[Mbelli]

I think re-naming VOB’s is tricky, there’s often issues with the audio or sync and I haven’t had good experiences in throwing VOB’s or VOB to MPEGs into timelines of non linear editing APPS (although Vegas seemed to work a bit better than Premiere).

I’ve had very good results with the following free tools:

DVD Decrypter/DVD Shrink
DVD2AVI

Basically I use Decrypter or Shrink to rip the VOB’s to my hard drive, even if I’ve been given usage rights to a DVD for inclusion in a production, I can still run into copy protection problems, so these tools allow me to get around that (if there’s no copy protection, you can drag and drop the VOBs but still, I find doing it with the above tools better as they also have ways to read/write error compensate).

Once on my hard drive, I import the VOB’s using DVD2AVI and output the video as uncompressed AVI (or a codec that Premiere can work with). I also set up DVD2AVI to demux the AC3/PCM track as a seperate WAV file, which I then join with the video on Premiere’s timeline. This method works great for me, although sometimes DVD2AVI can crash on certain codecs.

Another way to consider, but you’ll get more loss and your disk can’t be copy protected, is to simply take the video out of your DVD desktop player (using the s-video out) and transfer the DVD to your DV camera or DV Deck (s-video in, analog). Then all you need do is digitize your DV tape with Premiere. I did a problematic spot for Nike and had to resort to that to get a stable and clean rip.

Best of luck and hope this helps you.

[Mbelli]

I haven’t been very impressed with Adobe Media Encoder’s output to Quicktime. In addition to taking a long time to encode I find it buggy and of inferior quality. Luckily I have Canopus Procoder which does a much better job with Quicktime.

In regards to PP2 and WMV or FLASH, I’ve found both to be of really good quality and encoding time is pretty close to what I get with Procoder. MPEG-1 is also very good but MPEG-2 is average, especially with material which has a lot of subject or camera movement. Procoder MPEG-2 is clearly superior especially at very low bitrates.

Anyhow, those are my personal observations, others here might have had different results. Maybe Adobe will clean up it’s act in regards to Quicktime next PP update, I wouldn’t t put much faith on it at the moment.

**** ALSO, don’t forget to enable the deinterlacing checkbox on the top right befofe encoding, it yields better quality and far sharper encodes.

[Mbelli]

Remember also that fast drives in a RAID and a fast dual core PC makes a big difference in rendering and encoding speed. A couple of days to render even a 2-hour AVI seems like a lot to me. Maybe it’s time to upgrade your computer and drives.

[Mbelli]

Don’t edit directly on USB2 or firewire drives, that “delay write” error is common. I’ve been getting it for over 3 years using all kinds of different external drives, enclosures and various versions of Windows.

I recommend edit on your internal drives (configured in a fast RAID if possible) and backup to externals only.

If you work on a laptop this might not be possible, but don’t risk working directly to firewire drives. Your PC/software is doing so many writes/reads to and from your firewire drives that if there is a small glitch you could rick losing valuable work.

I know some people will say they work directly from firewire/USB drives but I don’t think it’s worth the risk for NLE. For other stuff that doesn’t access the drive often like an Excel spreadsheet, or Word — they are fine.

[Mbelli]

Beware that CTRL-K cuts everything, not just your selected clip but all the clips underneath it. Wish it would just cut the clip selected.

[Mbelli]

I think it’s a bug. I get the exact same thing when burning to disc from a 24p timeline. I solved it by going to Encore and transcoding there.

If you don’t have Encore, not sure what you can do. I did read somewhere that someone suggested changing the GOP in the video setting section from 12 to 15 or something like that. Can’t be sure thought, you might want to check the Adobe forums.

[Mbelli]

Wonder why it doesn’t default to the proper setting when you simply pick the VCD or MPEG1 template. Why would there ever even be a need to split an MPEG1 clip anyway?

Anyhow, thanks for the answer, I’ll see why that multiplexing option gets checked sometimes and at other times not.

[Mbelli]

Thanks Jeff, I’ll give that a try later tonight and see if it works.

[Mbelli]

>it seems like a waste of time to capture all these clips in order
>to then output them so the client can pick the correct ones. Just
>do what we do. Make a TC burn of the original tapes to VHS or DVD
>and let them look at these instead of capturing everything.

Here’s my workflow:

Step 1, I digitize all my shot tapes (sometimes with scene detect sometimes not, depends on the material).

Step 2, I immediately output an MPEG1 or a DVD-R with burn in TC for my clients. The MPEG1 is for clients who prefer working and taking notes from their computers, the DVD-R is for those who prefer taking notes from a TV/DVD player.

Working in DV, I capture everything, most of my work is only 7-8 DV tapes max. I don’t bother with select takes, I digitize everything as I’ve got 200G system drive and a 500G RAID. I often find when I don’t capture everything I wind up going back to the original tapes looking for shots we thought we wouldn’t be using but now need. Also, capturing everything is a great extra backup in case tapes get lost or damaged.

So, I guess when it comes down to it, if you click the scene detect option when capturing in PP2 and wind up getting a thousand clips from 7-8 digitized tapes — you can’t realistically cut and paste TC for each clip to make a TC window dub.

>What happens if you create the desired effect, copy it, select
>all the target clips, and then paste …?

The effect is only applied to one clip, not to all the selected clips. As I said, you could nest a sequence and apply an effect to all, but TC showing the clips original TC doesn’t work, it defaults to the timeline TC unfortunately.

[Mbelli]

Wouldn’t it be simpler to just have an option to click “opaque” or simply select a color that you want the BG to be if you don’t want it transparent.

The problem with a black matte underneath is one, if you have a lot of these kinds of titles you have to move and manage two clips now, secondly when you make a dissolve or a scene transition, you have to make it for both the matte and title.

Going back to creating a black rectangle in the BG for a second. This also has a few problems. it’s easy to click the BG instead of your font and have to then to find your fonts buried beneath the rectangle. But with the rectangle I don’t need to create a black matte — but, when these titles come over someone’s picture, I then have to create a matte or it won’t fade out properly.

An option to have a colored BG and not a transparent BG would really be handy, a lot of titlers have this option.