[Tim Kolb]

Yeah… Overall, I’m not certain that WMV is necessarily a file type that can loop flawlessly in this way…I have no experience working with a WMV as a loop…or at least not a short one. (Seeing a hitch every half-hour isn’t so bad if you’re running a repaeting program at a tradeshow, etc…)

Is there a reason why WMV is necessary, or can you deliver an alternative?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hi Todd,

This poster is using FW…

On the original issue:

1. Do you hear the audio coming from your computer speakers?

2. Do you see levels on PPro’s meters?

3. Did you try restarting your computer and making sure that the camcorder is switched on and seen by your computer before you launch PPro?

4. If you do a fresh restart as I stated, can you go into the play back settings from the program panel (where you’d see the switch for the wavform monitor, etc) and change the audio output to your camera?

5. If none of this works, please tell us your complete sequence ssettings.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Well… WMV can be odd, but have you tried the file in another player?…Windows Media Player can be odd as well.

Also…have you tried rendering the wmv from the original project source for the H264s? Taking one temporal compression system and feeding another could be an interesting set of oddities as well.

My last suggestion would be to attempt the conversion in the free standing Windows Media Encoder.

…I am assuming that there is no interlacing involved here by the way…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Since the project seems like it pre-dates the OS install if I understand you correctly…

Have you cleared the cache? Is it in a different place than it was before?

Was the OS simply upgraded, or did you wipe the C: drive and start clean?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

That’s odd. The video is square pixel, isn’t it?

I have no idea where he wrong PAR would be coming from…

What is the resolution of the exported still if you re-import it?

Is it the same size when you open it in Photoshop?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

What format are you editing? DVCProHD? HDV?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

All you need to do is arrange the panels the way you want them and save the workspace.

All my workspaces have permanent reference monitors that run diagnostics.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Is your playback resolution set to 1/2? How well does the Matroz device deal with that? Many third party I/O devices don’t work with Mercury’s reduced resolution decode modes.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Well…first off MPEG2 is far easier for a computer to get through than AVCHD…

I’m not sure what version of Premiere Pro you’re using, but “modest” would apply to your system if we were talking about editing standard definition DV…for HD, a Pentium 4 and 1 GB of RAM are simply not going to do the job with HDV (MPEG2), and certainly not AVCHD.

CineForm Neoscene is the current product, but I’m not sure how many legacy versions of Premiere Pro they support with it. With your hardware, an intermediate workflow like CineForm is the only real possibility of getting anything done…

…not trying to be mean here… I’m just trying to recall the last Pentium 4 I had that I did any editing on…and I’m quite sure it was 7 or 8 years ago and I used it primarily to edit DV.

Make sure you check on the minmum specs for the CineForm product as well. That system may not be able to run the newest CineForm products.

FWIW…Premiere Pro 1.5 had CineForm’s codec inside it for editing HDV…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

It sort of depends where you’re most comfortable doing each thing…

Going backwards…I happen to think that PPro’s audio capabilities are more advanced, though they are also more complex, than FCP for work on the video editing timeline. Just the abiility to take the audio tracks sub-frame increment to audio samples for super-precise edits and sfx placement is probably worth the price of admission alone.

How you edit and transcode becomes a matter of preference also…

With RED footage (or any RAW footage…PPro and CineForm were editing RAW natively back when the Silicon Imaging 2K…the “Slumdog” camera was out more than a year before the RED was in prototype), you have the capability to do the primary color correction on the timeline, either with CINEX somewhat remotely, or with the interface to the RED decoder in PPro, and there is no image degradation at that stage. My personal approach is usually to keep motion RAW in its RAW form as long as possible.

Also, I think that footage entering post FX should have a considerable color adjustment in context with surrounding material already on it in my opinion. At least that way the image that you start with as the source doesn’t have so far to go when you do the final pass. After effects work has been done, duplicating the grade that was done on adjoining material post-effects-manipulation can be a pain, or impractical…or even impossible.

As far as ProRes is concerned…it’s a great codec and if you’re going to do additional editing in Final Cut, it’s great. However, I think at the time being that Color can’t even load ProRes without FCP frame serving it…can it? I’d need to look back at an FCS workflow doc…

However, I think that Color DOES load DPX frame sequences directly (it did when it was Final Touch)…AND with all that 4K RAW goodness, PPro can save out DPX files that can actually maintain palette values that are “out of range” or would be traditionally beyond clip…having all that extra dynamic range when you get to Color might have a positive effect on the process…

You’d have to test it as I don’t even know if Color understands the “out-of-range” values concept with DPX files…or if it even handles it in the same way.

…but it might be interesting to explore.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,