[Tim Kolb]

What sort of material are you starting with? (framesize, compression, frame rate, etc) …and what are you trying to send it too? (same info).

Otherwise it’s too vague a question to really address…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

What sort of source media is it?

So, have you tried a project with other media in it? Making sure absolutely no media from the original project is in it?

How about one with just bars and black on a DV timeline?

If it consistently freezes, then I’d guess you need to start considering what you added to the system before this started to happen…something must be conflicting with the software.

Keep in mind if you are running Windows XP 32, half your RAM is wasted as the system can’t see it, and if you’re using Windows XP 64, Adobe does not support that OS officially…

To get your work done, I’d export an MPEG2 clip from PPro to put into your DVD project and get on with it without using Dynamic Link if time is an issue.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Once FCP rewraps files so it can deal with them…it’s pretty common that no one else can as it’s usually some proprietary thing that only users of FCP can decode (even the Mac version of QT won’t do it without FCP installed.)

The ProRes decoder won’t decode rewrapped HDV MPEG files…they’re still MPEG in their jelly-like inside, FCP just put a QT crunchy shell around it…

Unfortunately once FCP “imports” HDV, DVCProHD, and I think a few others, those files are FCP proprietary unless you buy an aftermarket plugin to read them.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

No, lots of video material is a straight data transfer so no video capture card is needed.

You may want to keep your laptop monitor calibrated to do any coarse color correction on it, but if it’s material bound for broadcast or some other specific scenario (film recorder or whatever…), I would still try to leave the really specific adjustments for a system that shows you your images on a screen that is consistent with your destination (a broadcast video monitor on a desktop system…with an I/O card most likely, or even a projection screen if that’s appropriate.

I’d also be particularly aware of your surroundings. If you do this type of work in airports and hotel rooms, you’ll find your perception will vary widely from day to day…making any color correction very inconsistent.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Mercury doesn’t change where video decode is done…it’s CPU-based.

If you have an approved CUDA card installed, you get the push on effects render.

So…with R3D files, most of us would utilize the interface for altering the R3D files as they are decoded…changing the metadata. This would be done in the decode of the frames and therefore would be done in your CPU/Red Rocket pipeline. If nothing else is done than cutting R3D frames and altering the color in the PPro R3D metadata interface (or RED CINE X for example)…it’s all handled during the RED decode.

If you added a color correction filter from PPro, say for some secondary correction (and it was an effect that is marked as being CUDA-supported…indicated by the little lego block with the arrow on it), then the CUDA card would pick that work up.

So…I guess the short answer is “it depends”. The CUDA cards have a definite impact on the speed of work on the timeline, as long as you’re not expecting it to have an impact where it isn’t designed to…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

OK…CS2.

I don’t know how many people are running CS2 on Windows 7…we’re talking about an application that was released in January 2006 running on an operating system that wouldn’t even exist for nearly four years (October, 2009).

I’d guess there are lots of interesting quirks in that system.

Most software companies support the existing release and the preceding release, which for Adobe would be CS5 and CS4… I’d say that it isn’t out of the question that there is simply a distinct incompatibility. Adobe would have dropped support (and therefore tracking any operational anomalies) a year before Windows 7 was released, so it wouldn’t have been even tested on Windows 7, much less designed for it.

However, if Windows can’t see the DVD-R burner, I’d guess you have some other system-borne issue.

If Windows 7 just won’t work nicely with Windows 7, creating a Windows XP boot partition might be an option…

…or upgrading your Adobe software (though alas, Premiere Pro could only burn direct to DVD in vCS2, so you’d have to adapt to using Encore, although that would add a lot of features and tools for you.)

I don’t know what else to tell you…CS2 was a great application and I’d say that as PPro grew in functionality after CS2, you could make a credible argument that it became a bloated application after that…however, the likelihood that CS2 will continue to be compatible with new hardware is going to become slimmer as time goes on.

(Even though I bet CS2 runs like a rocket-ship on that new system…)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

So the screen res settings, the capture res settings, the edit framesize, and the output framesize are all identical? (I’m on a phone and can’t really see any attached pics)

The fact you have to go to a large bitrate output file to make it readable suggests that it’s being scaled somewhere in the process.

If you’re capturing to wmv, that’s not going to have the quality of a Camtasia capture to Techsmith’s codec for instance.

You Tube will scale the image to whatever they use if you don’t output the exact framesize they use. Very few screen cap videos I’ve seen that are very clear on You Tube.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

“Burn” a project?

What version of PPro are we talking about? The only version I remember burning directly to a Video DVD was CS2.

Encore authors/burns Video DVD…

I’m not sure what trend you’re referring to when you say there is a problem with Adobe and DVD burners… I run Windows 7…no issues…it recognizes both my burners.

I don’t see how Adobe would change the system’s interaction with the DVD burnern. Adobe installs no hardware drivers.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

…though deleting the render files may solve the issue…

Again, preview render files are not used in normal transcoding operations in the Production Premium suite…they are a convenience for full-motion viewing of your edit.

Are you seeing this dynamic link failure on any PPro project that you attempt to Dynamic Link to Encore? What happens if make a new PPro project with something like 3 clips in it, slap them on a timeline and see if you can DL to Encore?

…I’d also say it’s time to start a fresh PPro project and import the original PPro project into it, open the edit sequence in there, and re-save the project elsewhere. After all this mucking about, particularly after you were having issues in the first place, I’d say it’s more than a little likely the project file could be a little dicey.

Now…none of this takes into account what sort of system you’re running on. Windows/Mac? How much RAM? Etc.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

What do you mean “PPro doesn’t recognize” the DVD burner? Are you trying to read data from it?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,