[Vincent Rosati]

Bill-
I misunderstood your issue. I offered some ideas that didn’t really apply. 🙁 Hope it wasn’t too confusing.

I’ll try to better explain the “mass scaling”.
Resize the first clip to your desired size – It sounds like you’ve done this, to 92%.
With the resized clip still selected in the sequence, under the Effect Controls panel, highlight the word “Motion”, than Ctrl+C (copy). This copies all of the Motion parameters into your clipboard.
Now you select all of the other clips in the sequence and Ctrl+V (paste). This will apply the copied Motion parameters to all of the clips that were selected.
Perhaps you were trying to click on the Scale parameter, and copy from it?

When you have clips grouped you won’t be able to see the motion/effect parameters, but you can still paste into them. You would have to ungroup the clips to see the parameters for a particular clip.

Regarding the “second idea”, nesting is when you take a completed sequence, from the Project palette, and drop it into the timeline of a newly created sequence. It will appear as one long “clip” in the new timeline. You can than apply effects to the nested sequence just as you would any single clip, only it will apply to all of the clips contained within the sequence. Having a better understanding of your problem, this may also work for you.

When you mentioned that you desired a scale of 92%, to make the full image visible on your screen, I had a thought.
In Premiere, on your Monitor controls there is a button on the right side that looks like cross-hairs, this button will toggle the Safe Margins – check it out.
The outer margin, the Action Safe Margin, is at 90% of the screen – So, your actually scaling down your video to approach this Action Safe Margin. (The inner margin is the Title Safe Margin, at 80%, btw)
Anyway, it sounds like your TV is overscanned, which is standard. So, when creating graphics for video, be mindful of these important margins.

But, in the end, I’m pretty sure the SDR-H200 shoots in 60i so any scaling, up or down, will reduce image quality.

Let us know how it goes. 🙂
Vince

[Vincent Rosati]

If you’re using letterboxed 4:3 (simulated 16:9) you’re probably going to have to upscale your video to fill the frame.
If your video is interlaced, it must be deinterlaced before scaling.
It’s better to do deinterlacing in AE, but you can do it in Premiere via right-click on the clip in the original 4:3 sequence – Field Options/Always Deinterlace.
Note, that this deinterlacing technique will reduce your vertical resolution by 50%. 🙁
If necessary, search the COW archives for “deinterlace” – it’s a whole other subject.

Create a new 16:9 project.
Import the 4:3 project, and drop your 4:3 sequences into the new project’s 16:9 sequences.
Select all of your source material in the project window, right-click and conform the footage to 16:9.
Apply Effect/Distort/Transform to the sequence, uncheck Uniform Scale and transform the width to 75%.
Your scaling proportions are now at 4:3 (or 100%:75%). Now, you determine the proportions that you need – If you scale your width up to fit to 103%, your height should be 137.3%. (103/3×4=137.3)
Scaling is best done with the Resizer plugin for AE or PP2.

Converting formats is a time consuming business that should be avoided at all costs.

[Vincent Rosati]

As a general answer, make sure you are burning to brand name media at the slowest speed. And, although I’m not sure how much it matters anymore, the AUDIO_TS directory should be included for backwards compatibility.

Let us know how things work out. 🙂

[Vincent Rosati]

Hmmm. Look in Project/Project Settings/General and see if “Scale Clips…” is checked in the video settings. If so, this would cause a rescaling of your source material when dropping it into the sequence timeline. Uncheck it, and reinsert your clips.

[Vincent Rosati]

Am I correct in saying that your project is 16×9, and your source material is 4:3 that has been upscaled to fill the screen?

Anyway, resize the first clip in the sequence to your desired size, than Ctrl+C (copy) your transformation from the Effects Control panel, than select/highlight all of the rest of the clips in the sequence and press Ctrl+V (paste).

Another option would be, if you already have all of your clips in a timeline sequence you could nest that sequence into another sequence, than apply your scaling to the nested sequence. In this way, you can apply an effect to all clips.

However, it sounds like you’ve already upscaled your video, so the nesting trick wouldn’t work as the nested sequence would be cropped to 16:9 and a reduction in size wouldn’t recover the cropped areas.

Additional notes: Effect/Distort/Transform is a better tool for scaling, but it increases the render time.
If your footage is interlaced, it should be deinterlaced before any scaling.
All source material should be conformed to the project settings to avoid unexpected results during rendering, via right-clicking on the source in the project window. So, if you are using 4:3 material in a 16:9 project, conform it to 16:9 than Effects/Distort/Transform the width to 75% than check the Uniform Scale box before additional scaling.

So, uh.. yes, to answer your question. :)lol

[Vincent Rosati]

Look into Canopus Video Effects, they might have something for you.

Or, you could try using the standard Effect/Wipe and run it at the same angle as the Page Peel. Than create a large (1000x1000px) raster version of the peel graphic, any color you like, to run on top of the Wipe.

Notice that the Peel effect is simply a static graphic that enlarges and moves across the screen, with a wipe underneath.
One trick would be creating the shadow effect, but you could create another graphic for that and run it at 33-67% opacity. Or, if your comfortable using Keying or the Multiply Key, you could combine your custom wipe graphic with the shadow into one image.

Anyway, you would keyframe the motion and scale of your custom wipe graphic using Video Effect/Distort/Transform to achieve a higher quality than by using the Effect Controls/Motion options.

In the end, you could save a project file of your custom wipe (along with your graphic assets) and import it into any project you desire.

This might seem complicated, but you could probably create a custom reusable wipe in less than 20 minutes, if you know how to use Photoshop. 🙂

Anyway, this is one way you could do it.

[Vincent Rosati]

It sounds like you have a good Batch Process workflow with TMPGEnc. 🙂
Otherwise, I agree with marcbrak regarding the usage of MPEG video, and that decompressing your MPEG video to either AVI Uncompressed or MOV Uncompressed would allow you to trim the project as you desire.
You are correct that encoding to DV-AVI is lossy, but uncompressing the video results in a lossless translation, however the files are huge. Generally, the listed codec for uncompressed video reads as “Uncompressed” in the codec options, for both AVI and MOV.
In the future, you might try to capture your video using the Automatic Scene Detect feature, or by manually clipping your footage as you capture – so you’ll have more manageable files if you decide to decompress. Or, many decompression apps will allow you to define maximum file size, so you can split a large file into a series of, say, 1 gigabyte files.

Perhaps someone in the Premiere Pro forum can provide you with an answer that better addresses your needs.

[Vincent Rosati]

Perhaps you could create a scrolling video disclaimer in AE or in your video editor, as your First Play. Than have it End Action to a “still image” video/timeline of the last frame of the first play timeline, as the menu.
A kind of animated intro to matched menu.

[Vincent Rosati]

Apologies. I ran a test project with uncompressed AVI footage and discovered a sort of “random” result in the trimming, in that the trimmed clips were not numbered in the order that they are in the timeline). But it worked.
Anyway, than I ran a test on an edited MPEG compressed video and it achieved a similar result as what you described – 1 video file.

I haven’t worked with HD and am unfamiliar with the codec, but it appears to have a similar limitation as MPEG-2, regarding trimming??

I’ve used AVS Video Converter to trim MPEG video, but it does recompress the file. Perhaps HD would work in the same way?
Also, QuickTime Pro does a great job at trimming video, but again, I’ve only used it to trim uncompressed DV video.

I’m not sure if I have an acceptable answer to your question, other that to suggest that you encode your timeline to it’s intended format, or decompress the video before trimming. 🙁

[Vincent Rosati]

Once you have your rough edit, your in/out points are set/trimmed, you should be able to go to Project/Project Manager and check “Create New Trimmed Project” and run the process.
This will result in a new batch of files that are trimmed to the portions that are used in the timelines.
I think this is what you are looking to do?