Adobe Premiere & Premiere Pro discussions from 2004

[Edward Natale]

Hi all,

I've just bought a new camera and now I'm having strange capture problems in Premiere Pro. The camera is a Samsung SCD27.

Whats happening is that I can not capture an in point to out point. The camera goes a little bonkers playing at slow speed and then I get an error telling me that Premiere can't find the in point and to try increasing the pre roll. Well, I increased the pre roll and still no dice.

First I thought it was my cheapy firewire card so I bought a new Adaptec Fireconnect 4300, but still the problem persists. If I do a down and dirty capture it works fine, but thats a pain in the neck. I'm really looking to solve this problem.

Update: It seems Vegas seems to dislike in point to out point edits as well. Down and dirty capture works fine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Eddie

[Glenn Chan]

I have a Samsung SCD55 and it's a piece of crap. The deck control is poor as the camera will lose communication sometimes and can only do a few commands through firewire deck control. You can trick it by pushing the buttons on it to manually cue things up for batch capture... that works with Final Cut Pro. It kind of works with Vegas.

My camera also gets dropouts and has some really annoying quirks that make it bad for capturing.

My model is an old one and hopefully Samsung fixed their deck control issues with the newer cameras. But you could try pushing the buttons on the camera to try to manually cue things up for batch capture. Rewind before the in point and hit play. You might want to turn the display on your Samsung camera so it'll tell you what the camera is trying to do.

2- What do you mean by down and dirty capture?

[Edward Natale]

Glen,

Thanks for the tips. I'll give them a try today.

Down and dirty capture is the term I use for capturing with out using in and out points. You just let the tape roll and hit record in your capture software.

Thanks,

Eddie

[David Hurdon]

The plot thickens. After 45 minutes at Best Buy's service counter this morning I left with this advice: reinstall the Toshiba software, then try to connect the camera. We had tried a JVC camcorder and as usual my notebook wanted to install the non-existant drivers. It was only when it made the same request of his USB wireless device that he realized this was a sick puppy, not an ignorant client. But here's the kicker. The Toshiba rescue process includes NO option to reinstall non-destructively, as does XP on a desktop. I have to trash every app and all the data I've brought into it over the past ten days just to determine if it's a bad install or a bad laptop. If it doesn't deal properly with the camcorder plug in by firewire after the "repair" they'll give me a new one. Oh happy day. If I could charge somebody for the hours involved I wouldn't have a gripe, but you know who's paying for the time.

David Hurdon

[Pat Engh]

I’m trying to put a transition on a psd file… it’s a logo that I made with a transparent background… When I preview it in Hfx window it looks perfect but when I render it out in Premiere it does not show the transparency, It does the effect only with a white background… I’m guessing that it has something to do with the A/B track on the timeline…

[Curtis Barnard Jr.]

What does most everyone do on here for compression for the internet. I want to compress a 40sec. - 1min. video clip into quicktime format, but im not exactly sure what settings i should use.

Thanks-Curtis

[Hans Henrik Bang]

I had the same problem when I had more than one audio clip on the timeline. Basically if I added an effect to the already existing soundtrack. In that case the sound could become "saturated" - go into clipping.

Solved by reducing the volume of the effects soundtrack.

Hope that was an idea.

[Hans Henrik Bang]

Hmm I'm not sure how to check RAM usage.

Sorry - old post, but just read it.

Under Win XP, press ctrl-alt-del (once!) to get the task manager. That will show you physical memory present and allocated.

[David Hurdon]

Well, it appears the problem was a bad retail install. After reformatting with the Toshiba rescue disks the notebook immediately recognized the VX2000 and allowed me to capture. I'm still having a bit of a wrestle with Premiere 6.5 though. It will play clips in their own clip window without rendering but in the monitor view the clip stalls fatally. I'm pleased that I didn't buy this unit as my main editing station, but I'll be more pleased when I can edit on the go when I want to.

David Hurdon

[Glenn Chan]

If you have a PC, your best bet is to download Windows Media Encoder for free and use that. Great quality and compatibility (compatibility isn't perfect though).

If you want to output QT, the pro codecs will give you better results but that costs money. With the stock settings, the following codecs work well:
sorenson3 for video (no reason to use anything else unless you need better backwards compatibility before QT5)

Audio:

IMA 4:1 is lossless on most sounds. The codec assumes that sounds won't change too much and spends less bits encoding material. On highly dynamic sounds (i.e. gunshots) you will hear a difference. Poor compression.

MPEG4 audio is great, but requires QT6. You can adjust bitrate to tradeoff quality vs size. At high bitrates it will be virtually impossible to tell the difference.

Qdesign music is similar to MPEG4 but offers subpar compression. QT3 compatible.

2- Frame size: whatever floats your boat really. 320X240 is the maximum I would ever do.

3- Frame rate: Half fps motion looks smooth to me. I would usually halve the frame rate.

4- Keyframes: Higher means better compression, but too high and you will get degraded video before the next keyframe hits. It's usually ok to leave this on default and it's not worth your time tweaking this IMO.

5- Quality slider: This should be somewhere low, around 11-44 for sorenson3. An alternative is to use the limit bitrate to options, which I have never gotten good results with (feel free to experiment, I was never very thorough with that setting).

I'm not sure how Premiere works again but with QT Pro you get all the options above.

[Ed Smith]

Hi Pat,

Please provide us with some more info:

How is you timeline set out, i.e. where are your clips, what clips have what effects etc.

Are you using any hardware assistants?

What version of Premiere?

Have you tried it in different video tracks? or in a different project?

Any other further info you might have would be useful.

Thanks,

[Ed Smith]

Hi Chris,

I don't know whats happening there Chris.

What happens if your camera is not attached/ turned off when editing? Does it still skip?

What are your settings in Premiere?

Are you running premiere on its own?

Do you have any programs running in the background?

Cheers,

[Ed Smith]

Hi Pat,

Thats a tough question.

What you need to do is try and get a demo with all the possible cards you can. That way you can make a decision for yourself.

There have been many discussions about this sort of thing, so please try our search.

I must say i'm on the Matrox side. Canopus took a long time to bring out a stable version of drivers for premiere, and even now i'm not to sure that they are 100% correct.

cheers,

[Edmond Chan]

Dear all, expert, master...

I want to cut some 4:3 footage into 16:9
Is there any program specailly doing this job...
I am using Premiere 6.5 with Pinnacle DV-500...
Is there any function that i oversee that can do the job?

Thanks in advance,
Edmond

[Ed Smith]

Hi david,

Thanks for the update. I'm Glad that you managed to sort it in the end.


Thanks,