[Dennis Radeke]

Hi Jeff,

What a nice thing to do for your grandmother – she will no doubt be proud!

Yes, Encore is the way to go for burning DVD’s and there are lots of tutorials on how to create them.

There is also a bunch of Encore Library Content that you can download for free which will give a number of pre-built menus that may suit your needs.

If your text is blurry, identify what part of your content is giving you those results. If it is the conversion of your .odt files to jpg, then you need to consider saving the stills as a larger file with more resolution to see if that helps.

At the end of the day, you need to a) make sure your content looks good in Premiere Pro (not blurry) and b) that you export it correctly to Encore for creating a DVD (typically MPEG2-DVD format)

Good luck,
Dennis – Adobe guy

[Dennis Radeke]

[Rachel Bays] “What do you mean by “Trash your preferences in Premiere Pro. Good housekeeping rule #1″?”

Here’s an old blog entry of mine that is still applicable: Two great tips

[Rachel Bays] “I have 26GB of RAM reserved for Adobe products.”

It may seem counter intuitive, but when you have some crashing issues, I will actually say to make it 50/50. In other words, allocate 16-20GB of RAM to Adobe and the rest to the OS. I’ve seen people take 64GB Mac Pros and put 55GB to Adobe. I say thank you for the compliment, but we actually need to leave adequate system RAM for the OS and other applications as well. Like I said, general rule is 60-75% when all is good, back it down to 50% if you’re having crashing problems.

THe idea is to eliminate what could be causing the issue.

HTH,
Dennis – Adobe guy

[Dennis Radeke]

[Jake Famisher] “This makes the effect itself easy to make, but how would I make each letter wiggle slightly different from each other? (like I did in my example)”

Try it out – the text animator is ‘per character’ by default meaning that each character will react independently and differently than the others.

Good luck,
Dennis – Adobe guy

[Dennis Radeke]

1 – create comp in AE
2 – create text layer
3 – use a wiggle expression by alt+clicking on the position parameter stopwatch. wiggle(X,Y); X=frequency per second and Y=how much for the parameter you’re modifying. “wiggle(3,50)” would give your text a random movement 3x per second by up to 50 pixels in any direction.

There are also a number of included text animation presets in AE that can be helpful in understanding what’s going on.

Check out this: AE Expression Basics

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Dennis Radeke]

Hi Rachel,

If you’re using a lot of AE comps inside of a Premiere Pro timeline, it is adding to the memory requirements of the project. While I don’t have any system specs from the post above, you do spell out the basic elements of the project. If you have 11 linked comps (from same AE project, if not then RAM is even more important), I would hope that you have 32GB of RAM in your system and are allocating about 60% of available RAM resources to Adobe applications. If you have 16 or less, then this might be some of your problem.

Two things you can also do to help manage a larger project, three if you’ve never done #3.
1 – Assuming you’re using the latest version of Premiere Pro 8.2, then you can ‘render and replace’ the AE comps in the Premiere Pro timeline once they are to your liking. This will render the comps in a format of your choosing and hopefully lower the RAM usage the system is using.
2 – Trash your preferences in Premiere Pro. Good housekeeping rule #1
3 – Clear your media cache. Good housekeeping rule #2

#’s 2 and 3 solve a surprising number of little issues. Lastly, if your system has less RAM and can accept more, it’s worth considering.

HTH,
Dennis – Adobe guy

[Dennis Radeke]

[Andrew Kimery] “No offense to our Adobe friends here, but AFAIK Premiere (and I don’t just mean Pro) has been crapped on as an only-for-wedding-videographers, also-ran NLE by Avid and FCP users up until about CS6 or CC so that’s a good 15-20yrs.”

None taken and I can agree wholeheartedly.

[Andrew Kimery] ” And to be perfectly honest, if Apple had released FCP 8, instead of FCP X, PPro would still be on the outside looking in. It wouldn’t have mattered about how good it was because, well, it would still Premiere.”

I think FCP8 would have been a great Star Trek “alternate reality” universe. For me, I feel Adobe video ENG teams and Premiere Pro in particular had a very clear focus of where we wanted to get to. With CS5, the Mercury Playback Engine, 64-bit native, etc. etc. we started our trajectory to where we are today. I feel we would have gotten there anyway even if Apple had done FCP8, but it is a great “what if” question if ever there was one for this group… 😉

[Dennis Radeke]

Bill,

Hopefully, you have a note in your inbox. Let me know if you do not!

[Dennis Radeke]

You know, I don’t really have a great technical explanation without going to the engineers, but I will say that lots of odd behavior is corrected by doing this basic housekeeping activity once in a while.

[Dennis Radeke]

Bill,

Get in touch with me either via the cow or DM on twitter or something and I’ll work to get whatever your problem is straightened out.

Dennis

[Dennis Radeke]

In addition to James’ response, the only other thing I could add is that they made Google Earth Pro free which is what all of the news companies use for their geo-stories.

https://www.google.com/earth/download/gep/agree.html

If you want exactly what the video has, James’ response is more appropriate.