[Mike Cohen]

always make video into AVI – I do anyway. Makes like easier.

[Mike Cohen]

If you have:
1 frame per minute over 2 years, that is 249600 frames over 2 years, if you figure 5 days a week x 8 hours a day, which at 1 frame per image is 8320 seconds which is 138 minutes.

So export that as an AVI then play with speed changes.

Or, you probably don’t even need all those frames. Given a wide shot of a 2 year project, how likely is it that there will be 480 interesting frames/day. Unless large girders/foundations/roof sections etc are being hoisted into position every day, there will be some boredom.

You might find a way to keep track of what happens each day, and then on the boring days use fewer images.

Or, maybe have them take pictures once every 10 minutes – every 1 minute might be excessive – that is unless you are doing things which are fast, which in construction is unlikely.

As far as image size, if you are not zooming or panning, 720×480 is all you need. Photoshop will let you automate this, although there are probably many free apps also. Check out Tom’s Downloads.

Good luck

[Mike Cohen]

Premiere likes DV-AVI.
Convert anything you get to that format.
The time spent waiting will save you time in the long run.

[Mike Cohen]

if this were my problem, I would take it in smaller chunks of tracks. Your ability to look at 30 tracks of video is limited by the human brain, so either use 4 track groups of video using the multi-cam feature, or take maybe 6 or 8 tracks, lay out the video in one multi-picture layout including text names for each track for your reference, then render it out as an AVI.

Do this for each group of tracks.

Then watch each rendered file on a separate timeline, and make your cuts where you want and keep track of what original tracks you want to use in each cut.

If you keep the sync point consistent among all tracks, you should then be able to merge your one track with the razor cuts back to your original timeline, make the same cuts on the original material, then repeat with each group of tracks until you have cut all your tracks to isolate the good shots.

You will still need to decide how to remove the overlaps among multiple good shots, but approaching this in smaller pieces is the best way to go.

In the olden days we did a paper edit before going near an edit bay, you will need a paper trail to help you out here.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

coming from a DVD, standard DV-AVI should be fine. You can open the VOB file in Premiere Pro 2.0 and then export it as AVI.

You may need to change the .VOB to .mpg

[Mike Cohen]

So Premiere was used as the capture utility only, obviously.

On a related subject, I was intrigued that they used similar titles in the movie to the originals, but the original films were opticals, and the new digital titles looked too digital, nor did they use the swooshing sound as was very effective in the old films.
Especially absent was the spatial swoosh which should have accompanied the Superman logo’s entrance. Overall a good movie with some plot points stolen from ET.
Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Cool to see Premiere is accepted in Hollywood.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

Yes you can import DV-AVI into QT pro on a PC anyway – that is how we make our H.264 videos for the ipod.

[Mike Cohen]

you can copy and past attributes to multiple clips at once – I thought he was talking about transitions

[Mike Cohen]

I suspect the clips he is using were either captured via a capture card or converted from DVD – both methods often use newer MPEG codecs to save space. A lot of DVD ripping programs use MPEG4 or DIVX, but still use the AVI wrapper.

As Steven said, Premiere is designed to work with DV-AVI primarily.
Anytime I have video in another format, I convert it to DV-AVI – the slight quality hit and time spent rendering is much better than the frustration of trying to get Premiere to play these other formats smoothly. You should be able to load the original files into Premiere, but drag them to the timeline and immediately export them as DV-AVI, then erase the original files.

It kills me that the new consumer microdrive camcorders record to MPEG-4 – people are in for a surprise.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

I have taken DV-MOV files and rendered them to DV-AVI in the PC, perhaps you can go the other way. But it would take longer to render the new files than if you just digitized directly into the Mac.

What happens if you import a DV-AVI file into FCP?