[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere 6.5 really doesn’t care much about what video card you have.

You should be able to use HollywoodFX as long as the version you have is compatible with Premiere 6.5. I doubt the newest versions are.

[Tim Kurkoski]

1) Yes
2) 16:9 (NTSC or PAL, whichever you’re using)
3) My guess is that if you shot DV, you would get black bars on 4:3 output. But I’m not sure, I haven’t fooled around with that setting. Generally, you should be matching the output ratio of the camera to what you shot. ie., If you shot HDV, always choose 16:9 settings.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Yes.

Encore cares less about the file format (it will accept AVI, QT, MPEG, or WMV) than it does about the specifications of the file. It must match the specifications for your Encore project, either NTSC or PAL (720×480 29.97fps or 720×576 25fps, respectively, though there are some minor exceptions).

[Tim Kurkoski]

I’m going to spout off some vague instructions. I fiddled with this a little, but a lot may depend on your exact workflow.

1. Pre-comp your puzzle piece animation.
2. Duplicate the puzzle piece comp in the master comp.
3. Put your photo in the master comp, below the two puzzle comps.
4. Set the Track Matte option for the photo to be the lower puzzle piece comp.
Side note- make sure the photo’s time bar only begins just before you want the flip to begin. Otherwise you could get some odd results.
5. Make all layers 3D.
6. Change the Z position value of the puzzle piece comps to -.01. This just gives them slight separation in 3D space.
7. Pre-comp this comp.
8. In the new master comp, make the pre-comp 3D and turn on the Collapse Transformations switch.
9. Rotate the comp’s X or Y to create the 3D flip.

It may not be perfect, but hopefully that will get you started.

[Tim Kurkoski]

After Effects 7.0 has an option in the Preferences for doing exactly this. Earlier versions do not have such a feature.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Remember that with Dynamic Link, you’re running two apps at once. After Effects is running to do all the rendering. Even if you don’t have it actively loaded, Premiere Pro will have launched a “headless” version that runs in the background. But that doesn’t really cut down on the system resources that AE needs to render. The performance you get should be about the same as if you were running AE and RAM previewing the comp, and also running Premiere Pro and scrubbing the timeline at the same time.

So it’s all down to the performance of your machine and how well it handles two resource hog applications at once. A faster processor will probably serve you better than more RAM. The disk caching idea is a pretty good one, though.

[Tim Kurkoski]

It sounds like your color settings are off. Go to Edit > Color Settings and choose one of the default presets, like US Prepress Default. (Save for Web doesn’t use color management, so it’s not affected by these settings.)

If that doesn’t help, you may have a damaged color settings file or preferences, a damaged color profile, or a damaged Photoshop install.

For the first, trash your prefs.
For the second and third, start by reinstalling.

[Tim Kurkoski]

There are different solutions to fix flickering, because there are different things that cause it.

It would help if you tell us which version of Premiere you are using, because the controls may be slightly different. But in most versions of the program, if you right-click on the still and choose Field Options, you can choose a couple of different options that may help: Flicker Removal, or Always Deinterlace.

Here’s an article on Adobe’s web site that may help. It’s geared towards an older version of Premiere, but the solutions are still pretty good and the explanation at the bottom tells you why this can happen.

https://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/315258.html

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere Elements captures as an AVI file. No changes are being applied to your captured video, though. The datat is stored in the AVI file using the DV codec, exactly the same way it is on the DV tape.

[Tim Kurkoski]

You would use DynamicLink anytime you want to create something in After Effects for a project you’re working on in Premiere Pro and Encore. For example a fancy title in Premiere Pro, or an animated background for a DVD menu in Encore.

The key to understanding DL is that Premiere Pro and Encore aren’t doing the rendering. What they do is create a “tunnel” to After Effects. AE does the rendering and feeds the frames back to the host program. (If AE isn’t already running, the host launches version of AE that runs in the background.) This type of technology is sometimes called “frame serving”.

So you can see how it doesn’t matter that Premiere Pro can’t use your plug-ins. It doesn’t need to. AE is doing all the work, it just hands the rendered frames back to Premiere Pro. To Premiere Pro and Encore, the AE comp is just another movie file.