[Marisu Fronc]

Ron-

[Ron Shook] “both stereo and mono audio clips can be used on the PPro timeline”

This is true, but NOT on the same track – you need to specify if you want a mono or a stereo track, if you aren’t careful you can get things you want together all higgledy-piggeldy across them – or tracks stacked in an order that is confusing at best (especially if you regularly with with an audio sweetener who is used to a certain layout (ie: VO on ch 1, interviews ch2, sync ch3, sfx ch 4-6 and music ch 7 & 8). Certainly not a BIG deal, but I’d love to be able to reorder the audio tracks once on the TL, and I’d REALLY love to be able to put mono and stereo clips on the same track fi they are the same TYPE of thing (sync for example).

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Ron-

[Ron Shook] “you’re one woman I wouldn’t wanta be in the same room with right now,”

I guess my husband is truly a brave man – he can actually sleep in the same room with me AND my swords!! 😉

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Ron, Ron, Ron-

All I can say is – be glad YOU get to choose. Right now I’m back in the dark ages of hand inputting capture data read off an EDL printout because (you’ll LOVE this one) an EDL import gives you a timeline, it’s true – unfortunately it doesn’t separately allow you to recap clips – only sources (read as Rolls) which means if I need a ten second clip at 1:00:00 and another 6 seconds at 18:00:00 it wants to capture from 1:00:00 to 18:00:06 (needless to say, even when the SAN is FINALLY working I don’t have the space overhead for this) – the short 10 minute programme I’m trying to recreate wanted me to recapture about 4.5 hours of footage (NOT) so, instead, I’m writing down the info (oh yes, keeping in mind the fact that all the DF or NDF TC will be wrong) and reinventing the wheel one edit at a time!!!!!!!!!

I think it’s about time to report my “bald” picture as I’m very, very close!! 😉

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Ron-

Seems to me the easiest solution would be to lay the clip down (vid on ch 1, aud on ch 1) apply the filter and “copy left” – this would be your left channel THEN I’d lay the same clip down in the same place with Vid on V2 and audio on A-2 and “copy right” – delete on of your video clips (or not, as you choose) and hack away.

I actually generally cut the whole piece and then razor it up and apply the filters (there’s too much back and forth deciding going on to make it worth while to worry about it before a final (or semi-final at least) decision is made.

As far as “real time” goes well . . . . applying the filters means it has to render the audio before export to tape (or it goes blatt-blatt-blatt). I don’t know of a way to “lock them together” – as I usually know when I need ch 1 or 2 (usually 1 is one person’t mic, 2 either another mic or the boom so it’s fairly apparent). If indeed you were trying to “finesse” it it would be VERY boxy (what am I saying, it IS very boxy, but you can, indeed, get there if you choose to).

I don’t know if I answered your ? or not – as I told Lyn earlier I think my brain is bleeding out of my ears at this point and I’m surprised I still remember my name. If I’ve been more horribly unclear than usual let me know (I’ll probably only make it worse, but I’ll be happy to take another stab at it).

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Steve-

You can set the project to audoscale – so your footage will automatically be scaled properly when it is placed on the timeline (great for mixing 16:9 and 4:3) it can save you oodles of time when you have about the same number of clips of each aspect ratio you need to use. I couldn’t see any difference in automating it as opposed to doing it a clip at a time (except for speed) UNLESS you are working 4:40 and don’t always want the 16:9 stuff letterboxed.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Herb –

Without breaking the link you can basically “copy” left channel to right or vice versa – that’s the workaround I’ve been using (still a major pain in the ass, but you keep the relationship between the audio and the video – your “stereo pair” just becomes two channels of identical mono info). I agree, this is NOT fun when you get into the hundred’s of clips – even more so as you have to “redo” it in each project you import the clip into (and I re-use stuff a LOT), still I wouldn’t count it as anywhere NEAR the worst of my frustrations with Premiere (many of which, I’m sure, are specific to the kind of work I’m doing and probably aren’t problems for the majority of users).

For your purposes I’d probably duplicate each clip and designate one as “right” and one as “left” – apply the filter to copy the appropriate channel and take it from there. Again, this isn’t elegant, and is most certainly a workaround, however it’s a pretty basic one.

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Larry-

It’s not the finding of it that’s a problem – it’s the re-editing it in that takes more time than it should – like I said, it’s doable – but when you covered and then re-edited in the same talking head 5 or 6 times it gets REAL old REAL quick.

slaine,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

David –

The double the space thing is necessary if you ever want to consolidate through project manager (not that I’ve ever gotten it to work, but theoretically it needs double the space). However, I noticed that even without trying to consolidate when I got over the half-way point on space the project becomes more and more sluggish (beyond the regular freezes, etc) and begins to act more erratically than usual. One biggie I’d warn against is auto saving, every time it auto saves while it’s trying to render it freezes forever and eventually you end up back on the desktop – manual saves eliminated that particular bone of contention at least.

One particular workflow no-no that drives me bonkers is the inability to pull a clip from the timeline to the source viewer and reuse it – you need to relocate it in the bins, also if you cover the video you can’t get it back simply by pulling the clip back into the bin – you only get the audio (even if they are linked) – again you need to re-edit it from the bin.

The bottom line is that Premiere does work, but it’s got its own pecularities that can be especially frustrating when you are working against deadline on a long and/or complicated project, at least until you figure some of them out!!

slainte,
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

David-

It does get balky when you start to get into the 1000’s of clips range, or when your timeline becomes too long, especially if you have lots of layers. Media management is pretty much a nightmare when you have lots of sources (unless you LOVE scrolling endlessly). Another possible problem area is timecode – if you have both DF and NDF sources that you need to access by TC I’d give it a pass (unless you’re a LOT better than I am at converting DF to NDF or vice versa in your head – you can only have one or the other in a project, you can capture both but it converts the TC into the chosen type). If you only want a single channel of audio that is also tricky.

As far as workflow goes, I have found that long-form is really only manageable if you are VERY organized on the way in – the better sorted and ID’d your clips are the easier it will be to locate them. Certainly if you aren’t comfortable with Premiere I’d expect to take significantly longer, especially as there are often 3 or 4 places to do things (like adjust audio levels).

You also need to consider disk space – you need to leave as much free space as you use or risk crashing and burning, so if you have 200GB of media in the job you need at least 200GB free. This could be a serious consideration with the overhead HD requires.

slainte,’
marisu

[Marisu Fronc]

Mark-

Yes, all is well here (aside from being a bit frazzled by my son’s sleep-over last night, who’d of thunk two 9 year olds could cause SO MUCH DESTRUCTION).

We aren’t using any cards with PPro at present, just the SD connect to convert the component analogue to DV (our stuff is ending up mostly as MPEG-2’s for DVD’s and on-demand systems, real and wmv files for streaming over the web and VHS so the quality is acceptable).

I can’t justify the cost or the space (even once the new SAN is finally working properly) to work uncompressed, especially since they’re shooting all the new stuff DV, so Axio, while intriguing to me personally, isn’t in the cards for our facility.

The SD connect is merely a way for me to convert footage from the 2300+ rolls of pre-existing BetaSP to DV so they can use existing assets and not reshoot. (although the NDF/DF thing really is driving me crazy – all the old stuff is NDF, all the new is DF – one way or another the logs don’t match the captured footage – AARRRGGHHHHH). I haven’t been worried about a lower quality than DV as it stands now, but if you fid a scalable card let me know as it could certainly become an issue in the future as space becomes tight.

Take care,
slainte,
marisu