[Mike Molenda]

I don’t think there’s any way to get the built-in scopes to update “live” like the ones in FCP.

But if you’re looking at your scopes in the Reference monitor, you can gang them to your Program monitor (click the button that looks like a chain link below the play bar in the Reference monitor). Then they’ll update when you pause playback, scrub, or jump between clips in your timeline.

[Mike Molenda]

Hmm… At this point your issue kind of goes way beyond what I had to deal with when I had the problem. So any other advice I could give you would just be wild speculation. Sorry I couldn’t help you address the problem with the in-application title tool, but at least you got something to work in AE.

[Mike Molenda]

The first thing I would try is instead of using a dissolve, move your title up to Video 3, and keyframe the opacity to zero on the title, and from zero on the still. Something may not jive in the cross dissolve between the two different format clips with alpha channels that don’t match, and this eliminates that variable.

It’s also worth a shot to try generating your titles in Photoshop (or GIMP, Paint.NET, etc., if you’re using standalone Premiere Pro without the rest of the Suite). Then save to a full raster format that supports transparency, like PNG. You can then bring that back into Premiere as footage. It’s more of a pain to make changes to the text, and you lose quality if you apply transformations, but if something’s going wrong with your title tool, at least you’ve bypassed that problem.

For what it’s worth, I’m using CS5 (64-bit) for Mac. But I’ve only ever run across the aliasing problem in After Effects, not Premiere Pro.

[Mike Molenda]

Hi Frank,

Thought I’d weigh in on this issue since I was having a very similar problem with some work created by a colleague of mine very recently. Our problem occurred in After Effects for Mac, so these solutions may not work for you, but it’s worth a shot.

We were working on a simple text animation with a pretty standard font (Futura, in this case) on a plain background, and every time we rendered the text would come out slightly larger than expected, with overly jaggy edges, just like yours. Like After Effects was not properly reproducing the alpha of the text layer.

Our quick-and-cheesy solution was to simply put a slight Fast Blur on the layer (0.7 pixels, I think). My colleague’s problem was not quite as extreme as yours, so this may or may not work for you.

I was tinkering with the project later, and discovered that converting the text to a shape layer in After Effects also seemed to work. You may want to try this.

Or, since the text comes out properly from other applications, you could try creating a raster image of the title card in Photoshop or another image editing application, and import that into your project.

Finally, it is worth noting that a couple weeks have gone by since this incident, and I have restarted my machine several times. I went to reopen the original AE project before writing this post, and everything works just fine now. So maybe a simple reboot is all you need!

Hope this helps.

[Mike Molenda]

Under Preferences > Audio, you can set Source Channel Mapping to default to mono, stereo, mono as stereo, or 5.1. Personally I have my default set to mono, then convert clips I need in stereo within the project panel, since the bulk of my material is generally dialogue or 2-channel camera audio, with a handful music and atmosphere tracks that I want in stereo.

Not really a fan of four point edits, since I find I can work faster doing three point edits then trimming as necessary in the timeline. So I can’t help you out there, I’m afraid.

[Mike Molenda]

Thanks for the tip, I wouldn’t have thought of that. Especially since I’d probably just duplicate the clip in the Project panel before I tried opening the title and clicking on that thing!

[Mike Molenda]

Quite a few things in Premiere are frustratingly built around the assumption that you’re working in 29.97 all the time (only letting you set default transition/still durations in frames not seconds, for instance). This seems like one of those little things that the folks at Adobe just overlooked. Maybe we’ll see it fixed in CS6?

Anyway, my workaround has been to copy the titles from my first project to the clipboard, open the second project, and paste them back into the Project panel. This retains the original frame rate, where export/import for some reason strips it off.

You can always try the reverse, too. Import your second project into the project with the properly-timed titles and add them there, then save as a new project.

[Mike Molenda]

Try creating a new sequence with settings to match your ProRes clips. Then copy the entire contents of your R3D sequence into it, and start replacing your clips. Should work since your new sequence is using Quicktime as the playback mode, not R3D. Hope this helps.

[Mike Molenda]

I’ve had good luck with OWC’s Mercury Pro external (https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MRF8BDSD12X/). If you’ve got a Mac Pro you can get internal drives a lot cheaper (the OWC is basically a Pioneer or LG burner in a quad-interface enclosure), but I often find myself burning from multiple computers so the portability is nice.

I don’t really have a frame of reference for speed, since it’s the only burner I’ve used, and I use it mainly for burning one-off HD screener discs. For bulk projects where I’d rather not babysit a burner all day, I usually outsource to a duplication house.

There’s not a lot of Blu-Ray authoring software for OS X, and what’s out there can get a little pricey, so be sure to factor that into your purchasing decision. You’ll also probably want to invest in a standalone Blu-Ray player for testing since Blu-Ray playback on a Mac is iffy at best.

[Mike Molenda]

Blehh. What a mess. Sorry, I answered your question assuming each clip was used only once. You may be better off baking the FX into the entire shot (deselect “Use Item In/Out”), and saving them with the same name in a new folder. Then you can batch reconnect from your sequence to the files in the new folder.

However, if you have several instances of the same shot that have a different color grade applied to each instance, you are going to have to render out separate clips for each instance and reconnect those manually.

You can’t make Final Cut automatically reconnect, however you can have it reconnect to all the files in a folder so long as the clips have the same name and matching attributes (duration, frame size, etc). Just highlight them all, select “Reconnect Media” and check “Reconnect All Files in Relative Path” in the “Locate” or “Search” browser.

Also, it doesn’t matter if you export the audio along with the video. Final Cut tracks the audio and video resources of a clip separately, even if those resources are coming from the same master file, so you can reconnect to just the video. Unlink your audio from the video before selecting the clips for reconnect, or hold down the option key when selecting your clips to choose just the video track.

It was a mistake to advise you to export only the in-to-out and rename each clip. You should be fine keeping the same clip names as long as you put them in a different directory and don’t overwrite any of your original files. I’m sorry for the confusion.