[John Doba]

Welcome to the club.

Isn’t it wonderful not to be able to actually render / create the movie from your sequence? Ah, Adobe, thanks. CS3’s Export Movie command was easy, quick, logical—couldn’t let that remain the case I guess.

My decked out, top of the line Macbook Pro has the same problem. I can wait a week and it’ll never encode the movie. Finally I have to Force Quit.

I have a pretty large project, not so many layers but ~1 hr 20 mins in length. I guess it’s just too big for Adobe… Time to move soon to Final Cut I guess…

[John Doba]

I too am having problems with Media Encoder, and other problems. CS3 worked better overall. Page Up/Down to Next Edit point doesn’t work on this Mac.

It seems idiotic for Adobe to change a good thing and make it worse. Export Movie from CS3 worked fine; now, my decked out Macbook Pro CS4 has stopped encoding totally; it just hangs up, never loads nor encodes. I’ve tried numerous times, waited all night—never encodes, just hangs up… Guess I’ll reload the stupid thing…

[John Doba]

Vince, thank you for your help!

I try to learn as much as I can about the software, but I’ve never seen this sort of info, didn’t know that Premiere prefers uncompressed files. I tried importing an MPEG4 last night, but Premiere spat it out.

The file I mentioned in my post, was indeed an MOV, it did get recompressed, but I was ripping my hair out trying to figure out why Premiere STOPPED reading an MOV it had previously read! A tutorial on optimizing files and quality—boy that would be nice.

I have a pastiche project using digitized old VHS tapes and internet stills. I don’t mind the native mediocre quality of the VHS, what chaps me is the intolerable degradation upon rendering. I started in iMovie then switched and imported all my DV and MOV from the Mac onto the XP/Premiere box. Things looked good in the Premiere project window, but when I rendered and viewed them in viewers like MediaPlayer or QT, I’ve been noticing quality loss, horrible pixellations, sizzly stills, surge-y colors, on the rendered files —didn’t matter whether I rendered to AVI, MOV, or other formats; some were worse than others, but none was acceptable.

I had to transfer files back to the Mac for an independent viewing test. I’ve found that rendering to MOV from Premiere seems to produce the best results. (By the way, Windows QT displayed the MOV’s horribly, but in Mac QT they look fine! How is this possible?)

My intended final format is dvd video discs to use along with live music. The final dvd-video discs look fine on my Sony TV. But it’s tough to have confidence because NONE of my rendered attempts have looked very good on the computer screen when I view them in WMP/Quicktime/Nero, etc. I’ve had to burn various dvd-video attempts and use trial and error to find good results. I guess once I render I’ll just view the rendered file as new source in Premiere and test with that, now that I know I can get decent results using MOV renders.

Again, thanks for your insight. I’d be grateful if you could direct me to any general guidelines/tutorials on file optimization, optimizing quality, &c.
John Doba
Houston
PS I’m using a Sharp monitor that has multi-inputs. I’m using its VGA, but maybe if I use one of my dvi outs from my GEForce display card, I could go into a TV input and view that way as well? Isn’t there a way to do this or something like this? Thanks again!

[John Doba]

You can switch the View in both the assets/project window and in the Timeline to show an icon of the asset. I think this is what you mean…