[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Eric,

Though I’ve never actually done it, you’re supposed to be able to put DVD material on a Blu-ray disc. I would not bother with upconverting the material to 1080i first – the Blu-ray player will do the upconvert for you upon playback using quality hardware methods, and this should work better than doing it in software.

Just encode for “MPEG-2 DVD” with a CBR 8.0 bitrate setting.

Hope this works out for, I’ve not tested it but have seen many forum posts about putting DVD files on Blu-ray.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi,

What video specs are you delivering – 1080p, 720p, frame rate? Makes a difference

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Emily,

While I’ve not specifically tried ProRes 4444 on a PC, the regular ProRes files work fine on PCs as long as the standard QT player is installed, no special plug-in needed.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Emily,

What about ProRes with alpha?

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

First and foremost, make sure that you’re using the proper Sequence preset (think Composition Settings from AE) for your needs. Do you want to deliver as SD, 720p, 1080p? Frame rate? So start there.

Next, there is a checkbox in Edit > Preferences > General for “Scale to Frame Size”. If you enable that, any media imported from that point on will automatically scale to the frame. However, depending on aspect ratio/proportions of media, you may have black bars – scale to frame does not CROP the media for you, nor would I want it to, since it would not know what part of the image was acceptable to cut off. It fits the whole image inside your frame.

For media imported prior to changing that setting, you can right-click any clip on the timeline (sequence) and manually enable/disable on a per-clip basis. If you want to do any Ken Burns-type pan and scan on images that are higher resolution than the project, do NOT use Scale to Frame! Rather, use the native resolution and then change scaling using Adobe Motion effect with keyframes, as that will use all available resolution of original media when scaling in Premiere.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Rodney,

Looks like you may be running Premiere in TRIAL mode, therefore some codecs are unavailable due to royalty/licensing issues. When you launch Premiere, does a screen come up asking you to “Sign In” or similar? Register/Activate the software and that ought to do it.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Audrey,

Your enthusiasm is admirable, but I think you’re “overthinking” the whole thing a bit much. And getting some bad info perhaps. In scouring the entire internet for information, you’re getting the good, the bad and the ugly all mixed together and perhaps losing perspective of what is a “normal” editing experience to expect with Premiere.

Premiere is designed to edit most formats natively. You don’t need to first convert to something lossless or uncompressed. I’ve been editing NLE professionally for over 15 years and have never used uncompressed video, or had any need to. I also seldom use “lossless” codecs – I just edit the native camera material, and might use lossless only to archive an edit master copy, or as an intermediate. Without a 4 or 8-drive RAID array costing thousands of dollars, your computer won’t be able to play uncompressed HD clips because the drive simply is not fast enough to move the data. Nothing to do with Premiere. Uncompressed files are actually EASIER for Premiere to play, since each frame does not need to first be decompressed for playback, as camera codecs require. All about drive speed. And having a 3TB source file? Unheard of, unless making a movie in Hollywood. Not typical at all.

The issues you’ve read about with Premiere having trouble with some formats is because those formats were not meant to be edited. MOST video editors are starting out with files from video cameras, or something you captured from a capture card or screen grab software. That is what editing is all about – taking raw footage and putting together a program. The folks having trouble are taking finished videos (pulled from the web no doubt), that are already in a DELIVERY FORMAT such as .wmv or Divx, and trying to re-edit those clips. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Those formats are highly-compressed and optimized for delivery/viewing and do not lend themselves to being edited again.

I would disagree with the definition of “scratch disk”. A video editing system will have a dedicated “VIDEO” drive where your clips are stored. This is your fastest, largest drive (a RAID is a good choice). When importing, editing and rendering video, Premiere creates a LOT of small, temporary files in the background, transparent to the user. THOSE files are what you would send to a “scratch” disk. The TEMP files. Not the VIDEO files themselves.

Years ago, with small IDE hard drives, setting up several scratch disks (audio, render, etc.) could be quite beneficial to overall performance. With today’s screaming fast computers and hard drives, I think a lot of the benefit is lost. A large, fast video drive is capable of handling it all. If you want to have scratch drives, you are welcome to, just saying it is not a necessity by any means.

This does bring up a point – many new PC builds use an SSD system drive (C:) and those are not very large. Premiere does by default write Media Cache files to the C: drive and that can quickly fill up an SSD if you don’t keep the Cache cleaned/maintained, so in that case, it can be beneficial to designate another drive for that purpose. But setting up a specific “audio scratch” drive for instance is not really needed. A scratch drive does not need to be external, and for a PC, Thunderbolt is not a viable option anyway (mostly Mac, PC side is not developed much yet).

I have a 3-year-old Core i7 with a single RAID 0 video drive and I edit and export all kinds of HD formats and it works just fine. If I was suffering from slow editing, long exports, etc. then I would add more drives if I thought it would help, but I don’t need to. The system is quite responsive as is.

Back to hard drives – seeing as SSDs are quite small and expensive compared to SATA drives, I’m not recommending them for video. System drive and Scratch would be a good use as you’ve determined already. For VIDEO, you want SATA 6Gb, 64mb cache, 7200rpm units. Avoid “green” drives, they are low-performance. If you can use TWO of the SATA drives configured as RAID 0, you effectively DOUBLE the speed and size of the video drive and that works great for HD editing. Can be almost as cost-effective sometimes to just get an external RAID, with eSATA or USB 3.0 connections, but internal is fine.

Video cards – double 780s are overkill for editing (unless you feel you need it for the gaming side). There is such a thing as an unbalanced system. For instance a monster computer, with slow hard drives. Or a good i7 computer with monster video cards that can process more data than the computer can handle anyways. The video cards are “idling” and not able to be fully utilized (for editing).

You didn’t say what utility you would use to capture gaming clips, but the Lagarith codec should be good. I use that for an intermediate codec in one of my HD workflows and it plays fine (on my old computer).

I’m not totally sold on the Windows 8 thing and would use Windows 7 Pro 64-bit myself, up to you.

I hope this info helps clarify a few things. Put some fast storage in the machine and playback will be fine, no worries there.

Thank you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Bruce,

You need to make it quite clear to the client that HD video is ALWAYS, ALWAYS a widescreen 16:9 format and when converting 4:3 source to HD, it WILL be pillarboxed (black bars on sides). You might have an option to center-crop the upconversion, which will expand the 4:3 source to fill the 16:9 frame, but that further reduces quality and crops some of the original source frame as well…

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

My vote is for a single H.264 file (.mp4) that should work with PC, Mac, Smart TV, etc. universally.

You already have 9 files, why complicate with multiple formats of each.

As for a player/menu interface, the only one I’ve used comes with Camtasia, but I think that is PC only anyway and would limit your options. I’ve used that for tutorials for PC users.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

I have used third-party MPEG-2 encoding methods which resulted in not having chapter markers for Encore. In that case, I grab a notepad and jot done the timecode of each marker in Premiere, and then just manually type those into Encore. That should be an option in any authoring program. Of course, we’d all love to reduce manual labor, but sometimes old-school methods get the job done.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers