[Tim Kolb]

Well, for most things After Effects can do a very good job of course…and even PPro is far better in this regard than any previous version.

…but my personal favorite is Canopus’s “Imaginate”. It is far faster than any other software I’ve ever seen and v2 can now do multiple pictures in a “timeline/comp” fashion.

It’s not really expensive and it does a great job.

Its main competitor is a product called “Moving Picture” from Stage Tools. I’ve never used it, but it certainly has its fans as well.

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

[BazinoZ] “Well Tim.. its my extreme attempt at humour… as my suggestion of ‘Diva’ is ‘aviD’ reversed ‘PCF’ is ‘FCP’ reversed. So “Adobe Diva PCF” is a combination of the two…”

Wow…I really wasn’t picking up the clues there was I?

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

[BazinoZ] “”Adobe Diva PCF”… Tim?”

I LOVE that.

(what’s the “PCF”?)

I kept coming back to “Blade or knife…something”…some sort of editing metaphor, but I think that Adobe was really trying to showcase the “studio” aspect of the software as it does so much more than cut. I also thought maybe “Finish…” or “Feature…” could have figured in somehow. It was so long ago now that I can’t remember what most of the suggestions were.

The problem is that most of us have no idea what names aren’t already protected. Most companies have product names on the shelf that they may not be using but they have them legally tied up. I could make suggestions for a year and they all might be taken…even though they’re not really “visible” anywhere.

How about Adobe Cut n’ Style?

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

I think Premiere Pro has a number of design changes that are both original and echo the best of several other systems, though I’d say that Avid is at the bottom of that list if it is on it at all.

Most think it seems very FCP-like…I see similarities in DPS Velocity…there has even been a feature or two that I’ve seen first on Pinnacle or Canopus systems (but just because that’s where I saw them first doesn’t mean they started there…)

v6.5 was the last version of regular “Premiere”.

Premiere Pro v1 does write some registry items as “Premiere 7” which was an oversight on somebody’s part…PPro 1.5 and later are proper all the way through. Premiere Pro is such a big change that they decided to start over… Many of us who were asked wanted them to drop the Premiere name altogether.

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

[David Jones] “Oh no, we like that little camera, it looks wonderful!”

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and I have to admit to laughing and crying simultaneously when reading this as it hits pretty close to home.

…we actually had a corporate client who had a “video enthusiast” on staff in the company somewhere and decided to buy their own camera. They had to shoot a machine that was very tall and not very wide. Of course, it looked fine in the LCD panel because it was tilted 90 degrees with the camera…I swear I thought Allen Funt was going to pop out from behind the plant in the edit suite.

I explained that our most practical options were to run it into a DVE and either drop it back creating space on either side, or we could build a graphic around it…or worse, we could blow it up so it filled the monitor side-to-side, but we’d obviously cut the top and bottom off.

In a final moment of frustration, the client huffed “Well I can’t believe in a professional production company with all this equipment you can’t do better than that.

…my editor proceeded to get up, walk over to the Sony Broadcast program monitor, and unceremoniously flip it onto its side. He then proceeded back to his chair and without a word, continued to check out the footage.

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

I’d have to agree with everything that Nick said (though I think not doing business with people who drive you insane is good maintenance of your mental health, not just a sign of success…)

The problem with video/media production types of services is that most of us are relatively small businesses. We all want relatively large businesses as clients because that’s where the higher volume work should logically be…

The problem is that if you want to be in small business and get paid for every hour and get paid on time (sometimes on the spot…), you need to be a plumber. When water is flooding the family room downstream from the commode, it seems pretty easy to get that big deposit and promise to give back any funds that end up unused…if only sales videos and television commercials were like that…

Bottom line is that in any business relationship between a small business and a large business, the large business ends up pretty much calling the shots through decree or default. Generally we actually get paid in a far more timely manner from our smaller clients than our largest ones.

We no longer give a quick pay discount for all the reasons Nick described and I can’t remember the last time we bothered to try to collect any interest. If we get to that point we’re typically just trying to recover the invoiced fees…

…as far as just beginning to invoice…in this business you’ll have to resolve yourself to the fact that you’ll probably have to chase people to get paid as a freelancer as that just seems like the way it goes.

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

[Perry ChenB> “1. V1: [Video1][Video2][Video3], if I want move
make Video1 longer, if I just drag the end of the clip, it overlays on
Video2…(In P6.5, Video2 and Video3 will both move along.)”

It’s a matter of what the tool defaults to…PPro defaults to overlay
(as opposed to “insert”)in everything. If you hold down the Ctl key,
you’ll get the ripple tool, which will move the timeline as you want to…

[Perry Cheng] ”
2. How do you copy and paste a transition, now there is no AB
editing?”

Hmmm… I haven’t done that as far as I can remember…I’ll have to
get back to you…or someone else who’s done it?

[Perry ChenB> “3. I have not tried all video transitions yet,
but, say simple wipes (I think it is called blind wipes? or something like
that), when I want it to wipe from East to West, instead of West to
East, how can this be done? I have tried to click on the little triangle
where it says E>W but no changes were observed. Is this a bug?”

There are arrows around the video frame in the Effects Control
window…they all seem to work for me to reverse a wipe, so maybe I’m
not understanding the question…

[Perry ChenB> “4. Copy and paste a clip seems awkward as well. In
6.5, you just choose a empty space, and then paste what you have copied
and the other clips will move along the timeline. In 1.5, one have to
choose the appropriate Video timeline, line up my timeline bar (i.e. |) and
then Control-V. (I can do this in 6.5 by Right click on the timeline and
paste!!) Am I missing something?”

Actually, the copy/paste function was changed due to intense amounts of
user suggestions. The old way was fine as long as you had space on the
line you were copying from, but if you did it in the middle of a
timeline, you had to slide all the way to the end (the first blank area on that
line) to get the pasted version and drag it back…it didn’t make a lot of
working sense in many cases.

Pasting at the position of the CTI (playhead) on any track you choose
was almost demanded by many, many users. Now you can copy a clip from V1,
even if there’s 35 minutes of content filling V1 down the timeline, and
paste it on another track in that area to work with it. I suspect if you give
this some time, you’ll find it more convenient in the long run.

[Perry ChenB> “5. Opacity ruler can appear on the timeline, but
unless a keyframe has been added, I can not add a new one directly on
the timeline! But, once it is added, I can move it… that is silly, to
me.”

Use the pen tool (hot key: P) and press Ctl and make a keyframe by
clicking on the opacity (or volume) handle. This was also a feature much
addressed by many past users. The old opacity/volume handle behavior meant that
it was nearly impossible to create a keyframe on the exact end frame of a
clip as the cursor kept changing into the trim tool…so the keyframes are
now handled with the pen tool. One more click, but considering how many
clicks it took me to move bad keyframes…it seems a bit more logical.

[Perry ChenB> “6. Motion: how should I apply motion to a jpg
picture so that it moves smoothly and not abruptly? ie. If I simply put a begin
key frame and and end keyframe, the picture just jump at the beginning. I
find the Ease In and out function, but am not sure how to properly use them.
Do I need to apply ease in and out on both motion keyframes and if I
scales it, do I need to apply ease in and out on both scale keyframes as
well!???
Why can that be a default value, who wants to jerky beginning and
ending?”

In the Effect Control window, right click on the motion keyframes and
choose “ease in” for the beginning of the move and “ease out” for the
end. The setting of ease in and ease out may be different, but how they work
is identical to past versions of Premiere. You always needed ease in and
ease out to be manually turned on.

…and I don’t think everybody wants every one of their keyframes to
interpolate with a speed change…if they did, they’d all want a
different speed change… The keyframing works identically to past versions of
Premiere and all versions of After Effects in this sense.

You can drag a “box” around multiple keyframes and set the
interpolation for a group if you choose.

[Perry ChenB> “7. If I create a screen capture by Ctrl-Shift-M, a
bmp is created on the root directory of the assets windows. If, however, I
deleted it, PPro 1.5 will then crashes! The same is true for creating a
matte, before saving the ppj, I delete the matte, PPro
crashes!!”“

I tried to reproduce this one and i can’t do it…my system seems to
work as expected when I export a frame and then delete it from the project
window…you might try an uninstall/reinstall of PPro as some portion
of the app might be malfunctioning.

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

First, you’ll need to upgrade to v1.5.1 (free) from the Adobe website for HDV support.

Then…any properly operating FireWire port should work as long as you have harddrives that will keep up…(fast DV capable harddrives should be fine…though the file conversion may take a bit to catch up after you stop capturing…that’s normal)

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

Wow…Zurich, Athens…and Newark.

…you may run out of tape before Athens…

🙂

Safe Travels Steven. Sorry about the interlace thing…(I’m having difficulty getting my response email back to you for some odd reason…)

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Tim Kolb]

Premiere Pro has a couple of HD options for workflow.

The soon-coming (or possibly here) Matrox Axio will do uncompressed HD on SCSI RAID drives, I don’t think it does HDcam native.

The option with one feature film under its belt and more in the hopper is the Prospect HD system from CineForm. The codec isn’t HDcam native (more on that later) but better. In fact it is high quality enough to post online and image back to film for “Dust to Glory” which had a considerable amount of HDcam as well as several film formats and various video formats. The CineForm HD codec is 4:2:2, full raster 1920×1080, wavelet encoded video. The even better news on this system is that it will run with an IDE RAID. There are two systems at Laser Pacific that were used for D2G. The wavelet technology eliminates the two most hated artifacts of video compression, blocking and mosquito noise…both caused bt Discrete Cosign Transforms, which almost every other compression system is based on, including HDcam.

As far as handling HDcam (not HDcam SR)…you should probably try to avoid posting in HDcam native if at all possible. HDcam shoots 1920×1080, but really only records 1440×1080 to tape. That’s a loss of 25% of your horizontal resolution right out of the gate. It also undersamples chroma to 3:1:1 (remember lowly old DV is 4:1:1) It’s a fact of life that that is how they cram the data on the tape, but post production will require more trips through the codec at some point.

Color correction, any effects, compositing…it all takes rendering and at some point a new trip (or tripS) through your post production video codec of choice. I’m not sure that the constant encoding from 1920×1080 4:2:2>1440×1080 3:1:1 and decoding to 1920×1080 4:2:2 is the way you want to go.

Acquiring on HDcam will certainly deliver content commensurate with your crew talent, but using the HDcam codec in post is pretty destructive…

TimK
Kolb Syverson Communications
Creative Cow Host
2004, 2005 NAB Post Production Conference Premiere Pro Technical Chair
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net