[Marisu Fronc]

Terry-

Above and beyond all your other concerns – Pro WON’T operate under Win2K so if you aren’t willing to upgrade to WinXP there’s no point in worrying about the rest of it. However – if you do decide to upgrade you could certainly continue to use your existing hard drives (although scsi isn’t necessary it certainly will work) and perhaps some of your other components. You would probably need faster processors (a guess based on your system being a couple of years old) and probably more RAM (at least 2 GB’s is nice – 3 is even nicer).

As far as the older programs “getting along with” Pro . . . certainly you can use files generated from Photoshop 7 or AE 5.5 in Premiere (I do it all the time when I reuse existing art pieces), but the upgraded Production Suite gives you much better integration with Photoshop and After Effects, as well as Illustrator, Audition and Encore (nice if you do soup to nuts work and need print, audio, and DVD functionality). As far as plug-in programs (like BorisFX) you’d probably have to try and see. I’d suggest you download the demo – but you’d need an XP computer to run it on.

As far as the program you are in the middle of – you could convert the program to Pro (but you might be surprised at the difference in the interface and perhaps lose some time getting past that). If the files captured with the DV500 use a proprietary Codec (that is – not just standard DV avi’s) you’d either need the card or the codec to make use of them. As for lost functionality – I don’t know what you gained with the card, so don’t know if you’d need a replacement (of one type or another) or not.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Alex-

I’ve been using the SD connect for about a year now – the only issues I have are with the lack of audio meters in Premiere when you capture, so I can’t tell until afterwards if my levels are too low or (even worse) too hot. As far as the video goes though – no complaints.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Yup-that certainly works AS LONG AS the media TYPE is the same (that is video only or audio & video or whatever – if you change that the new clip won’t link (the moral is – know what kind of clip you’re processing and keep it the same – it certainly makes substitution easy down the road!)

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Sara-

There are a couple of ways to do it. If you capture directly to that drive OR collect the project to that drive using project manager. The one thing you HAVE to do if you don’t want to relink is make sure when you put the drive on another computer you use the SAME drive letter you always have – that way it will find the madie without relinking.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Alex-

I considered it – and (for the time being at least) have rejected it – Bridge has too much instability for me – extremely slow to open, even slower to bring up thumbnails and has an alarming tendency (meaning it does it EVERY time) to suddenly lock up and/or crash. Besides, I’d still need the drives so the stock categories can be swapped between users so they can pull off their selected shots (for example, I have several drives worth of food shots – good food, bad food, action food, etc that I pull from whenever I do a nutrition show). In reality we need a GOOD, usable and searchable database with lo-rez proxies, but until then this is working in the interim. I have been doing all my sorts/searches in windows explorer (ha) by thumbnails – it doesn’t hang or crash on me like Bridge does and I can usually find what I want relatively quickly (well, as quick as looking at that many of ANYTHING can go)

We are searching for a SAN solution which will eliminate the need fot separate drives (YEAH) but so far, no joy – our first attempt failed dismally and now we’re looking again for a solution which actually will work for us!

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Alex-

I make a project folder on my selected hard drive (I usually have a dozen or so things in progress at the same time so they usually each have one or more disks of their own) labeled with the project tracking info (job number, project name & catalog numbers, starting date). Then I create a new project and and select that folder as the location – I name the project the same as the folder – except the date field which changes with each day’s save – I also add major step tags to the project name at different stages (ie: 1st eval, for VO, english final, spanish final, etc).

I set Premiere to direct everything to same as project (this folder). I create bins in project window named by reel and brief description (ie: 02483 Agnes home & restaurant) and log into the appropriate bins then batch capture. As I capture media it goes into the root of the project folder. Then I copy other folders into that folder with non-capturable sources (grapics, music, sound efx, scratch VO, final VO, etc). Any files I reuse from other projects are copied into the directory into folders with the name of their original project and then imported into Premiere folder by folder. Premiere automatically creates folders within the project folder for autosaves, media cache and preview files. It’s a bit time intensive on the head end, and is still a work in progress, but it’s the only way I’ve found to efficiently deal with the huge masses of material I’m dealing with. When the project is finished the entire contents get backed up to an Ultrium tape and any generic footage shot for the project is copied into stock footage bins on stoack hard drives categorized by shot type for easy retrieval (hopefully) later.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Alex-

I’ve been doing it that way and it seems to work okay – I keep everything set to “same as project” and save the .pproj file in the root of the master project folder. All the captured video ends up in the root of that directory, it’s true. However, Premiere creates folders for media cache, autosaves & preview files. Everything else I need I import from folders nested inside the master folder (ie: scratch VO, final VO, graphics, etc)as they are coming from other people/places. It has worked okay for now, the only hitch is if you consolidate a project all your sub-folders disappear and everything ends up in the root directory.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

Some stand alone recorders (only a few models) will encode the closed captioning if it is on the input stream, some hardware encoders will as well.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Nathan-

[Nathan King Miller] “If not, I have to erase all of my coloring effects (2 hours of individual cuts) and redo them. Ugh.”

You MIGHT save yourself some time (or, at least, save yourself from rethinking everything you’ve already done) if you copied and pasted the effects properties from the bad sequence into a fresh sequence with no colour effects applied (yes, it WILL still be a pain, but not as much as starting from scratch). Just toggle back and forth and copy/paste (assuming you can’t get rid of the glitch, of course).

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

I have some jobs where Premiere alone uses almost 2GB of RAM – generally the larger the job (more clips and sequences) the more RAM it seems to use, jobs with dynamic links to AE project also open AE and increase the RAM usage. best bet, throw as much RAM at it as you can, it’s well worthwhile

slainte,
marisu