[Jorn Bergmans]

Hi Paul,

Editing together a timeline with Interlaced footage and exporting as Progressive will not always do the trick – you are merely telling the program to output a Progressive video this way. This means it will put out a file without fields, but it won’t ‘merge’ the fields in your original footage together.

To ‘merge’ those fields, you will need to de-interlace your footage. You can either do this ahead of time, making new files to edit your video with, or indeed set a de-interlace setting / effect on the footage in your timeline (like the “Always Deinterlace” option)
This will tell your editing software to interpolate between fields and turn them into progressive frames again, which you can then export as a progressive video with progressive content.

[Jorn Bergmans]

Also, the default hotkey to link/unlink audio from video is cmd+L
(or, I would imagine, for windows this is ctrl-L)

[Jorn Bergmans]

If it was on a second monitor, reverting to one of the original single-screen workspaces should work too without having to trash all preferences.
(might save some time reconfiguring)

[Jorn Bergmans]

You can view things from your Project tab in the Source Monitor, it just takes a couple of buttonpresses.

There’s a shortcut called “Open in Source Monitor”; I believe it’s Shift+O by default. (if it’s not set, you can find it under Keyboard Shortcuts – alt+H – and set a preferred shortcut yourself)
Selecting your Project tab is Shift+1 by default. Then you can use the arrow keys to move around your folders and files.

Be aware tho that Shift-O is also the default program shortcut for “go to out-point”, so if you have any other panel than the Project or Media Browser selected, it will jump to the outpoint of your currently active timeline.

[Jorn Bergmans]

DNxHD or ProRes won’t matter much in terms of editing / scrubbing speed – they’re both all I-frame codes with a similar bitrate.
If you are on a Mac I’d suggest ProRes as it’s Apple’s own intermediate codec and the support is superb in all software. If you’re on Windows, I’d say DNxHD because there’s no ProRes encoder available for Windows.

You can convert the footage to SD and then relink them, just make sure your proxy media has the same name as the original media.
Premiere will most likely _not_ automatically resize the footage, but you can change your sequence settings from SD to HD and they will line up on the frame if sizing is set to 100%

For any proxy you’re best off using an intermediate like ProRes or DNxHD, no matter if it’s SD or HD media. In this day and age I would not recommend using DV as it does not use a square pixel aspect ratio. (and that might complicate things with frame sizes etc when you relink your footage to the online material)

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hmm, this is more of a general hardware question than it is a Premiere question, but here goes. My 2 cents:

Personally, I’ve always found that RAM tends to fill up most while working. Having multiple programs open and running smoothly draws mostly on the memory available. RAM isn’t all that expensive anymore, and it’s the bottleneck that will be most noticeable while working on your computer.

However, seeing your current specs, your video card seems a little outdated. If you’re looking for hardware rendering support from any of the Adobe programmes, you should look into buying a CUDA capable card, like the NVidea GeForce series. Again, a new videocard will add some video RAM, which should help you with your 8 video tracks all overlaying etc.

The CPU is of course an important part of the computer, but will usually only be very stressed while rendering, which is something you can do overnight for the really lengthy exports. I would say this has a lower priority if you just want a rig that ‘works smoothly’.

This is the general approach I would take to upgrading a system, with these priorities, although I think in this case I’d put the videocard-upgrade a bit higher than I usually would.

And yes, your mouse pad should be awesome. But I would assume that’s a given. 😉

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hi Henry,

This must be a Gamma setting, if you’re not transcoding anything there shouldn’t be any color or gamma shifts occuring. You should try exporting with Gamma not set to Automatic, but the setting it had with the previous export. (I think it’s 2.2 on Apple devices?)

Alternatively, there’s 2 solutions that could save you a lot of time.

Firstly, you could render the video without ‘recompressing all frames’. This will not transcode ProRes to ProRes, but will just write the video frame-by-frame. Since it’s already a valid ProRes file it should turn out fine, and since you’re not doing another render pass you’ll have less chance of getting a setting wrong / a gamma shift.

The second alternative -and the fastest one-, is to open the video you have AND the new audio track in QuickTime 7. With the audio file activated, select all (cmd-A) and copy (cmd-C). Then activate the QT window of the video file, press cmd-J to open Properties, and paste (cmd-V). You should now see an extra audio track being added to the list. Delete the old audio track, and save (cmd-S).
Quicktime will now save this .mov with the new audio track in there, without having to re-render the whole video file, meaning there’s no chance of a gamma shift. Also, this way won’t write a new file to your disk, so it takes about 5 seconds to save the video with the new audio.

Hope that helps!

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hello Mihai,

The short answer to your question would be ‘no’. Exporting the files / sequence will read from the source material, so exporting them separately, on a timeline or nested (‘on a timeline as a timeline’) will all still refer to the original .MTS files.
If you would like to export them as 1 single file, it’d be easiest to just drag them onto a timeline and export that as a QT .mov.

What nesting would be useful for, is working with the separate MTS files as though they were 1 file without having to transcode them to h.264, or ‘flattening’ a bunch of video layers without having to pass a render on them.

If you’re sure you are transcoding to h.264, nesting will not do anything to speed up your rendertimes.

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hello Alok,

It might be there’s an Easy Setup listed for Apple ProRes 422 – this setting defaults your sequence to ProRes 422 HQ which is the same codec used for ProRes LT files. The HQ and LT only represent a bitrate standard – HQ being 220mbit/s and LT 100mbit/s for HD video, if I am not mistaken.
Otherwise, select HD, with the compressor being ProRes ideally, or XDCAM HD if ProRes is not available. (be aware, setting it to something other than ProRes will require you to render your timeline to be able to view your edit in realtime!)

Having said that, I would strongly suggest setting up a project, and just changing the sequence settings by hand. This way you will have full control, and you can make sure your video and timeline are using the same settings.
You can pop up the Sequence Settings menu under Sequence -> Settings (yup, I know) or using CMD-0.

This will prompt a screen with several options, that you can set to your video’s specifications, like framerate (editing timebase), frame size in pixels, and Compressor. This last options is the codec the timeline will use for rendering, so you should set the compressor to Apple ProRes 422 (LT), and your files should be ready to play directly in your sequence. (barring any effects or overlays)
If you are unsure of any settings, you can check your video’s specifications by right-clicking a video in your Browser, going to Item Properties -> Format. This will display all the information about your video. Match your Sequence Settings to these for the smoothest workflow.

Hope that helps!

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for that info – it seems I just put the tracks in the wrong order, but routed them right then. That’s a relief.
Much obliged!