[Vjohn]

Although two random white-noise sources will average toward zero when you add them, I doubt that adding two sound tracks has a useful result. Put the room sample on a separate track and play with the gain to see if you can hear an improvement.

It’s probably more beneficial to play with the filters in Audio Effects. I find the notch filter great for removing air conditioner hum in auditoriums, for instance. Bandpass is useful for quiet times, but usually detracts seriously from content if you use it when there is any.

[Vjohn]

Yes, encode it in Premiere and then import the video and audio files into Encore. With a 27 minute target you might as well use the highest data rate choices. Select PCM audio – Encore will convert it to AC3 if you want it to.

BTW if you haven’t done much with Encore – imho it’s a relatively primative product, development-cycle wise, and the development team wasn’t told to make it like Premiere. Unfortunately there are some GUI features that are Premiere-like enough that a new user might make wrong assumptions about how they work. For instance, in Premiere, you add stuff to a single timeline. In Encore, you create a second timeline if you want to use two video files in one project. Good luck.

[Vjohn]

Thanks, Scott.

I think you’re saying that rendering as a separate step (either render timeline or export to movie), then adding the resulting file to the timeline and selecting it as the workspace and exporting that to mpeg, gives identical results to the one-step process of exporting the original timeline to mpeg. Given that all settings are correct and unchanged, of course.

Reiterating the reason for the more complicated process: it leaves me with a rendered file, and if I need to make small changes to it, a subsequent export of any kind will need to render only the changed areas. Afaik the one-step process cannot be told to preserve an intermediate rendered but not encoded file.

[Vjohn]

If you network the machines, open the project in Premiere (Pro?) on the laptop, and select Project/Project Manager/Create New Trimmed Project and set Project Destination to be on the desktop, you’ll get an exact replica of your project over there. The original project on the laptop will remain intact, but of course after you begin editing on the desktop it’ll become obsolete.

I’ve gone to keeping each project on an external USB2 hard drive so that I can simply plug it in to the machine I want to use for editing. 3.5″ drives perform much, much better than laptop drives, so I do the same thing for that case, even though it’s one more thing to haul. A nice rolly TravelPro laptop case helps.

[Vjohn]

That’s just what I did to experimentally verify the process. It’s a bit of a chore since the program creates a gaggle of preview files, not just one, and I think they need not sum to the work area – if a snippet didn’t need rendering, it’s left out. But given that it’s pretty easy to apply effects that take 5:1 or 10:1 to render, avoiding re-rendering can save a ton of time.

An interesting workflow might involve incremental export to DV AVI for preview; those files could be brought back into the project on a new track and time-aligned. Clip boundaries would be obvious and clips in the original could be further edited as necessary and then copied over the new working track, or the clip bounds could be duplicated into the working track.

[Vjohn]

Thanks for the insightful reply, Steven.

[Vjohn]

Okay, I don’t pretend to be expert at this so it may in fact be possible to “import” a project into another one, along with its work-in-progress state. What worked here was to open the 32khz project, highlight the timeline, click Edit/Select All/ Copy, close that project, open the blank 48kHz project, highlight the timeline again, click edit/paste. Premiere has nicely populated the files window with all the files, and the timeline with all the clips, and all the edits are there. I don’t know if there’s a trap awaiting me – I suppose I’d better try a render/encode before spending much labor on editing – but for the moment it looks just like the project I left behind, except still says it’s 48khz.

[Vjohn]

On your system does it actually import the entire project, including its state (effects being applied, temporal alignment of clips, etc)? I tried it again on mine (XP Pro SP2) and the project files are certainly there as you say, but nothing else. No effects, no alignment. Must be a button I need to press.

[Vjohn]

Sorry I wasn’t clear. Starting over throws away significant effort that’s been put into the video so I’ll finish the video editing and export to avi. Then I’ll use that avi (edited video, 32khz sound) in a new project, but replace its sound by importing the original 48khz source. The audio doesn’t require much work so the replacement is easy.

I’d hoped there was a secret switch in Premiere that enabled audio-rate selection in an active project. The edit box is there, tantalizingly greyed out, suggesting that since it’s there, there *must* be a way. I wonder why they do that?

[Vjohn]

I’m green at this so my method may be flawed, but I leave track 1 empty and put cameras on 2 and above.

Synchronize using sound tracks, assuming each camera recorded one and the tracks share a spike or two. Apply any general effects as necessary to each camera track.

Then start from the beginning and select scenes from among the cameras and copy the best camera down to track one. To do that, razor cut both sides of the clip you want to use, copy it with Ctrl-C (PC version), make sure track 1 is highlighted as the target and the hairline is on the left cut, paste it with Ctrl-V. Ctrl-D plops your default transition onto the cut, and you’re on to the next scene.

I actually like to leave the camera tracks uncut, so I erase the razor cuts right after the copy. The sequence is position at right of desiged scene, razor, move to left (PgUp), razor, copy (Ctrl-C), delete razors (Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-Z), paste (Ctrl-V)