[Tim Kurkoski]

Don’t use DivX.
Don’t use DivX.
Don’t use DivX.

Sorry for the repetition, but it’s a serious point to make. DivX is not an editing codec. It’s a delivery codec and is not made for editing, and Premiere Pro can’t handle it well.

Your best option is to recapture your footage in Premiere Pro. NEVER recompress your footage after you capture. Edit using the original files. This is both for the purposes of quality (you lose quality when you recompress) and compatibility.

[Tim Kurkoski]

What version of Premiere and what version of AE are you using?

[Tim Kurkoski]

There are settings for the painting cursors (yes, Clone is considered a paint brush) in the preferences that I think will help you out.

Also, what version of Photoshop are you using? One of the improvements in CS2 is that it changes the color of the cursor to white when you’re over gray areas.

[Tim Kurkoski]

It sounds like you’re running out of memory for RAM preview.

The most straightforward solution is to buy more RAM. But there are some settings you can tweak within AE to get more out of the RAM you have.

* Reduce the preview resolution of your comp. (Full, Half, etc. at the bottom of the comp window.)
* Make the comp window smaller. When you do this, change the resolution to match. (50% + Half, for example.)
* Use a Region of Interest to only preview one section at a time.
* Turn off layers and effects you don’t need to actively preview.
* Turn off motion blur and frame blending for the comp.
* In the Preferences > Memory and Cache, increase the max memory usage and image cache values. The max I’d recommend are 200% and 80%, respectively. Also, turning on the disk cache can help extend your RAM previews.
* Purge the image cache occasionally so AE can rebuild it from scratch. (Edit > Purge)

Those are some of the basics of managing your memory for previewing. There are some other techniques, but I can’t remember them now.

[Tim Kurkoski]

1. Duplicate the layer, make sure it is above the original layer.
2. Draw a mask around what you want blur on the duplicate layer.
3. Apply the blur.

You can use AE’s motion tracker to help follow the motion. Apply the tracking information to the position of the duplicate layer.

There’s also the “binary search” method of setting keyframes manually, which may be more accurate.
1. Create keyframes at the beginning and end of the comp, and adjust the values as desired..
2. In the middle of the comp (halfway between the keyframes) create another keyframe, and adjust the values.
3. Halfway between each keyframe, make another keyframe adjustment.
4. Halfway between each of those keyframes, make more keyframe adjustments.
5. Repeat setting keyframes in between others until your animation looks smooth. The point is not to have to put a keyframe at every frame, but to add keyframes until you have enough for your animation to look good. Since AE handles interpolation in between keyframes, if the motion you’re trying to match is consistent, it will take care of the rest.

As far as to whether or not there’s a better way to remove the character from the animation, I can’t say. If you’re going to be placing another character over the top anyway, I wonder if blurring the old one out is worth the effort.

[Tim Kurkoski]

DVD’s use the MPEG-2 codec. It is very much not lossless.

There are several reasons why a commercially produced DVD can fit so much onto a single disc.

First, most commercial discs these days are dual-layer DVD’s, with a capacity of over 8GB. That’s twice the size of standard burnable media, though dual-layer media and burners are available now.

Second, commercial DVD production studios use very expensive MPEG encoding applications which let them fine-tune the encoding of the file. This allows them to manipulate the balance of quality and compression to give extra bits where it’s needed, and take them away where it’s not.

Third, they’re often starting with better source material which allows the compressor to do a better job. Consumer level video is usually quite noisy (visual noise), and noise wreaks havoc on the compression process. Starting with clean video from better quality cameras or from film eliminates a lot of the problems that folks like us run into.

Those are the main factors to my understanding. What can you do to make your DVDs look better and fit onto a smaller disc? I can only advise that you learn about the technology and the tools you’re learning. Since you’re asking good questions, you probably already know the basics. Compression is a balancing act, and it can get quite complex.

Adobe has a number of articles about digital video technologies that you may find are a good jumping-off point:
https://www.adobe.com/motion/primers.html

[Tim Kurkoski]

I’m not sure I understand the question. Any WMV file should be readable by Windows Media Player. Are you having a specific problem, or are you asking about getting the best quality from the file?

[Tim Kurkoski]

Choosing a turnkey system will depend on:

A) Your needs for the system. Are you going to be editing DV or HD? What kind of inputs do you need?

B) How much you’re willing to spend. You can get a simple DV/HDV system for a couple of thousand bucks. You can spend well over $20,000 for a Matrox Axio machine.

OpenHD.org is a good place to start to look.

[Tim Kurkoski]

There are lots of plug-ins out there, some of them free, most of them not.

Premiere technically never had an old film look filter. However, what it did have is access to the QuickTime filters. (Premiere Pro lacks this capability.) QuickTime has an old film look built in, which you could apply in Premiere 6.5.

There is a way to use the QT old film look in Premiere Pro, if you still have Premiere 6.5 or if you’ve purchased QuickTime Pro.

1. Create a black matte and put it in the timeline.
2. Make the length of the matte either A) as long as you’ll need it, or B) 30-60 seconds, or some other arbitrary value which you’ll loop as necessary. Beweare that option A gives you a much bigger file.
3. Apply the Transform effect and lower the opacity of the matte to zero. We basically just need a timeline that has nothing in it.
4. Apply the QuickTime Effect and turn on the Special Effects > Film Noise filter. Tweak settings as desired.
5. Export the timeline as an AVI or QT file using a codec that supports alpha channels, such as QT Animation or no compression (huge files!). Set the colors to Millions+ to actually get the transparency.
6. Place the file into Premiere Pro and place it on a track above all of your other clips.

Done. If you have QT Pro, but not Premiere 6.5, follow the instructions above to create the matte and export it as a transparent QT file. Then take it into QT Pro, choose File > Export, and in the options apply the Filter. Make sure your export options remain for Millions+ colors and a codec that supports alpha channel.

Note that this film effect only applies scratches and dust, really. You’ll probably also want to apply some sort of color filtration (sepia toning or over-saturation and color tinting) and maybe some noise to simulate film grain.

[Tim Kurkoski]

What version of Premiere are you using?