[Jonathan Shohet]

I think this is what you are looking for for number 1. You need After Effects for it, though.

https://www.videocopilot.net/presets/film_fade_transition/

Don’t know if there’s a way to do it in premiere…

[Jonathan Shohet]

[Brendan Coots] “but universally across the board most people report miserable experiences using HDV in any app, especially AE”

I don’t know on what you are basing this claim. I know of many people, both personally and from forums, that share my experience of not having issues.
I don’t want to offend Dace LaRonde, I am sure he is much more experienced then I am, but declaring flat out that AE DOES NOT PLAY NICE with HDV, is irresponsible in my humble opinion, as someone, based on this advice, may go out and spend cash on a capture card/raid array he dosn’t absolutely need.
Just try it first for yourself!
I have to wonder if there people out there that work in uncompressed who never even tried working with native HDV in AE…

[Brendan Coots] ”
“You can preview your work on an sd monitor in your editing app via your camera/firewire connection.”

You can, but you can’t trust that at all for color correction work”

Again, I’m not arguing the merits of proper capture card/professional monitor. Someone suggested that you can burn a DVD and view it on your television, and in this case monitoring through your camera is a more efficient solution. It at least allows you to check for interlacing issues, and understand general color differences between your computer screen and TV screen (especially if you are working with LCD screens). The question boils down to what budget you have. Many people are monitoring through camera, and find it an acceptable compromise until they can afford a proper monitoring solution. It certainly is a compromise, that’s true enough.

cheers.

[Jonathan Shohet]

I’m not disputing HDV m2t/mpeg’s are far from ideal formats for compositing.
However I have never had any issues working with them in AE, at least not any issues that are not present in DV, or any other compressed format as well. Of course processing time are longer, do to their more complex high compression, but that’s about it.
An uncompressed workflow is great, sure, but very costly (capture card, lots of hard drive space, hardware raid controller and so on).
Start with what you have, invest your money first in lots of RAM, a good processor and motherboard, and an editing app.
If you feel that you need to, you could always add the capture card later.
You can preview your work on an sd monitor in your editing app via your camera/firewire connection.
If you absolutely need hd monitoring, you can get the Blackmagic card which is quite cheap. It will also let you capture uncompressed via hdmi, but again, remember that you need a fast large raid array to work with uncompressed files.

[Jonathan Shohet]

just did a quick check – a 260 MB avi-dv file compresses to a 60 MB winrar archive. [and no quality loss whatsoever of course]. If it’s for archiving and you can live with the fact that you’ll need to extract the archive in order to view/use the video than it’s a good solution I think.

[Jonathan Shohet]

If your avi files are uncompressed, you can use quicktime’s photoJpeg or MotionJpeg free codecs which will reduce file size for archiving, but still won’t destroy your ability to go back and edit. there are also free lossless avi codecs like huffyuv, lagarith and msu; google them up. Also noticed that Microcosm, which is supposed to be a very efficient lossless QT codec, is about to go freeware this fall, if you can wait a while.

If you are talking about avi-dv files, I would also suggest not to re-encode them to divx/h.264 type codecs, you really would destroy any chance of going back to editing/compositing them ever again.
Maybe just use winrar or some backup software that archives/compresses files in general?

[Jonathan Shohet]

thanks so very much.
Is there a keyboard shortcut for “trim comp to work area” also?

[Jonathan Shohet]

Thanks you guys for your input.

I don’t know enough about scripting in AE, but the process of duplicating/trimming the compositions looks to me like something that could be automated.

Maybe I’ll get around to trying my hand at a script after this crazy deadline is over…

cheers

[Jonathan Shohet]

[I have to say that AE has been handling the hdv mpeg remarkebly well, other than the slow import and render times. I know that I have to start using intermediate uncompressed files, but lets just say that for this specific deadline I’m sticking with hdv as I don’t have the diskspace or the raid hardware]

Rendering each clip individualy from premiere, and then copy/pasting the adjustment layer 30 times to each comp, does not seem to me simpler or quicker than my current workflow, in which I can always duplicate the main composition 30 times, and then trim each duplicate composition according to the in and out point of one of the layers and delete all the other layers. More importantly, it involves an additional lossy render betwenn PP and AE.

I was hoping there is a way to automate this, so as not to wear out my I,B,O,N keys on my keyboard and erode my sanity…

[Jonathan Shohet]

trim your long video track in a premiere sequence so you end up with only the parts of the track that you want to use, (do only basic cut to cut editing, no effects) and save your project.
Now import the premiere project into after effects, open the premiere sequence as a composition by double clicking it in the project window and do all your masking and effects.
You can now either re-import that after effects composition into premiere, or render it as a new clip from after effects and import that.

[Jonathan Shohet]

If a customer pays a lot of money for a professional software like PP or an Adobe suite, and it has a serious (even if it’s not critical) code error, isn’t he entitled to expect some sort of fix for it, without being forced to pay for an expensive upgrade which he can’t necessarily afford?
I mean, even microsoft still addresses win XP problems with updates despite the aggressive pitch it’s making for vista…