[Jarheck]

I like Steve have since upgraded my system and no longer use the RTX 100. The system does do as advertised if you have a system that is on Matrox’s supported list, I mainly used the card for its extemely fast green screen work, but now it just sits in a box. If any one is interested I would gladly sell it for a very reasonable price w/o the adobe software, otherwise it is going on ebay here in the next few days. Just shoot me an email jared@absolutevideo.com.

[Jarheck]

I had a similar issue, it required me removing the OpenGL plugin. Adobe has since released a patch to 6.5.1 and this seemed to fix the issue. Check out the download section on their website.

[Jarheck]

I am going to have to play with this a little more but but from first glance it does not look like you loose any resolution, but instead just resets the scale ratio. I first thought it was going to cause a loss in resolution but after playing with it and doing some extreme scaling I have been hard pressed to tell much of a difference except the scale percentages were different when pulled into a similar part of the image.

So if your high rez picture has to scale down to say 25% to fit in the screen, if you used the Scale to project dimensions it would reset the scale so 25% is now equal to 100%. This would allow you to make finer movements and adjustments as the difference between 25% and 26% would be much larger change than 100% and 101%.

If someone else would like to confirm this that would be great.

Thanks

Jared

[Jarheck]

Randall,

Thanks for the advice, I plan on getting a few more lights as money permits.

As for the tripod, I currently use a Libec H60 setup and it has not held up well, the legs have fallen out of their mounts and the head has developed a loose spot. This has only been under light use for two years (started breaking down after a year). But maybe we had a lemon. So I am willing to pay a bit more for something that is of a higher quality build.

[Jarheck]

Thanks for your advice, I guess I should have been a bit clearer is that the main items I would like to focus on are the necessities: Camera, Tripod, Mics, and Lighting Kit. The rest is nice and I may get when I have the money. The list is by no means in an order my preference, I think it just puts it there in the order I have chosen it.

The primary questions I have:

Best bang for the buck lighting kit, is the Lowell DV 4 light kit a good one? Experiences with it? Recommendations for anything better?

Same questions apply for the Tripod, Miller or Cantoni head? A good set of sticks? And recommended head sizes, I wouldn’t mind a larger weight capacity for those times when I do rent a larger camera. Has any one used these? Recommendations?

Same questions for the Mics

Thanks again for everyone’s help

[Jarheck]

Your system problems could be cause from a few different things.

First – what format is your source file? DV? Uncompressed? Mpeg? If it is Uncompressed or even DV your notebook hard drive may not be fast enough (most notebook drives are only 4200rpm or max 5400rpm and you really need a 7200rpm drive to get a good transfer rate). A co-worker of mine tried to edit DV footage on his laptop and we could not get it to work smoothly until we used a firewire attached 7200rpm hard drive. If you are trying to edit an Mpeg you should look into the Mainconcept plugin for PPro as PPro on its own does not favor Mpegs at all and have cause my system to repeatedly hang until I purchaced Mainconcept.

The reason Windows Movie Maker works as it converts everything to a WMV which is what it edits natively, Premiere does DV natively. 3dsMax is a whole other world that is not for video so I am not going to go there.

Just make sure when you edit in Premiere that you are using a DV Format file and be sure your hard drive that maintain a high enough transfer rate to play back smoothly.

Hope that helps.

Jared

[Jarheck]

Check Adobe’s website, there is an update to 6.5.1 that fixes that same Open GL issue I had with my Nvidia card.

[Jarheck]

When you export your file be sure it is 720×480 (for NTSC DV footage) with a .9 pixel ratio, Premiere should have a preset for this as it is standard for NTSC video. Exporting other sizes may cause MyDVD to re-encode your video (reducing the quality), DVD playback issues, and/or distorted picture (stretched tall or wide).

If you export as an Mpeg 2, your transcoding will be much shorter in MyDVD if at all (it may transcode your audio into a Dolby Digital form). As I said before I would export with a 7-8mb max bit rate.

For your future reference, I would never put more that 2 hrs on a 4.7GB disc, as quality begins to take a real hit. You can get larger discs aka. Dual-Layer 8.4GB, but they are expensive and many dvd players have a big issue reading them (they lock up when changing layers).

[Jarheck]

I don’t know if that was a typo but the correct export settings should be 720×480 29.92fps (standard DV NTSC). Codecs are what is used to encode and decode (COde-DECode) audio and video files, there are literally hundreds of different ones of varying quality and file sizes. I am not too familar with Premier 6.5 so I don’t know if you can export an Mpeg 2 file (type of file required to create a DVD). So I would recommend exporting a quicktime file and setting it to the DV/DVCAM codec (should be under compression settings/type in the quicktime options). As far as MyDVD goes, when it is transcoding it is actually taking that movie you exported from Premiere and converting it into an Mpeg 2 file to create the DVD. Some where in the program you should have the option to adjust the transcode settings (aka Bit Rate, Quality, Single/Dual Pass). Now to maintain the highest quality these settings must be adjusted to the length of your program, the lower the bit rate the more you can fit on the disc but the quality also degrades. If you are under an hour I would recommend a bit rate in the neighborhood of 7-8mb/s (7000-8000kb/s). I also don’t recommend more than 2hrs on a 4.7GB disc.

[Jarheck]

I need a little bit more information on your project before I can help. First, what is the length of your project, as this affects the bit rate you will encode at. Secondly, what are you using to encode your MP2 (Cleaner, Adobe Media Encoder, your DVD authoring software?). Finally, what program are you using to create your DVD?