[Mark Hollis]

The longer the dissolve, the smoother the transition. Generally, when I have stills moving into moving video, I’ll do a 1 second dissolve that gives me a half second crossfade to each side — unless I need to start the transition early or late because there is not enough material on either end.

Short dissolves get you in and out of jams but lots of material that is moving benefits from longer dissolve transitions.

One thing I tell people who are shooting material is that most of the movement happens in the edit. You make a film or program move by cutting from one shot to another so that the viewer does not get bored with just one stable shot (emphasis on the word stable here because stable shots give you the best means by which you can tell a story).

But if you are doing another Blair Witch Project, you want moving shots with cuts between them. That exaggerates the nature of the movement (usually termed “visual whiplash”).

In your case, you are looking for something more sedate. Assuming your video is color-corrected and that everything is just fine, any abrupt transition will benefit from a dissolve, a dip to black, a dip to color or a similar crossfade transition.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Are you using a Mac or a PC?

Have you checked bars out of the camera?

Are you assuming that whatever shows up in the camcorder’s monitor is what you ought to see on your computer? That’s not so, you know.

I am not familiar with your camera, but if it can make a standard test pattern (SMPTE or color bars), record some bars and look at them on Premiere’s scope.

You can make a scope out of any monitor. Click the little button in your monitor with the triangle in the upper right and choose YC waveform. The white bar should be either at 80 units or 100 units IRE (depending on whether or not the bars are SMPTE bars or color bars.) SMPTE bars have a special white bar that is at 100 units with the white bar to the left being at 80.

Look at the recording of the camera’s bars output in your scope. If you look at them on your vectorscope, they should look like this. Tektronix has photos of how the bars should look on a waveform monitor.

If the bars from your camera check out, look at the video. If the brightest part of the signal hits 100 units, your computer’s monitor is adjusted so that it is not giving you a good looking picture. If it is too low, you have underexposed your image in the camera.

The brightest part of a person’s face should be 80 units, with caucasians averaging at 60 units.

Do not assume you have a good video picture until or unless you have seen it on a television monitor or in your computer.

There are adjustments in Permiere’s preferences to properly set up what you see on your computer.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

OK, this is not an endorsement of this company or this product, but since the hardware does come with Adobe software, you’re probably going to be able to do captures with this:

https://www.ramelectronics.net/computer-parts/computer-accessories/firewire-i-link/firewire-adapters/ads-tech-pyro-a-v-link-with-premiere-elements-api-557-efs/prodAPI557EFS.html

Your “yellow” cable is a coax video cable terminating in an RCA plug. Your “White” cable is a mono audio twisted pair cable (though it can be coax).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

If you cannot simply reinstall Windows XP, Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate can run Windows XP mode, which is a virtualization tool that may give you the ability to run old XP-compatible software in a window under Windows 7.

Personally, I would not have upgraded. If I’m making money doing video, I do everything I can to make sure that I have a good installation of anything that makes video. I don’t let my Mac automatically update, I don’t update Quicktime Pro and I never update the boot drive with new system software unless I have a clone of my old system.

Same with PCs. I used the Avid DS with a PC and we never upgraded Windows XP to anything. When Service Pack 3 came out, we waited until Avid had released a patch that would prevent SP 3 from borking our systems. When Avid released version 8, which ran on XP-64, we were never tempted in the least to try Vista. Current Avid editing software that runs on Windows runs on Windows XP or SP-64 — they have not transitioned to Vista or 7.

I realize Adobe applications tend to keep up with OS changes better than Avid’s highly proprietary stuff, but I would seriously hesitate to install Windows 7 on any machine that is used for production, until or unless Adobe released a version (or an update) specifically for the new OS. And it is highly unlikely that CS3, Premiere Pro 2 or the version I use, 1.5, will be updated to work with Vista or Windows 7.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

My friend used Avid Newscutters to digitize because, before Adobe released the updates to CS3 and released CS4 Premiere could not use the material he shot for some reason. He would ingest using the Avid, which he hated, and then send the files to his PC with AE and Premiere Pro.

I regularly capture material from Sony J-10SDI VCRs from Betacam SX and from Panasonic AJ-SD255 DVCPro VCRs, and I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5 and capture over Firewire. Aside from having problems with batch capture (which simply does not work well at all), captures work great.

I think my friend’s Avid workflow is due as much to legacy media as anything. I think his station is still shooting on old Betacam-SP cameras. He just got a HD camera that works with P2 cards and CS3 could not read them. I’m aware that Adobe released an update that will work with P2 for CS3, but he updated to CS4, which can definitely read the material. He’s pretty happy with Adobe’s suite and pretty unhappy with Avid.

I have worked with networked drives. I do not recommend that kind of a workflow. A central server tends to be safer if you RAID 5 stripe it and if your neighbor needs to reboot or has a software malfunction you are not affected. And removable hard drives are just fine for backing up old media. Not for storage. Removable drives don’t come in RAID pairs (yet), which makes them pretty useless for HD projects as well as uncompressed NTSC or PAL.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Dissolves tend to work just fine, though I find that some producers like cuts — the more jarring, the better.

If you want the look of a cut, make your dissolve transition very short. I generally throw in dissolves very quickly by navigating to an edit ([PgUp] and [PgDn] work very quickly) and then using [Ctrl]-D to put in my default transition, which you can make a cross-dissolve. Use your Preferences to change the rate of the default transition if you are going to do a whole lot of them and change the rate to something like 5 frames or so. They’ll be differentiated from a regular 1 second dissolve and tend to look like cuts.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Your post elsewhere says you are from Sydney which makes me wonder why you would shoot 30 FPS, when your standard is 25.

No matter. The information I have on your camera is: The HF100 uses a 1/3.2in, 3.3-megapixel, CMOS image sensor and an increasingly popular video compression system called AVCHD to squeeze high-definition movies and still pictures onto regular-size, high-capacity SD (called SDHC) cards. Based on the widely adopted MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 codec, the resulting HD movies look fabulous when displayed via HDMI or component connections, particularly those recorded at the highest 17Mbits/sec FXP setting.

So if you don’t have the MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 codec on your computer, you may have problems.

Since the camera’s native resolution is HD and not SD, I’m wondering if you have created a standard definition project and you’re trying to play back HD video in it. That can result in playback problems as well.

Have you tried a render of your timeline?

Lastly, uncompressed SD video (and lots of HD compressed codecs) need a drive array to play back without dropped frames. If you expect one 7200 RPM drive to play back uncompressed SD, you have too high an expectation for the poor drive.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

But if you are using a camera with Firewire and you start playing back from the camcorder (in deck mode) and hit the red button on Premiere in the capture window, it will simply capture the input without trying to control the VCR on your camera (or the virtual one in the case of a P2 camera).

It’s quick and dirty, though it is not optimal, as you cannot repeat any captures later.

Very good for recording scratch tracks of voiceover though.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Firstly, everyone on a PC is terrified of Apple’s ProRes Codec because they say that it doesn’t run on Windows.

Feh. You can download it here. There is an issue with gamma shift, but it’s not so bad that, for archival purposes, you couldn’t restore it on a Windows sysem for viewing the archive or for a quick insert into a later program (with a moderate CC).

I don’t like using a long GOP MPEG compression for archival purposes. I have had to edit with that and there are really nasty “Max Headroom” issues with restored footage from those kinds of archives, so Paul’s idea is very sound.

I would highly recommend that Paul use Mike Bombich’s excellent Carbon Copy Cloner to clone his current version of Final Cut Pro (the whole boot drive!) for archive restoration. Apple may change their codec, they may change how Final Cut works with the codec, etc. And as long as the cloned boot drive is viable (Paul has an old enough Mac to boot that operating system), he should be able to recover any archived material that way.

In fact, I recommend that anyone on a Mac clone their boot drive so that Software Update or some add-on doesn’t bork a system that works (and these things tend to happen in the middle of production with a client looking over your shoulder). If you keep a backup of your projects and clone your boot drive, all you have to do is reboot from the clone, access your project and get back to work.

On the PC side, I recommend using O&O Software’s Disk Image to create a bootable spare. If all you are doing is fiddling around, it’s not that important, but if you are a pro and editing and producing for real money, it pays to have a “last known good” installation.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

If you are editing in high definition, you should be using a RAID. Frankly, for SD, I’ve always used a RAID array for media up until switching to Adobe Premiere.

I’ve edited using Final Cut Pro, Avid DS and Avid Media Composer. All three systems used arrays as a matter of course because it was assumed that one could not play back uncompressed NTSC (or PAL) without one. The Avid systems all used 10k or 15k RPM drives in a SCSI RAID array (or a server).

There are lots of people here in this group that are assuming that a single drive (and in many cases their boot drive) that runs at 7,200 RPM is just fine for video editing. While video compression has vastly improved since the early 1990s (when you edited on an early Avid at such low resolution that you could not tell whether or not your focus was properly pulled), a single, unstriped drive just barely keeps up with the demand of multiple streams of video.

With today’s compression standards and modern hard drives with large caches, you can get away with a lot. But dropped frames on playback become a larger and larger risk as you tax the ability of a single hard drive to keep up with a complex sequence.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?