[Vincent Rosati]

From Flash, try QuickTime MOV or Windows AVI, 16-bit, and uncheck ‘Compress’, check ‘Smooth’. And, make sure you’re exporting at the appropriate frame size for your video project.
From Premiere, if you’re going to DVD you should use DVD-Video MPEG-2. Or, If you want your DVD authoring software to transcode the file, export the movie as Uncompressed.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Usually for import issues simply decompressing the files works – Codec: Uncompressed or Compression: None.
I use AVS Video Converter.
For audio, PCM WAV is nice.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Sorry for the long response time..
I have an audio rip from a hollywood feature, lots of segments – speech, background music, dramatic music – I import it into all of my projects that are going to DVD.
By ‘speakers’ I hope you don’t mean headphones, monitoring with headphones will result in a bad mix.
You should at least have stereo external monitors.
They should be positioned at ear height.
They should be spaced equidistant, making a triangle with your head at one point and the left and right audio monitors (speakers) at the other two points.
If your sound card has an equalizer, set it to flat.

Good audio mixing is a complicated subject.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

I’m not sure of the export options in Elements, but if you can, use Adobe Media Encoder or otherwise export as a ‘multiplexed DVD-Video MPEG-2 with PCM audio’ – Or, you can export as an uncompressed AVI and let your DVD authoring software do the transcoding.

The safe guides are at 90% and 80% of the frame size (I think). The larger guides define the Action Safe Area and the smaller guides define the Text Safe Area.

For best image quality, save your images as PSD (Photoshop) or TIFF with LZW compression, both are lossless image formats.

There are other issues with using square pixel images in video, maybe you don’t want to worry about right now.
But if you do, you might want to correct the aspect ratio of the images.
If you are creating an NTSC full screen DVD you should open the images into a 720×540 file, than resample the images to 720×480. The image will appear to be vertically squished, but will display correctly when viewed as a DVD.
Also, if the video will ever be displayed on a CRT you should ‘deflicker’ the images…
https://www.handcranked.newinelabs.com/assets/Adobe_Photoshop_Action_-_Encore_Menu_Deflickerator.zip
Finally, you might want to add the Broadcast Color filter to the entire sequence, but this would also only be necessary if it will be displayed on a CRT.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Video ain’t easy. To offer you the best help, you’d need to define your output. Is this for DVD, NTSC or PAL, full screen or widescreen?

If you’re in Photoshop CS, create a new project and click the drop-down at the Preset options. Towards the bottom of the list are the presets for different video formats, choose the appropriate one. This will ensure a correct pixel aspect ratio and they have safe guides built right into the templates so you don’t put your titles too close to the edges.

Regarding full screen or widescreen, both use a different pixel aspect ratio (PAR). When you are creating images for video in Photoshop you should take this into account.

Photos should be pre-processed to correct the PAR, before imported into a video project. Let us know what format you’re in and we can elaborate.

As far as how to create the titles, Premiere has acceptable titling and it’s flexible within the project. If you need the power that Photoshop offers, than that is also good. After Effects is even better. But, for speed, maybe just do them in Premiere.
Try adding Video Effect/Blur or Gaussian Blur to titles, set the amount to zero. That usually does the trick.

I use Premiere Pro 1.5. When I create premiere titles it opens the Titler interface, once I create the title it is saved as a title file. To edit the title, I open the title file in the project bin.

Hope this gets you started.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Since you’ve already created the vector path, select the shape layer and go to the Paths tab. Click the drop-down and choose Save Path.
You can now delete the shape layer and work with the path.

There are a bunch of ways to mask.
With the path selected, again click the drop-down and choose Make Selection.
or, you could duplicate your art layer and Layer/Vector Mask/Current Path.

Hope this helps

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Hey Del-
I’ve also had a few TIFs become corrupted. Total iMac 10.5 workflow.
The TIFs were originally generated by Cinema4D. Than, Save As/TIFF/LZW in PS CS3.
The corruption occurred, similar to your situation, in that I placed the images into AI projects and they were fine – But, the next day they were corrupted. 🙁

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Pretty solid! Nice Cuts. Locked shots. Appropriate music, Very nice.
If I had to offer one suggestion, it would be to look into Title Safe Guides/Safe Areas 🙂 They can be enabled in Premiere or in Photoshop CS.

Bravo!

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Click and drag as you make the points.
Or, use the Convert Point Tool to smooth existing points – click and drag.

Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

Hmm..
Typically, I’d start in Illustrator, than go to Photoshop when necessary.

Basically, try recreating the file as an AI file, piece by piece.
Save a rasterized version of the art and place it in Illustrator as a temp background, in a locked layer.
Create paths from any vector objects or shapes in the PSD and ‘Export Paths to Illustrator’.
Highlight and copy any text in the PSD than paste into Illustrator.
Save any raster or Smart Objects as individual files, than place them into the AI file.
That’s probably the cleanest way to do it.

Also, maybe you could save the PSD as a Press Quality PDF or EPS, than open that in Illustrator.

Can’t your print service use a PDF?

Unless you turn off the spot color warning, you will always get it when you are using spot colors – It’s a good thing.
If this is going to be printed in CMYK, keep your spot color file as a master, but ‘save as’ a CMYK version and convert all of your spots to CMYK.

Vince