[Erik Pontius]

Ran into this exact same problem on a co-worker’s Avid. He’d copied files from an external drive to the hard drive, then tried to move/copy/delete/rename and kept getting the same error and was logged into an admin account. And as with your case, the securities tab wasn’t there to change the permissions.
There are two ways of going about fixing this…the root of it is that XP’s simple file sharing has been enabled. You can turn it off and the security tab will come back, where by you can add full control to “administrators” and modify to “users.” This might piss off your actual administrator (if your in a business that has one) if they are trying to keep people from messing with it. Adding the permissions will allow you to do as you like with the files.
The other sneaky way is to boot to safe mode (hit f8 just before windows starts, select safe mode). Work your way to the folder in question and the security tab will be in properties now, whereby you can add the permissions. Reboot and things look to be back to normal.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

To expand the previous post a little. You’ll need to find a codec for your rendered video that also supports an alpha channel (DV AVI uses compression and will not allow an alpha channel) and also is compatible with Premiere. You best option might be for an uncompressed AVI, choosing “RGB + Alpha” and “straight” matte.
Premiere should be able to import this footage and recognize the alpha channel thus making your transparent areas transparent…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You will also need to choose “invert existing” for the alpha channel option in the avid graphic import settings. Avid sees “white” areas as transparent (as in film), while AE and other graphics software (photoshop) use black…
You might also export find that in addition to using a straight matte, you might also set the field renderer in render settings to lower field first and set Avid’s import settings to match.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

adding a little zooming and panning motion into the photos, really adds a little something…makes it more interesting than a boring slideshow. AE handles reasonably size photos pretty well. If you think in terms of square pixels the size of video is only 640×480…photos that are 1280×1024 + or so will give you enough room to play with…without bogging you down. One other nice thing is that often there is only certain portions of the photograph that is very interesting, you can always choose to crop sections out by scaling to fit that area in the visable area… Starting with a larger photographs and scaling down is much preferred over starting with something small and scaling up.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I would think that this would only be one portion of the overall future of editing. You’re still thinking in terms of editing flat 2 dimensional pieces of footage together, strung along in a linear fashion.
Most of the uses of this kind of data manipulation and visualization I have seen have been in the manipulation of multi faceted/”multi dimensional” types of data….visualizing complex molecular structures and being able to rotate, zoom/magnify the data to be able to study it more.
What if the future of video acquisition was more multidimensional…I watched the behind the scenes featurette on the cg animated film “Monster House” they actually had the actors in motion capture suits act out each scene. A series of cameras and tracking gear was positioned around the set to be able to capture every angle. This tracking data was then tied to cg characters and enabled the animators to set “cameras” in practically any location and piece together the story anyway they wanted. Fascinating concept…imagine having similiar multi-plexed HD (of some other form of video) video capturing a live action scene from a variety of angles (perhaps similar to the Matrix effect), then the editor being able to manipulate this data in a editing system such as this being able to choose a variety of angles, shots and movement from one piece of video….
As for this kind of thing eliminating the need for editors like ourselves…perhaps…it’s our responsibility to recognize emerging trends and get on the train before it leaves the station. For example, I worked for a small city newspaper in the early 90’s doing advertising design. The ad design department had already been using Mac’s for a while to do ad creation pulling from digital scans, clip art libraries and digital type libraries. Paste-up was still done manually the old fashion way. We would print out our ads on high rez printers and paper, hand it over to a guy who waxed the back of it and mechanically stuck it on a big paper paste up board. When everything on the page was in place, he’d send it to another department who photographed it on a very large format camera and made the printing plates. This guy had been doing this for probably 30 years.
As I moved on to other things, they were already starting to transition everything to a digital process, doing all the layout for smaller weekly newspapers and seasonal inserts in a computer and printing directly to film. This old paste up guy instead of spending the time to learn the new technology so as to operate the new system, just grumbled about his job being replaced by a computer and retired.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Back to an earlier comment by another poster… AE is not an NLE. That being said, there is no technical reason why you can’t work with longer pieces of video. The RAM preview will preview your work area which is the bar directly above the timeline, you can set the beginning of the work area by placing the current time indicator to your desired spot and hitting “B” and then move your CTI to the spot where you want the end of your work area and hit “N”. Performing a RAM preview will process and load as much of this work area as possible into memory and play it back at real time. Once you’ve previewed that section you can move the work area down and then ram preview another section. Changing the “magnification” setting of your comp preview window (say 50%), setting a lower resolution (say half), and or changing the preview playback frame rate (15) can help you fit more frames into RAM…
Also for some complicated comps where you have parts that are final and are not going to change, the can be pre-rendered so that AE doesn’t have to spend time processing the effects for those areas.
Check out the COW’s AE tutorials, there are a couple of tutorials on workflow tips, pre-comps, proxies, and such that could help you out.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Are you just playing the timeline (space bar) or are you doing a RAM preview (num pad zero key)?
Just playing the timeline will choke (not playing in real time) as soon as AE has to do any real work and render anything. Doing a RAM preview will get AE to render all the effects and as much of your work area into memory in order to playback that area in real time.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Avoiding it often depends on your camera.
The cause is usually recording to tape and either ejecting the tape and later putting it back in and recording again or switching to “vcr” mode rewinding and playing back the tape and then cueing it up to a blank portion of the tape to begin recording again.
Sony DVcam camera and perhaps other manufacturers have various timecode options, such as preset timecode, free run, rec run, regen, etc… In most cases leaving the camera in Rec Run and Regen will help to avoid some problems. Often on multiple tape shoots the shooter will often number the tape using the timecode’s hour mark, using a preset timecode of 1:00:00:00 for the first tape, 2:00:00:00 for the second and so on. Tricky part is remembering to switch the mode from preset to regen if you happen to turn the camera off and back on, removing the tape, switching to VCR, etc…
The majority of other consumer DV cameras don’t have as many complicated timecode options, simply rewinding or fast forwarding the tape to a section that has timecode the camera is smart enough to continue the timecode from that point.
For these reasons it is always good practice to shoot a little extra junk footage at the end of recording your subject (some people record color bars) to ensure that you have enough to fast forward the tape to an area where you have timecode but don’t overwrite footage that is important.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

In After Effects the effect is called Time Remapping. You might try the COW search to look for Time Remap, it will probably find a handful of posts.
Also, the Meyer’s book “Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, vol 2” has a good explanation and tutorial on the subject.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Probably get better results with using a Straight alpha rather than a Premult (I actually think Avid will import either), but it does an much cleaner job with straight alphas just because of the nature of it.
The problem might actually lie with the user…using terminology like “see through parts” might be an indication that they are not used to working with alphas. Avid needs to be told what to do with an alpha channel on import. There are three choices Ignore (which does what it says), Use existing and Invert. Avid has it’s roots in the film world, so Black areas in an Alpha are opaque…while what we’re used to is black areas being transparent…so in most cases in order to import a graphic or video with an alpha the option to “Invert existing” will need to be checked prior to import.

Erik