[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Sarah,

Download to PC, RUN, then the codec is installed and will be available in any app such as Premiere or After Effects or any other editing software. Choose AVI as the format, then Lagarith should be available under Codec drop down.

Have Adobe apps closed when installing any new codec.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

What Chris said. H.264 is a delivery codec, very highly compressed, so you don’t want to composite with that!

While Uncompressed video is the ultimate, the file sizes are outrageous. I often use the free Lagarith .avi codec for PC, which is mathematically lossless, so really providing the same quality as uncompressed – with much smaller files.

https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

On a Mac, you could use ProRes HQ as your intermediate.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Emmanuelle,

That is hard to say and depends on a few different factors.

1. How far do you want to zoom in during editing?

2. What is the physical size of the print you are scanning?

Editing software does not care about “dpi” – it is meaningless really. We have to talk about PIXELS – what resolution is the scanned digital image?

Example – you are editing HD at 1920×1080 pixels. Therefore, any image you want to put into that program should be at least 1920×1080 pixels minimum, to fill the frame. Larger if you want to zoom in, right?

So maybe you have an 8×10 photo and it is Landscape format, so really 10×8 inches. Scanning at 150dpi would result in a file of 1500×1200 pixels. We can see that the result will NOT be large enough to fill the 1920×1080 “frame” we wish to put it in, so we need to scan at a higher dpi.

A 300dpi scan gives us 3000×2400. This would allow the editor to “zoom in” on the photo to some degree. You will need to experiment and see how far you can go before you run out of pixels and start “blowing up” the image, which is where you begin to lose quality. Maybe scan at 600dpi to be able to really zoom in on a face in the crowd!

Here’s where it gets fun – what if the source is a wallet size, or 3×2 or 4×5? Then that same 300dpi scan comes up far short of the pixels needed to fill that HD frame, so the dpi of the scan needs to be bumped up accordingly. 600dpi? 1200dpi? More??

So that’s why I said dpi means nothing to your editing software. A very small photo scanned at 300dpi would be useless for editing, while a large photo scanned at the same 300dpi would be more than enough to work with. So it’s the pixels resulting from the scan that we are concerned with.

I’d try a few samples and figure out what resolution the image needs to be for you to zoom in to where you need to.

A tip – when adding pan/zoom motion to high-res stills, sometimes fine details will flicker during movement (teeth, eyeglass frames, etc). I’ve found that adding a small amount of Gaussian Blur in Photoshop totally fixes that! Try like just a 0.2 blur and that should do it. Loss of overall detail is not even noticeable, but end result motion looks 100% better. Just don’t blur the original image, do a Save As to make a blurred copy to edit with.

When keyframing movement with Adobe Motion, you may want to add Ease Out/Ease In to starting and ending keyframes for smooth motion rather than abrupt, jerky stops and starts. Right-click the starting keyframe and choose Temporal Interpolation > Ease Out for example. The movement will ramp up smoothly, like a car leaving a stop sign. Same for coming to a smooth landing on your subject after a zoom, apply Ease In to final keyframe.

Do a search on this forum or the online for “Ken Burns Effect” to learn more about the whole process.

Good luck with your project

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

I’m in the US where 29.97fps has long been the standard, so in that case, 24p (23.976fps) does have quite a different look! However, as Dave stated, how is 24p going to look vastly different than 25p? Who would see the difference?

I think you may be missing a piece of the puzzle. TV broadcasts use interlaced video. Meaning that each frame is split into two fields, the even and odd scan lines. So in the case of a PAL TV broadcast, it is not 25p, but rather 50i. There are 25 frames split into 50 fields. Each field is captured in 1/50 of a second, so there is a temporal difference between each field, which means they are captured at different times.

So, when viewing 50i, each of the 50 fields has small movements of the subject (or the panning), so it looks much smoother than 25p or 24p. That is the difference I believe you are seeing, or looking for. The difference not between 25p and 24p, but rather between 50i and 25p. With 25p, there are no fields. Each frame is complete, no fields, so motion is being captured only 25 times a second rather than 50.

Shoot and edit at 25p. This should provide the filmic look you are after, without the bad side effects of converting 24p to 25p. If your production ends up on TV, you can certainly convert 25p to 50i easy enough.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Dave nailed it, but I would add, do they really need to get a tape from you, or can you deliver a digital file? Next issue, most cameras shoot at around 24Mbps, maybe 35Mbps for XDCAM. So what are you shooting with? Shooting at 24Mbps and converting to a 50Mbps format for delivery does not give the source 50Mbps quality…will they notice?

Many broadcasters have requirements that the source be at least 50Mbps, and having 4:2:2 color while most cameras compress with 4:2:0 color.

One way to really improve the source would be to use something like an Atomos Ninja 2 which takes the live feed from the camera and records as Apple ProRes, thus giving you the high-bitrate 4:2:2 source recording to work with, having far less compression than what the camera would provide on the SD card natively.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

If you are referring to “1080i/576i” this simply means it can output HD or SD. In the US it would be called 1080i/480i”.

I can’t speak for PAL cameras, but in the US, they mostly output 1080i even if camera is set to record 1080p. The output is 1080i because that is compatible with all displays while 1080p is not always supported.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Try this – copy memory card contents direct to hard drive, without using any Sony software. Copy ENTIRE contents of card, not just the video clips. You need all the folders as well!

If copying multiple cards, copy each to a unique folder, do not mix contents of multiple cards together!

Once all is copied to drive, import into Premiere using “Media Browser” which is normally tabbed at lower left of screen if not familiar with it.

When you have longer camera recordings that get split into multiple files on the card, importing as described above means that Premiere will import the many “spanned clips” as ONE long clip, without glitches. All seamless that way.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Just an FYI, YouTube does not play WMV files from their site, they are converting what you sent back to H.264 as soon as it’s uploaded to them. Can’t explain why your H.264 encodes were behaving badly though.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Fernando,

What are your computer specs? Type of footage being edited? Sequence settings? Export settings? Can you post a screen grab of Export Settings from Media Encoder?

There is no reason it should take that long. And it doesn’t make sense that “Use Previews” would speed it up unless you had in fact pre-rendered a bunch of effects on the timeline…but you said you hadn’t used any.

Did you maybe use Warp Stabilizer at all? That renders very slowly.

Or if frame rates are mismatched between footage and sequence or export settings, things like that can slow export times due to conversion. There is more to the story, something is off in the workflow and I don’t think your issue has been resolved in any way.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

GoPro footage is notorious for having playback issues at times, even on fast workstations. You will not see any degradation by converting in GoPro Studio. I would choose .avi over .mov since QuickTime is 32-bit and slows down the 64-bit Premiere.

Not sure it would make any difference, but try importing GoPro clips with Media Browser rather than File > Import in Premiere.

Benefits of converting the footage with Studio are:

* Much easier playback on timeline
* Edit long clips before converting, keeping only parts you need
* Fisheye removal option available if needed

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers