[Vincent Rosati]

I’d like to do a COW video tutorial for this question. Do you have the authority to allow the use of this image?

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

This might be a question for the Audition Forum…
https://forums.creativecow.net/adobeaudition

If your audio is clipping, if the red light blinks on the meter, than the data just isn’t there, I’m not sure if you can recover that.
You might be able to try to smooth it using an equalizer.?

In audition, I often use the Param EQ/R&B preset to smooth linear waveforms. I’m not sure if that would help, in your situation.

Any chance you could post a small clip somewhere?

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

I haven’t used Illustrator much for creating web images. Photoshop is the tool to do that sort of thing, it has more interpolation methods; Nearest Neighbor, Bicubic, etc.
If this is going to be a typical stage in your workflow, consider creating an Action or Droplet in Photoshop to perform the task.
You could create a droplet that you just: drag the AI file onto the Droplet, and it will automatically open and rasterize the file, resize it, save it to wherever you want, than close the file.
With Actions, you could do a batch of AI files, in one shot.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

MPEG is generally considered to be a delivery format, not an editing format. Although you can work with MPEG, it’s not a good practice.
Either; decompress the video/audio prior to import, export the audio from the MPEG with QuickTime Pro to WAV or AIF, or extract the audio with some other tool such as Audition and save as WAV or AIF.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

There’s probably a better answer than this, but I seem to remember doing something like this in the past.
I eventually used After Effects to do the conversion, and it worked fine. I’m not exactly sure why AE would be better at cross-platform translation, but it worked.
As always, video codec (AVI or MOV) Uncompressed.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Sounds like you know what you’re doing. The only thing I can think of is to try a reinstall.
I know it hurts, but it might do the trick. ??

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

I assume your AVI Export is Uncompressed, and that the AVI looks exactly like the original file, as Uncompressed is lossless…
And that the compression loss that you are describing occurs after the movie is transcoded to MPEG-2 in Encore. ?

(Generally, refer to this visual loss as ‘Compression Artifacts’.)

DV always has DV compression artifacts. MPEG-2 always has MPEG-2 compression artifacts. MPEG-2 is more compressed that DV, and will usually have a sprinkling of both types of artifacts when DV source is used.

I get the best results by decompressing, deinterlacing and ‘filmifying’ DV source, prior to editing.

Magic Bullet has a DV deartifacting component, but it is crazy slow and I never use it because of that.

I will always recommend that you encode out of Premiere with AME or MC Pro, into an Encore compliant MPEG-2 DVD-Video file.
I never allow Encore to encode/transcode. It reduces the possibility of unexpected surprises, late in the job.

As far as improving the quality of the encode, you’ll need to test your settings until you find one that is acceptable for your project.
Usually the problems occur where there is a lot of motion, either horizontal or vertical.
To do this, you should identify small portions of your movie that look bad. Than, make a small (maybe 30 sec. to 1 min.) movie that you will encode and run through your entire encoding and authoring process, including writing to DVD-RW, to see what it looks like on a CRT monitor.

It’s a guess, but I suspect that the issue occurs as a result of the Encore encode.
I’m not saying that Encore is bad, just that you have more control over the encode process with AME or MC Pro.

Making a movie is a complicated thing, as you know 🙂 At any step in the process, there are like 10 things that you can do wrong or better.
Test your processes and keep notes! What if a hard drive failure or virus destroys your well earned settings and process formula.
That would be a nightmare.

I’m notorious for rambling. So, I hope there’s something here that will help your to achieve your desired results.
Please feel free to post with more questions if you cannot find an answer in the archive.

Good luck brother 🙂

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

I don’t think you can use a raster as a brush, unsure.
Here’s a file that describes how to make a Pattern Brush…
https://www.newinelabs.com/rosati/tutorials/spirals_redux_cs2.ai

You can apply a brush to any path.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

I seem to remember having an issue with that, once. Maybe you just need to run the OS update?
Maybe, check your project settings to make sure the audio is set to run from your desktop, and not to DV hardware.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Many times, when you add a clip to the timeline and the audio drops in an unexpected place, it is usually because it has a mono audio track – assuming the project is set to stereo.

I don’t know if you can ‘restore’ the audio, but you could add another instance of the 30 sec. clip, right-click on it and Unlink the audio. Than delete the video and move the new audio portion into the correct position, under the original video clip.

Once in the correct position, you can select the original video and the new audio and re-link them.

Vince