[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Alex,

Do all the audio sample rates match your sequence?

That’s a common issue with mixed footage and that’s where I’ d start.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi John,

My recommendation, other than getting the latest graphics driver, would be to reformat the drive and install XP and CS4 from scratch, unless that’s what you meant by Erasing all memory of the program.

Drivers are part of the Windows architecture, so erasing Premiere alone will likely not solve your issues.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Sally,

After Effects has text animation presets very close to that.

That’s not something I would approach with Premiere.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi John,

By re-installed, do you mean by wiping off the hard drive?

If something gets corrupted in the OS, that’s pretty much the only way to do it. Even a system restore is sketchy.

If you did start over, I would go the graphics card manufacturer site and download the current driver version. You haven’t mentioned the format of the video you are working with, is this happening if you bring in bars and tones? I’m assuming it’s native since I don’t see any bars above the timeline.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi David,

You could look at the After Effects’s puppet tool. It’s pretty easy to setup, and I’m sure there is a ton of tutorials on Youtube for that one.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Emily,

Here comes a looooooong post, you can tell I’m waiting for a client…

To the most urgent question, yes converting to DV would get you a fluid edit. The caveat is that it’s not HD, so you will not be seeing full quality while editing.

The process I would recommend:

1 – Open Adobe Media Encoder, import and convert all the footage to DV widescreen. (Note you could do a test with 4Mb/s H.264 and see if you are able to edit real time)

2 – Create an HDV or a desktop sequence with the desired resolution and frame rate (Go to the custom tab if needed). If you want full HD, it’s 1920×1080 Square pixels (desktop mode)

3 – Bring in the DV converted footage and do a quick test. Drop it on the timeline, right click scale to frame size if you want to see it at full frame, do a couple cuts. Then go to the project manager and replace the footage with the original, make sure everything looks good (and it should, especially since you are dealing with separate audio).

4- Now do you edit in DV and replace at the end. You could also set your preferences to scale to frame size prior to importing the DV footage if you want to avoid doing it for every clip, but that could mess things up if you are bringing in images as well. You would get a quality hit with zoom ins for example.

Onto your hardware questions. If you do, or plan on doing a lot of editing, some things would likely need to be upgraded. For one, your RAM should at least 8 gigs, 12 Gigs recommended, especially if you are running a 64 bits OS. It matters more if you upgrade to CS5.

For drives, it’s going to be expensive, but I wouldn’t even be editing without a nice drive array. A couple of streams of video can easily overrun the fastest single drive, that’s without including the overhead needed by the OS and cache from Premiere itself.

If you are doing After Effects export, you’ll be dealing with uncompressed footage and that’s a real headache.

The cheapest “great” array I can recommend is the HDElement from Caldigit (looking at about $1800.00 with drives and taxes) for 4 Gigs.

Great support, very, very fast, and reliable system. I tried cheaper stuff and it just doesn’t compare. You also get the added safety of RAID 5 allowing a drive to fail.

All of this can get expensive and it depends on how much you are willing to put up with, but if you have a client in the room… well you want something that just works 🙂

Cheers,

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Emily,

If most of your footage is HDV, by all means create an HDV sequence. Keep in mind that the type of sequence you pick will not affect the quality of your export.

You haven’t mentioned your computer specs and drive type. My guess is that it could be a combination of both.

For drive, you will likely need a nice RAID array, especially if you are running multiple tracks of footage and audio.

I think the best approach at this point is to throw all your footage in Adobe Media Encoder and convert to a low bit rate format like DV, edit with that, and replace in the project panel when you are done.

The frame rate however should be solved prior to starting since interpreting afterward will mess up your edit timing.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Robin,

By widescreen, do you means 16:9 or something wider?

If 16:9, make sure your sequence settings are 1280×720 “square pixels” and it should be the same in your export setting, override the “Match Sequence Settings” if needed.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Tom,

First thing, delete your render files, then go to your preferences and clean media database. Still crashing?

Check for any effects in the area, and remove them.

Import your project into a new Premiere project. Still crashing?

Remove the particular clip, reexport it if needed, it could be corrupted, although a system reboot is unlikely in that case.

It could be RAM or drivers, or just a corrupted Premiere app.

You could try finding out what the error is by going to the event log area, or turn off the automatic restart after a blue screen, so that you can read it. It’s under Control panel > System > Advanced system settings > Start up and recovery > Uncheck automatically restart

System reboots often refer to hardware issues like memory or Bios settings.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

As Todd mentioned, you can use preview as part of your export.

We have a pretty good raid system from Caldigit and so, rendering to uncompressed when needed is a great option, then use the preview for export, no loss, and it’s fast.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area