[Jeff Pulera]

It’s been my experience with various versions of Premiere over many years that you can never go backwards. Projects made in older versions of Premiere can always be opened in newer versions, but not the reverse.

However…you might be able to do this: have your associate Export as Final Cut Pro XML format (File > Export > FCP XML).

You can create a New Project, then open the XML file using IMPORT. I’ve heard of this before, but had never tried it. Just did, and it worked! No guarantee that all effects and transitions will translate perfectly, but for cuts everything should be the same. Certainly worth a try.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Zoe,

The others are on the right track, thinking as I was that you can simply encode for Blu-ray and send them that file, and they can then author that to Blu-ray without transcoding again. The screen grab shown was for “MPEG-2 Blu-ray”, but “H.264 Blu-ray” would be recommended to squeeze out maximum quality, is more efficient than MPEG-2.

Note that this encode will produce two separate files, for audio and video. That is normal for disc authoring software needs. The audio will normally be .wav, but you should be able to switch that to Dolby .ac3 under Audio tab in export settings and that will create a far smaller audio file for emailing, and Encore would later convert to .ac3 anyway, so nothing lost.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Open your Sequence, Select All and Copy All (Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C). Open a NEW sequence, and Paste (Ctrl + V). Copies entire contents of sequence into another.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Alvin,

The Adobe Mercury Engine was introduced with CS5 – is your display card supported? Using Mercury Engine will help performance in many ways.

Also, when I bumped my RAM from 8GB to 16GB in my older Core i7-2600 machine a couple of years ago, I did notice a speed up in MPEG-2 exports for example, so if you have low memory, that might be a cheap upgrade that would possibly help performance.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Agreed, single-layer is perfect for 90 minutes. And no need to pay for a glass master, most places now will accept a DVD-R or the ISO file and burn copies from it.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Edwin,

No one is making you render anything. Even if you have a red bar, if the timeline plays back well enough to get the editing done, don’t worry about it. When you export at the end, it gets encoded straight from source to destination for best quality, without any intermediate copy being involved.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

What is the total length of the content? Can you post a screen shot of the encoding settings you used to create the MPEG-2 DVD content?

It is possible that due to an error in how your buttons and menus are set up in Encore, that clips are being “counted” more than once, which would create duplicates on the DVD, increasing size. If you can post a shot of the Encore menu branching that might help.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Lou,

Why not fake it in Premiere Titler?

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

I had to use Unsharp Mask on some long videos last year to fix footage that was slightly out of focus, and yes it does take a day to render – and I was on a workstation PC, not a laptop! If you understand how Unsharp Mask actually works, then you will realize and appreciate why it takes so long. Google it. An incredible amount of calculations must take place for every single HD frame.

As Tero asked, why the render preview? When I used Unsharp Mask and realized how slow it would be, what I did was apply ONLY the Unsharp Mask to my raw footage, and exported that raw, sharpened footage to a “lossless” codec. That was my new “original” footage to work the edit with, all sharpened up. Then I was back to normal render times for whatever else I needed to do to the footage, rather than trying to apply Unsharp at the same time as all other effects.

You mention Denoising, and if you mean for video, that can take just as long as Unsharp Mask. Again, as above, if all my footage is noisy, I will just Denoise first thing, exporting to a lossless codec, then begin editing with that clean footage from the start. If I apply a Denoiser plugin effect in the Premiere timeline, everything grinds to a halt and I just can’t work with that applied. So I just bite the bullet and do the overnight render (export) first, then work with the new cleaned clips that behave normally.

Back to rendering the timeline – what is the Preview Codec set to? You are adding a generation of quality loss by rendering timeline previews, and these will have to be converted again when you export. Hopefully the preview codec is decent, such as ProRes. And of course you must check “Use Previews” when exporting, or you are rendering it all from scratch again anyway. I don’t export using Previews, for best quality export using raw footage.

I normally do not use Max Depth, as I understand that is for 10-bit footage, or effects with high bit depth. I don’t use it for my 8-bit sources. And as Tero said, do not use Max Render Quality unless the output is being scaled, like 1080 to 720 or HD to SD, only increases render times. Those checkboxes increase render times.

You mentioned wanting to add the Denoiser after you convert to 720. That doesn’t make sense to me, because you’ve already added other effects, and rendered them out, and scaled the video, so the noise is just getting worse with each re-compression cycle. Noise doesn’t compress well due to it’s randomness. I would denoise earlier in the game. Like before doing any editing/effects.

You’re really at a disadvantage if the footage requires both the Unsharp Mask and Denoiser. Not sure which I’d even attack first.

Good luck with all this, and be prepared for some long waits.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Paul,

Haven’t run into that before. Maybe try MPEG StreamClip or HandBrake software to convert (both free).

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers