[Jeff Brown]

What are your Project settings? (timebase, format)
What is the captured footage timebase?
What version of Premiere are you using?

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Uou might get a good approximation from plug-ins, but from my experience, nothing looks like true (painstaking, laborious, mind-numbing) rotoscoping.

-j

[Jeff Brown]

Try downloading the codec from Sony. That might be all you need. But: good luck finding it on Sony’s site. It took many search attempts for me to find the XDCam codec/software (which was free to download once I found it).

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

If you have a web site, you should be able to offer secure FTP access via your ISP’s control panel, or similar. And if you don’t have a web site: why not!? ;>)

I’m not a fan of “3rd-party” FTP sites, but that’s a personal thing (no real technical basis for it); I just want the control over hosting things on my own domain.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

One big issue is: what is your source footage? Improving that is usually the easiest way to get a better key.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Another $0.02… For shooting, if you have a choice and are in NTSC-land (North America), I’d recommend “30P” — which is, of course, really 29.97P, unless you are shooting high-action content like sports. Non-interlaced (progressive) is nicer to work with in many ways, and certainly translates better to computer screens (which are progressive). If you have a camera where you can control “shutter speed,” some test shooting should find a sweet spot that eliminates any “strobing” look while not blurring things too much.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Yes, you don’t want to embed a video in a SWF; you want to use the FLV component in Flash to do a “progressive download” (not true streaming, but close to it) of the FLV file. Try some Adobe tutorials on Flash authoring for adding the button/interactive parts; if you can afford a small price, I’d recommend browsing any of the O’Reilly Publishing books about Flash and ActionScript. Or anything else computer-related; O’Reilly seems to produce consistently good material.
From my limited experience, I don’t think you can add anything but “plain” video to sites such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Be prepared to spend some time wrapping your brain around Flash authoring: it’s quite powerful, but not immediately intuitive.

hope that’s some help,
Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

I’m not sure where you found the workflow, but: Once the links go into Premiere, you have a video file. Not an interactive file. The images might show up, but you will destroy any “button-ness” the overlays have. You would need to do your video first, then add interactivity in the Flash environment. An FLV file is, for all practical purposes, an MPEG-4 file. Interactivity requires an SWF file (or JavaScript, or HTML, etc.)

Hope that helps,
Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

The important question is what do you _want_ it to look like?

;>)

[Jeff Brown]

[Laura Gruszczynski] “Doesn’t 24p give a more filmic look to the footage?”

I’d call this a “common misconception.” Film does typically run at 24 FPS, but what really gives something a “film look” as we might think of it is (in no particular order) the gamma curve of film, the cinematographer with 20 years of experience, shallow depth-of-field and no zoom lenses, a great colorist in post-production, a lighting crew with a grip truck… you get the idea ;>)

-jeff