[Jeff Pulera]

The CS4 drivers for the Matrox RT.X2 card have been out for several weeks already, and I’d imagine that it would be harder to write the drivers for RT.X2 because of all the realtime Matrox effects plugins involved, it’s very tightly integrated with Premiere.

https://www.matrox.com:80/video/en/press/releases/adobe_cs4/

Regardless of the programming complexities, the hardware companies can’t leave the editors hanging for too long. There was plenty of complaining on the Matrox forum, but they delivered. Maybe the BM users need to make more noise 😉

Jeff Pulera

[Jeff Pulera]

It would be helpful to know what you want to do with the finished video. There are MANY presets in the Adobe Media Encoder for different purposes, including DVD, YouTube, iPod, internet etc.

DV video uses about 13GB per hour, so the size you are seeing is normal for the finished clip at full size, full quality. Anything you encode for the web (.wmv for instance) will use a smaller frame size and more compression (lower quality) and thus will result in smaller files

Jeff Pulera
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[Jeff Pulera]

You have the tools you need then, as Encore is included with Premiere Pro CS4. Encode video using 6.0 CBR and 90 minutes should fit just fine

Jeff

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

You can purchase an inkjet printer that also handles discs for as little as $50-60, there is no reason to use paper labels in this day and age, to many issues with labels

Jeff Pulera

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Devon,

PC or Mac? And how long is your project? What editor do you currently use – it will typically provide MPEG-2 output.

For the PC, a good stand-alone encoder is Sorenson Squeeze 5, but there are many others as well

I use Adobe Encore CS3 for DVD authoring, it’s included with Premiere Pro

Jeff Pulera
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[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Rishele,

What you are referring to is a Split Edit. You would right-click the video clip on the timeline and select “Unlink”, then you can edit the audio and video clips independently so you could cut the newscaster video and insert new video while the underlying audio of the newscaster continues on.

Jeff Pulera
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[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Mark,

I think the first consideration would be which cameras/HD format will you choose? This can make a difference for editing. Will you work with HDV, AVCHD, XDCAM EX?

I personally use the Matrox RT.X2 and love it, I do a lot of 1080i HDV editing, all real time, no rendering! You don’t want to render all your effects for HD, it is quite intensive.

RT.X2 does not currently support AVCHD in realtime, so again, good idea to decide on cameras before the edit system.

Jeff Pulera
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[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Chris,

A little more info would be helpful – what is the source, destination (DVD?), project settings?

If working with widescreen DV or HDV, then simply Export using a 16:9 DVD setting and the DVD player should recognize when using a 4:3 display and it will letterbox the footage on output.

If you want actual 4:3 video with black bars, then edit the footage in a 4:3 project

Jeff Pulera
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[Jeff Pulera]

Another opinion 😉

I generally stick with CBR encoding, especially for shorter programs. I have seen players stutter on playback with the up and down encoding rates (spikes) on DVD-R, keeping it steady seems better.

Also, some players can have playback issues with high data rates on burned media. I’d use 7.0 CBR as a maximum, the viewer will not see a difference between 7 or 8 quality.

The purpose of VBR, or Variable Bit Rate, is to maximize the efficiency of the encoding for long programs, finding the best compromise between quality and available space on the disc by allocating a higher bitrate for complex scenes and a lower bitrate for simpler scenes. For a short program where ALL the video can easily be encoded at a high setting uniformly, I don’t see the advantage of VBR.

I prefer consistent quality when the space is available. For longer programs, the formula of 560/minutes will tell you the encoding rate, for instance 560/90=6.2, round down to 6.0 and you have overhead for menus and such. Formula assumed Dolby audio encoding.

Jeff Pulera
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[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Scott,

There is no “80 minute DVD”, but there ARE 80 minute CD-R discs. Are you SURE it’s a DVD-R blank?

To be clear about burning the VIDEO_TS folder to disc, the burning software must support burning of “DVD VIDEO” files. Burning as DATA will not work, it must be specially formatted as a DVD video disc during burning. NERO is one application that will do this.

Jeff Pulera
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