[Jeff Greenberg]

Not in front of my system now – I can’t recall if Premiere Pro will let you modify the alpha channel to ignore, but I know After Effects will absolutely do that.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

The methods to do this in compressor are…fair at best. You’d run the Frame controls at the highest quality (extremely long recompression) and run the frame size with padding.

You might find Instant HD better looking than what compressor does and that you can run in inside of FCP is a nice bonus.

One note – you can’t judge how it looks in FCP unless you’re at 100% quality. Better yet, output a DVD and look at it there.

My only question – if it’s going out as an SD DVD, you’re upconverting everything to then downconvert it for playback. Why not downconvert all your HD material instead.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Unfortunately, I don’t think you can.

But I’m not 1000% sure. I know that FCP7 with DV material (on a DV timeline – with no effects) would not recompress anything – it would be nearly the same file.

You could try dragging a clip and letting FCP conform the timeline to match the footage – warning – this will be a non-standard sequence. You may get RED/render audio – but as long as the video is gray (not green), FCP is handling it natively (which many people will advise against – h.264 isn’t a stable codec for FCP7 to work in.)

Add your titles at the end as planned. (Punch the production company in the face for not giving you editable masters.) Export a QuickTime file – I think it’ll have to be a QuickTime h.264 and not an MPEG4 file – but it MAY work.

Let us know!

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Two thoughts

First, you could use the Apple TV preset – it’s an MPG4 h.264 file and should look decent.

Technically, the h.264 codec can be in one of three major architectures – MOV/Flash/MPEG4. If it’s in QuickTime (MOV) that’s fine – but you should check with the festival to see if they’ll accept it. They may be working with a hardware playback mechanism that only works with true mpg4 files.

Ok, settings.
QuickTime movie.
Encoder tab – Video Settings: Change format to h.264, current fps, Best Quality (multi-pass) and set the Data rate at 20,000 (far more than you need; you probably can get away with 8mbs)
Audio settings; AAC, 48k stereo, 160kbs

Frame controls: Leave the frame controls to automatic – it should properly detect and handle interlacing
Filter Controls: don’t touch
Geometry Controls: Set the frame size to 100% of source

This should leave you with something that looks nearly identical to the original.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

After you replied that it didn’t work – I went and actually tested and built one that did.

I’m just going to reiterate what Craig said here (and add a little of my own info.)

1) Check the file actually has audio – perhaps compress it to some other format (such as the youtube preset in Compressor.) Don’t encode the whole piece, just one min or so (you can set in/out points in the viewer or in FCP)
2) Use the DVD (or other MPEG2 preset. Customize it as following
Encoder tab: Switch the stream usage to Generic
Encoder; extras tab: Multiplexed MPEG1/layer 2 audio on, program stream (MPEG) or Transport stream (TS)
Save this preset
3) Test this preset.
4) Report to us if it worked or not (also, tell us how you’re monitoring it if it doesn’t work – QTX? QT7? VLC?)

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Move the material locally and then see if it exhibits this behavior. If it does, then yes, it’s something about the server (for example, it’s likely that you’re not going to get playback if you’re accessing wirelessly)

Do this one step and you’ll know.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

I don’t believe there is. There is a function in AE where you can do stuff like that…but not between the two apps.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Nope. Since Premiere Pro doesn’t rewrap into QuickTime, this won’t work. And your FCP7 users? They’re going to have to learn sooner or later.

The only way you can ensure compatibility (and this will suck…) is to ingest in FCP7, then xml and work in Premiere Pro – that way they’ll be able to get to the media.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Mac or PC? What version of the OS?

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

I don’t think this is a Premiere Pro issue…directly.

This feels like something with your video card – that it’s not passing the information after a sleep. You might want to try repairing permissions / checking the HD for damage. Also you might want to toss the Premiere Pro prefs…

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website