your choice from the three offered.

[David J]

But you can use the audio mixer to alter the output volume of an entire track is you wish.

[David J]

I work PAL, but the essentials are similar.

I would guess that the culprit is your audio not being compressed by the default DVD preset. You should be able to get best-quality pictures for much longer movies than 20 minutes if you compress the audio.

You could try the following:

Select the MPEG2-DVD preset in Media Encoder.

Click the Audio section heading.

Choose MPEG audio format.

Activate the bundled MainConcept CODECs when asked (if you haven’t already). Activation is free.

The default 224bps for audio is good quality. You can reduce this for longer movies if necessary without losing too much.

You should then find that the audio size on DVD is much less than before, leaving lots of room for better-quality pictures than given by the settings you quote.

[David J]

Adding SHIFT reverses the direction of CTRL+TAB, which helps.

Have you tried using Keyboard Customisation to generate specific shortcuts for each relevant entry in the Window list?