[Paddy Uglow]

#9 rising pitch on high-speed playback is the main thing that got me onto Premiere; when editing hour-long talks, it’s a great way to spot places where edits are needed. But yes, maybe time-stretch could be an option there. And it would be nice to control the percentage increase that the L/J keys do; I have to hold the mouse button to play at the speed I want.

[Paddy Uglow]

Those setting sound like they should work, as long as the frame rate change works OK – maybe you could edit at 50fps and convert at the export stage? Presumably you can’t export at 50fps?
I tend to use QuickTime Pro for transcodes; I don’t know how it compares to AME.
Probably best to do a test – but since you’re working with MOVs as a source, you’ll be able to replace them with a different codec if a problem appears crops up at a later stage.
I hope that helps
– Paddy

[Paddy Uglow]

A very late reply, but might be useful to somebody…
I did a multi-camera project with raw footage from three Kodak Zi8s. In Premiere Pro CS4, the Multi Camera Monitor was unusable jumpy (I think I was just getting a still image actually!), so I re-did the project in CS3 with the same settings and it worked fine. I was using Apple Intermediate Codec for the project setting.
Apart from the background Adobe Media Encoder, I’m really unimpressed with CS4. I’m hoping CS5.5 will do a better job than both 4 and 3.

[Paddy Uglow]

So, if I’ve got something in P-pro CS5.5 that I want to add some effects to, I export that clip as Pro-res or AIC, open it in AFX, do my stuff, export it to a movie of the same codec/size, then import that onto my p-pro timeline?
Or is there a better way of doing it? I haven’t yet got the hang of the premiere-AFX workflow really.
Thanks for your time

– Paddy

[Paddy Uglow]

Thanks for the suggestions. I got to the stage of randomly trying profiles in the output module… the closest I got was the pink almost right, but the black turned to gray!
I’ve been doing more experiments this morning and my colors are goin waaay out! I made a PNG in photoshop (with blocks of color with RGB set to 255/0/0, 0/255/0 and 0/0/255) and put it in After FX and exported to mpeg4 (I’m using MPEG4 (h264) because when QT Pro exports that, the colors stay fairly stable), opened it in QuickTime Pro and took a screen grab, then back into photoshop to sample the color values. Of course, there are several stages there in which colorspace could be messed up, but it’s visually obvious the colors have changed.
I also generated the same color blocks in After Effects, which also got changed, but not as much.

Since the actual movie I’m trying to create has a single color, my best bet I think is to use a Channel Arithmetic effect to subtract RGB values to compensat for the incorrect mpeg4 output.

Did you suggest that newer versions of After Effects solve this problem somewhat? I have CS4, but ran into problems with exports not working in Premiere, so I installed the older version.
Thanks for your help
– Paddy

[Paddy Uglow]

You are a super-genius Dave!
Thanks for that. I was feeling very clever having made a spreadsheet with columns for timecodes and columns for the 4 languages I was creating subtitles for, and doing a bit of cut’n’pasting/replacing in a text editor to create importable subtitle scripts, when that pesky “too complex to be encoded” error came up at burntime and made me wish I’d maybe started in DVD Studio instead.
But you seem to be right about those edges settings. Burns nicely now with 4 subtitles (including Greek!).
Thanks 🙂
– Paddy

[Paddy Uglow]

I do lots of converts and exports of different aspect ratios, and I’ve found QuickTime Pro to be my best tool.
I’ve used an AppleScript to sense the aspect ratio of the original, and to export at that ratio in the new size(s) and format(s) that I want. Unfortunately, you can’t directly script the settings for QuickTime, so I have to save a “quicktime settings file” for each size and codec that I’m likely to encounter. The script then exports “using settings” from the settings file I’ve told it to use.
All a bit long-winded to set up, but works very well after that (until someone changes the codec or sizes they want, and I’ve got to export another bunch of settings files!)

[Paddy Uglow]

Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the ideas. I tried Compressor but re-confirmed the reasons why I have trouble with it. Maybe it’s because I’ve got Perian installed, but I couldn’t persuade it to give me the codec I wanted. I tried some MPEG StreamClip which couldn’t do what I wanted either, so I braved ffmpegx’s x264 encoder settings and I think it’s doing the job, with none of those “encode”…Ping! errors that I get when I’m confused with the settings.
I think it’s doing variable bit-rate, with some logarithmic “quantising” value ranges. Anyway, the 3 second ident looks much better, without the file size going through the roof.
So, +1 for ffmpegx!

[Paddy Uglow]

I use QuickTime Pro for all my movie compression. I don’t have much success with Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder.
QuickTime Pro is simple to use and never crashes on me, and I can export several movies at once. I’ve also written scripts to automatically resize movies with different aspect ratios or to export multiple sizes.

[Paddy Uglow]

Thanks Eddie! That’s saved me a lot of stress.
So, is that a PP bug or does it make sense somehow?
Thanks again
– Paddy