Jeff Pulera
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Sarah,
You don’t necessarily have to resize the images, but just keep in mind that if you don’t have a high-performance workstation, large images can bog down the system.
In Premiere Preferences, there is a checkbox for Default Scale to Frame Size. If you enable this PRIOR to importing the pics, they will be sized to fit the screen, but if you are planning motion on the pics anyway, leave this option OFF to utilize the full image resolution for pan/zoom.
Scale to Frame can also be turned ON/OFF by right-clicking the photo on the timeline and toggling Scale to Frame.
Since your pics are currently about twice the 720p resolution, and you DO want to zoom on them, I would use them as-is as long as the computer can keep up.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Mark,
Make sure the HDV deck is not downconverting to DV on the 1394 output.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Volodymyr,
Have you tried bypassing MAX and simply using the Adobe H.264 for Blu-ray encoding preset? With CS5 using the CUDA acceleration now, it shouldn’t take a whole lot longer to just render the files that way and be safe. I think MAX is great for laptops and slower computers, but for a hot workstation, MAX doesn’t offer the speed advantage it did a year or two ago.
Jeff Pulera
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Premiere should automatically recognize PAR, for instance importing a 1440×1080 HDV clip into a 1920×1080 or 1280×720 sequence should not require anything on your part.
In the event that Premiere does NOT properly recognize a clip, right-click the clip in the Bin and choose Modify > Interpret Footage to manually change the PAR.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Julian,
The Quadro 4000 has 3 outputs (1 DVI and 2 DisplayPort), but only 2 outputs are active at a time.
This is where a Matrox or BlackMagic device comes in handy, driving the third video output preview monitor.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
The MXO2 doesn’t care which video card you have. If you get the Quadro 4000 for Mac or PC, you will then get the benefits of the GPU acceleration part of the Mercury Playback Engine, in addition to whatever performance benefits the MXO2 offers. They both do their own thing and are totally compatible. Most of the MXO2 systems we build include the Quadro 4000 from PNY.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
If a lot of the footage is HDV, then I would edit as widescreen 16:9. Here’s the reason – if you letterbox the 16:9 as 4:3, when viewers watch the final 4:3 video on a 16:9 screen, it will be BOTH letterboxed AND pillarboxed, with a small video in the center of their screen! You’re just “dumbing down” the whole production quality.
Assuming the majority of viewers now own flat panels (16:9 native), then create the video for those viewers, unless the great MAJORITY of footage is 4:3.
For the 4:3 footage in the 16:9 project, you have a couple of options. One would be to scale the 4:3 footage up to fill the 16:9 frame, and adjust the vertical positioning as needed for proper image cropping. Now it matches the 16:9 footage, full screen.
On 4:3 clips that you do not wish to crop, rather than have black pillar bars on the side, pick a nice background graphic of some sort. Or better yet – put a copy of the clip for the background, stretch to fill 16:9 frame, and add BLUR effect. I often see this on documentary shows and it works nicely because the colors of the background then of course match what is happening in the foreground video, looks good.
If exporting a copy of the 16:9 DV video for the web, don’t use 720×480 or the video will be squished, as players don’t recognize anamorphic widescreen. Export as 854×480, using square pixels (1.0 pixel aspect).
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Julian,
Matrox offers a few RT effects for Premiere on the PC side, but not for Mac. These are Matrox Color Correction, Luma and Chroma Keying, and Matrox custom wipes. Matrox also accelerates some Adobe effects as well.
I would agree with you that when using Premiere, a user will get more benefit from Matrox on the PC side than on Mac.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Chris,
The trial and error method would take a LOT of time. The 560/minutes=bitrate thing works pretty well, or there are bitrate calculators available online. Nothing worse than coming up 2MB too large to fit, then having to start over! Been there.
Regardless of which method you use to calculate or “guesstimate” the bitrate, there are variables that can throw things off, like using motion menus that take additional space on the disc, so you must account for that as well.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Jim,
On the low end, you could go with a Grass Valley ADVC-110 or similar, which offers composite and S-video conversion to 1394 to capture as DV.
Moving up, there are the Black Magic Design Intensity units which will offer analog and HDMI capture/playback. Next in price and features is Matrox MXO2 Mini, again with analog and HDMI i/o. Also offers hardware up-down-cross conversions on capture and playback, plus RT effects plugins for Premiere.
At home, been using Matrox for years, currently on MXO2 Mini with MAX.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers