[Mark Hollis]

Ah, I should mention I am using Premiere Pro 1.5. Your version is vastly improved from mine.

PPro 1.5 saved titles separately as .PRTL files. I keep those in their own folder within a project’s space.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

“None of us remember the ‘cans and can’ts’ of the app.”

Premiere Pro 1.0 was the tiny step above the home version and 1.5 was, supposedly, an upgrade and tweak. So I’m really squarely in the “wedding video” realm.

I have nothing against wedding producers and videographers but back in 1986, after doing one “as a favor” for a Pakistani friend of my employer, I pretty much resolved to never do another. When I was married there was a still photographer and no video.

I am just learning AE, having done pretty much what AE does on DS. DS lacks a lot of the cool pre-done effects that AE has, but the application is very capable in many ways AE is not, namely for editing, fine color correction, working with RED CINE, and other things AE was not designed to do.

Here is one fix that worked:

I had type (that was the same as some of the type that moved jittery) that did move nicely. I replaced the bad stuff with the good stuff and everything worked. Both sets of type were from the same .PTRL file, so I know the issue was with the movement and how that was achieved.

It takes a lot longer for me to do the work in AE but I suppose, since I’m paid by the hour, that may turn out to be a good thing.

As to Windows, I’m running XP Pro on two different computers in the same room (using one to capture material while editing is sometimes really handy). Since XP is 32-bit and the applications are pretty old (Premiere Pro 1.5 and AE 6.5), I get RAM hinkiness that does not exist on a Macintosh when I run them both at the same time. I’m doing this so that I can refer back to material edited on Premiere Pro in AE. With a Mac, if it has enough RAM, it just uses it. With Windows, you can never use what you have (until Vista or Windows 7) because Microsoft limits all application space to around 3.5G — and even then many applications cannot take advantage of more than 2G because they’re not written to use more. OS X handles RAM better.

I’m still working out workflows here. I plan to have AE completely down by the time the Macs arrive and that will make it essential to my FCP workflow. I’ll also continue to use Premiere, I think, because I will have legacy projects that may need reworking.

I do like how Adobe is chasing Apple’s FCS with their Production Studio. The winners are us, the users.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Oh, Micah, it’s way past time to upgrade.

I stepped into this job while production was sallying forth and there were upgrades in the works, destined to hit us in January if they’re not delayed again.

We will be moving to a Macintosh platform with Final Cut Studio for editing and we may be retaining After Effects CS4. Personally, I’ll be happy to get rid of the Windows platforms. I’m not accustomed to not be able to work when you have any dialogue box open — even the “help” boxes prevent you from taking the action that they’re telling you to take.

“Print Screen” records a copy of your screen or open window, but then you have to paste it into an application to see what you just did. If you tell Windows to print and it cannot find a printer, it will often crash Windows and all applications. I had thought that Microsoft had actually made the operating system better (or at least more modern).

We cannot work directly with P2 media (though we have Premiere CS4 on a more modern laptop to do the translation to AVI files) and we could really use a server to distribute media. I’m looking forward to having clean copies of everything we’re doing on a server ready for me in an instant instead of running across a street to get tapes or drives with AVIs from P2.

But our upgrade path will probably not include Premiere. I will stay in After Effects because Motion is still not up to snuff (as far as I understand) and we’ll be headed towards something that looks a little closer to what I could do on the system I used to use: The venerable Avid DS (a compositor that edits, an editor that does composite work, capable of any resolution from SD through 4K).

Sorry for the rant. I feel very frustrated about this issue.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

If the Titler window is topmost, or selected as your active window, [Ctrl]-S saves the title. If your titler is open and your timeline is selected, you are saving your sequence.

I typically will use one title as a template for another (especially lower thirds) and will use [Ctrl]-[Shift]-S to Save As a lot.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I do this all the time, be hitting [Command]-S on a Mac or [Ctrl]-S on a PC. And a “Save As …” is [Ctrl]-[Shift]-S on a PC and if you give it the same name as another .PTRL file, you will get a dialogue that lets you know that you are about to overwrite a file.

If I change a title and then save the result, I see it almost instantly on the Timeline (which will turn red, indicating that it needs processing).

Changing titles is something I do all of the time, as I have to make sure they’re not underneath a “bug.”

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I tried these steps..

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You literally have to create your text by entering it in “crawl” or “roll” in the titler. If you have your titler set to be still (first), the text will always be still.

Unless you set keyframes for it in the motion tab. But that is a really bad way to do a credit roll where you have lots of titles because there is no easy way to edit or correct misspellings and such.

So start with your titler in roll or crawl mode and you’ll be all set.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

A “tornado warning” is text moving along the bottom of a television screen from right to left. It’s commonly used to alert viewers of something happening in their locality and it is usually broadcast over currently-running programs to warn viewers of weather or flooding issues that may affect them. That’s a crawl.

A roll is text moving from the bottom of the screen to the top, as you see for credits at the end of feature films.

A still is simply that. It’s text that stays motionless — unless you move it with the Motion effect in your effect controls.

Generally, when I need to do a lower third or put text on a screen using the character generator, I’ll hit [F9] and bring up the titler. I have certain settings, like typeface, drop shadow and so on set up so that I can quickly type what I need (or cut and paste from a WordPad Document sent from a Producer) and position the text appropriately. For lower Thirds, my style fits into an effect I created with the show name on it, so I have a box to type on that is good for three lines of type.

I don’t do rolls or crawls for the show I edit, as it’s news and never has credits. I’m not sure I’d want Premiere Pro to animate text that much anyway.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I am doing these compositions in After Effects. And an upgrade is just not possible. The computer we’re using is really pokey by today’s standards and just cannot run CS4.

I am learning AE as it will be part of my workflow to come. I acquired this (very good) job after working for a number of years on the Avid DS, which can be seen as a combination editor and compositor, so I do understand compositing.

I also know that AE and Premiere CS3 (and forward) are wonderfully integrated so that, within Premiere, you can simply click on an AE composition and edit or change it within AE without stopping. The current workflow with AE 6.5 and Premiere Pro 1.5 are not well integrated.

We’ll probably go to FCS in January, but I intend to keep AE in the mix, as FCS is not a compositing application.

I have successfully animated the still image of documents in AE. They seem to be all right and that will probably be my workflow henceforth. There seems to be no solution for this issue from within Premiere.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

This is not that kind of jitter.

It’s about ten lines of the image as it comes in — but interlaced, so you don’t see every other line. This does not show up in computer monitors, as the output of these monitors is frame-based and not field based. The movement is not so fast as to suggest that this is simply an interlace artifact.

This is clearly an animation artifact. And I can do the exact same animation elsewhere and I don’t have this problem.

I have been wondering if this is an issue with starting the animation on an odd frame versus an even frame. I haven’t had to worry about something like that since the early 1990s!

What if there were no hypothetical questions?