[Ht Davis]

Relink by right click on clip in project panel, make offline, then right click again and choose relink, pick the full file.

Pro-Res LT is a “lighter” or slightly compressed version of full pro-res. The advantage is space. With multiple camera angles, you will be taking up a lot more space with full pro-res, and you won’t be able to tell the difference on the output end with 1080i or lower. At 1080p, you look really, really, really, really close, and you might be able to tell. It takes up 1\2 to 2\3 the space.

Compressor has proven to make smaller files with similar settings, but that’s only because it stays more strict to what you set. I would Use AME for fixing problems with frame rates (like dropped frames causing sync problems) and go to pro-res. I might then output an h.264 file for youtube using AME, with settings that are close to internet standard speed usage; it handles it well enough for that use. However, when I try to go to Blu-Ray, I need better compression and I need access to the Progressive video 1080p format of AVCHD. Compressor also allows me to send the encoding for that to another machine, and I can rent a studio or set of computers for that for a couple of hours to get great output. I then link that to encore and build my disc as I please. AME only does SONY compatible Blu-ray formats, and has some issues with 2pass VBR with HIGH bit rate profiles (4.1 or above). Compressor handles that better. Compressor is better for some encodes, but not all. Mainly DVD and Blu-ray, which take considerably longer, and need audio and video to be encoded separately.
Also, Compressor lets me separate encodes across several machines by farming or by sending different jobs to separate machines over a network. It saves a lot of encoding time, and if you allow job segmenting, it will split the jobs between sets of machines, speeding up the encodes. I’ve heard rumors that AME is developing a similar function. Haven’t seen it yet.

[Ht Davis]

The tool acts a lot like the type tool in Photoshop. Wherever you place it, it will think you want a new typing object. Place it, type and then remember to drag over areas where you want to highlight (hold down the mouse between letters and drag a little first, then redrag or use shift and arrows to move across text).

Also, if you want to fill a set area, click a corner of the area and drag to start your shape. You can change that shape with the pointer tool.

Other than that, the text objects each act like their own page of text. You can use the justification tools to center, justify and paragraph style them; you can use the graphics options to color and glow them.

IF you want it all as one text object, draw a large square to fill the area you want the text in. You can fill it like a page of text (it will function like a screen sized page). You can vary your text and your paragraph styles just like normal text editing.

[Ht Davis]

every player has it’s own initial balance, but you’ll need to grade your own color if you want them to show up similar on all the different players.

What are you rendering from? Are you starting with an MP4 or an H264 variant or compressed video? Straight front the camera?

With the white balance set to auto, most cameras will start with one setting and stick close to it. Some don’t. When putting into premiere, you want to have one color set. Use an intermediate and you’ll get that. Basically, transcode your video to AVCintra or ProRes, or another decompressed format. This will tag a color schema to it. Use a proxy, and you’ll get the same color set, but the motion and sharpness quality will be dropped a bit. Grade the color with speed grade and you’ll tag a full color set into your edit. Then replace with your full format by relinking, and output the file. It should look the same.

Also, try checking your visual settings in your players. Set all values to middle zero and then compare. Check the preferences in VLC, as it has some advanced options that affect playback and color. Also, check the profile of your monitor. You may need to profile your monitor with special equipment. Also, I grade with the SRGB color set, which is the internet standard, and will look similar perceptually when played back in most RGB playback.

[Ht Davis]

When you speed up a clip (105%), it will have to process and drop several frames.

Try using the effect controls to keyframe and speed it up with that. Instead of redoing the frames, you will be playing the frames faster, instead of dropping them. You can do this, or you can try AE.

You might also try TWIXTOR, a plugin for AE and PrPRO.

[Ht Davis]

Quicktime is an apple product. Mpeg is a codec, independent of that.

Many problems are looking like macs here. CUDA is the problem. Go to the preferences, playback, and change mercury playback engine to OPENCL, as CUDA is not yet working on mac.

For Windows, you need to check your specs. IF you have a non-cuda capable system and have CUDA on, you need to turn it off.

For some windows systems with CUDA cards, you may need to upgrade or downgrade your driver. The CUDA architecture betas have been pushed into drivers and distributed while bugs hadn’t yet been worked out. There aren’t a lot of Beta testers.

As for the Quicktime engine… …Check it’s architecture markers. Is it 32 or 64bit? The Quicktime architecture itself is built in 64bits now. But if you have a 32bit system for talking to that architecture, you’re bound to have problems. Apple hasn’t fully updated the interface for linking to the codecs. This is not a problem with ADOBE, it is with APPLE.

You’re really better off with a WINDOWS machine with similar specs, and decent antivirus\firewall software if you are rendering right out of premiere or with AME. The only advantage of the Apple computer right now is Compressor. It does a little better at farming out sections of you compression and rendering from FCP.

Get on APPLE’s butt first. Their CUDA support is non-existent. Then get on the card manufacturer, and finally, get on apple about it’s quicktime engines and codecs.

[Ht Davis]

Check your Mercury playback engine in your preferences. Turn off CUDA. Use OpenCL

CUDA is still unsupported on Mac Yosemite. They’ve been working on the drivers, but the language is still not properly handled by Mac OS.

[Ht Davis]

Time remapping from the clip assumes you are remapping the clip to a new frame rate to be processed out. Using the KeyFrame method to remap the time is the same function logically, but the program handles it differently.

The clip remap actually changes the indexing and frame count of the referenced clip, and placing any keyframes on that… …well, which index do you use? You have two of them. One is a standard set from the file, the other still needs to be built into timecode. IF you use the first, you’re inaccurate. If you try the second, the number of frames is different, and you have to account for that.

Try duping the clip in project panel, time remap it there, and then apply the clip to a sequence. Now keyframe it. IT should work.

The reason is as stated.

IF you are going to keyframe, then keyframe your entire effect. It will all be processed together.

This is also why nesting works. Sees the nested sequence as a new clip.

[Ht Davis]

CUDA still unsupported on mac. It is a faster engine, but even with a CUDA capable card, this technology may never fully be supported. They have lagged behind in their design for mac systems, and the fact that Apple releases a software update every week doesn’t help. The life of a mac used to be 10-12 years. Now you see maybe 10-24months before your hardware is too outdated for the latest OS. Disgraceful, but still some of the best graphics based hardware, even if the software isn’t fully and readily available for it yet.

You may want to start looking into Windows based systems. Mac has been rumored to be phasing out their larger computing platforms in favor of smaller Devices with integration. They are targeting a futuristic view where their market is the everyday user with smaller computing tasks and larger wallets. I don’t think it will pan out for them. Windows started down that road and their market didn’t comply, mainly because there were so many who were dependent on the larger computing structure and processing power. They, instead returned to that and invested in their server architecture, making it more versatile. Unfortunately, most of the market for the apple device is all hype. People want to be part of the IN crowd. I used to find the apple towers and laptops to be top of the line, ready for hard work and fast processing. Now glaciers and the polar ice caps grow faster (just a note, they grow in a negative way; they actually are shrinking currently due to both natural and human effected climate change). My 2008 MBP is still as fast with many tasks (if not faster) than some of the newer models. And it still handles graphics alright without CUDA.

[Ht Davis]

CUDA is not currently supported on mac OS. Get a Macbook Pro, and make sure it has a dedicated GPU (look for discreet graphics, ATI, Radeon, terms like that). Try for at least 1gb on the graphics module, and 8-12gb ram. Other than that, shoot for 256gb or greater ssd internal drive.

Since I don’t know your exact specs for working conditions, you can swap out that SSD for an HDD of 1tb or greater, 5400rpm, but boost your ram to the max if you’re doing any live capture, and use the HDD for that.

If you’ll have some power where you work, you can plug in some RAID drives via thunderbolt or even a Dock that plugs into thunderbolt. This will allow you to dump your files to faster drives for your actual editing workflow. With a Dock, you could have several RAID and purpose them all.

I use a 2008 MBP with a 2.16ghz processor, 256mb gfx, 4gb ram 15inch, and I’ve modded it to carry 1x5400rpm hdd and 1x7200rpm hdd (removing the cd drive). I use an Esata Expresscard and the firewire ports to run several RAID drives. I edit 1080 prores proxy video just fine. My compressions take a while though. I’ve augmented that by outputting a Prores LT or full 422 to my internal HDD 5400rpm, or a network drive (hardwired net) and using compressor to do audio on my comp but video on comps I rent at a studio\lab. That way I can only rent what I need for a short time, save some moolah, and provide excellent quality. It’s fast enough for me. I put out 2-4 projects in a week to 2 weeks, with full edits, and I dump to DVD\blu-ray. Occaisionally, I’ve been asked for digital only, which allows me to still use DVD’s as a transfer medium. I burn with external burners and have a duplicator. I archive my work by using RAR and .iso images. I start them off as sparse images.

[Ht Davis]

<“Thank you for your input.
This Video will be broad casted on television. For the most part this video will be burned on to a DVD.
Do you still suggest the Blue Ray Render method that you suggested earlier?

Here is a screen shot of how I usally render my projects. But as I said befor this is the first time I have tried to render a project of this length.”>

I see several issues here. Blu-ray and DVD have Drastically different requirements. Are we talking playback on a blu-ray player or a DVD only player?
The reason I ask is because you CAN use a DVD disc to hold Blu-Ray Video. However, this has different requirements of it’s own also.

Blu-ray plays at a rate between 20-40mbps, and can be set to variable data rates to retain quality across the video, while getting the best compression possible to fit the disc. It can use Mpeg2 streams or H.264 encoding streams to compress and h264 will compress the files smaller, with better quality. It uses PCM or AC3 audio streams but is most compatible with AC3. With AVCHD streams (not available with adobe media encoder), you can use raw streams with progressive video at higher resolutions. It is, however, recommended that you make two encodes. One standard SONY\Phillips Blu-ray standard (720p or 1080i max resolution), and one with your progressive encode. AME will not help you with that. Use another encoder with AVCHD encoding capability, or the professional x.264 plugin to encode two video streams, and one audio stream.

DVD has a max roughly 10mbps for video and audio together, and it’s safer to set around 9 for the max, with a variable data rate; DVD uses MPEG2 elementary video and either PCM or AC3 based audio (most compatible is basic AC3 audio stream). The max resolution is 720×480 progressive\interlaced (though most early players only supported interlaced formats).

A Blu-ray 5 or 9 (blu-ray burned to dvd) has a max of 15mbps for audio and video, uses H264 compression, and all other aspects are the same as blu-ray standards. Progressive video will be smaller and sharper than interlaced, but interlaced gives the more cinematic motion in the encoding.

I use Compressor to encode 2 streams (using two computers or more across a network) to encode most of my blu-ray, as it allows the AVCHD blu-ray formats (progressive video and higher resolutions\data rates), as well as a standardized Blu-ray format (interlaced). It also allows me to encode the audio as a separate operation so I can limit it to a single computer and save compression time. I then use Encore CS6 to make the discs. I start by exporting my sequences to encore, then right click and locate transcode for each one, selecting first a progressive and an audio, then making an image. Then I reset status, and do the same with an interlaced format. It’s extremely difficult to tell the difference, but when you blow them back up, having a progressive format tends to yield sharper detail, and generally better quality at max size\resolution.

You can use handbrake with x264 and a -fake-interlace flag to build a compatible AVCHD format x264 raw stream. You can use any encoder that has an AVCHD blu-ray format encoder, and check that the output is a .264 or .x264 extension. Separate your audio and video encodings. Encore will be able to tell they are split and will let you select a file for both automatically; I’ve had it skip the audio input with a combined encoding, as this outputs 2 files, but lists an audio stream in the video file that is empty on it’s own but holds a reference to the audio file.

For dvd, I also use Compressor for audio. I stick to AME for video encoding though. It stays closer to basic standards, and that’s necessary for older formatting, as you don’t know what they’ll have for a player.

I’ve burned one or two Blu-ray 5\9’s before. Quality is great, but you are limited to 720p and 15mbps for your maximums on settings. Encode the same way you do other blu-ray, just set your resolution to 720p and your max data rate to 12-13 for video in AME, turn off export of audio, and export the audio separately. High motion files will be small enough for 30min-1hour to a single layer disc (an average), and less motion will allow more time to the disc, due to the capability to compress more, as the motion areas will not exceed your chosen max data rate.

Some like a constant data rate. I choose variable. VBR allows you to maintain a quality standard across the video, while CBR varies quality and sharpness to fit the data rate in a constant fashion. Most often, I use a single pass to compress with VBR. With more motion, or variation in that motion you’ll see artifacts in CBR, though it does work more efficiently with streams since it has a standard chunk sized packet. VBR works well for quality, and at the same max bit rate, you will see fewer artifacts, though you may need to raise your max bit rate to achieve the quality you want in your motion and raise the target for your standard quality. With H.264 in AME, I’ve found that 10-12mbps is great for 1080 maximums with standard scenes and 15mbps for motion. It relies more on playback decompression, but that decompression is based on lossy compression, so it can be done quickly without much overhead. 7-12mbps is great for 720p, and with interlaced formats, you can probably get away with a 10mbps max for 1080 or lower resolutions. 2k and above can require 20mbps or greater, which would require buffering on networks, and would probably not fit a blu-ray (sony) standard video, but might match a later avchd format (You’d really have to know their player was a recent model).