Adobe Premiere & Premiere Pro discussions from 2004

[Anton Coene]

Thank you both for the very usefull replies. We're planning to make some test-shoots of the area. With the received tips we should try to edit everything we want in Premiere so we have an idea what to do when the shooting of the "real" movie is finished :)

Thank you.
Anton.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Genuine fractal is a tool to increase the resolution of still photos. Are there any similar tools available for video footages? Has anybody tried whether it is possible to export a footage from Premiere to Photoshop, increase the resolution, and then import ithe footage back to Premiere.

I'm stucken for a while with my old archieve material and need to mix old 4:3 and new 16:9 footages together. Scaling within Premiere is not a good idea, for that's simple linear interpolation.

[Pete Bauer]

Hi Lauri,

I'm assuming you want to crop the archived 4:3 footage (that is, chop off top and/or bottom) to create a 16:9 aspect? If you have a lot of material archived, using Photoshop would probably be impractical. Of course, nothing will create image detail when it didn't exist in the original, but I have an idea that I hope will help.

Although extra compression-decompression cycles are generally frowned upon, compared to simple scaling within Premiere perhaps this might actually do better:

Try exporting your archived 4:3 footage to a new 720p or 1080i WM9 file or (gasp) mpeg at the highest quality settings, thus substantially up-sampling it. Then import the new footage to your main 16:9 project, to then be positioned, cropped, sharpened, scaled DOWN, whatever.

I suggest this NOT from deep knowledge of the programs, but on the presumption that the encoding for export is probably more sophisticated than the scaling function within Premiere; presumably it would therefore give a smoother look to the footage that will then tolerate further manipulation in the 16:9 timeline better.

By way of example...yesterday, I created a small project to play with the XL2's 24p mode. I exported the 720x480 16:9 DV from the timeline using the built-in Adobe Media Encoder to both WM9 and MPEG 720p and I must say that at least on my computer monitor, I couldn't tell the difference between the raw footage and the exports. So despite transcoding and compression, the up-sampling looked GREAT.

I'll be curious to know if this does what you are looking for!

[David Levine]

Using prem 6.5 with a Canopus Raptor rt2 card
Have a problem exporting to a mp2 format that will render into a readable DVD with Prem Pro 1.5
Have a plugin for 6.5 that works great and find though there are a few more steps I need to take in 6.5, the final product is fine

[Michael Bernstein]

Premiere (6.0) doesn't print out their Batch Capture lists very satisfactorily. So I'm writing a tool (in Perl) to convert the .PBL file to a .RTF that Microsoft Word can print out for me. (Then I can sit down in front of a better monitor and check off the scenes that I've logged.)

(1) does anyone know the format of the .pbl files? I've figured out where the reel name, the in point, outpoint, file name, and comments show up; but I haven't decoded the other elements of the [BREC] record. Plus I wouldn't mind knowing what the elements in the [WSTA] and [HFSZ] records mean.

(2) has anyone tried converting absolute frames to the MINUTES;SECONDS;FRAMES format that we humans like to read? I seem to have an error in my arithmetic, because 29.97 frames/second and 60 seconds/minute are giving me not just off-by-one errors, but off-by-two (!) errors. I'm sure it's just a case of sloppiness, but if someone else has done the work already, I wouldn't mind cribbing from them.

Thanks!

Michael

[Rob Lohman]

One thing to add, do you really need a hardware card? Basically
there are two reasons to use such a card:

1. analog in and out (sometimes you can do this with a firewire camera with analog in/out as well, or a dv deck or a analog <-> firewire converter)

2. "real-time" performance

I especially quoted the word real-time because a lot of stuff on
the new NLE's on a high-end PC are real-time or near real-time.

The last question to also answer is do you really need any of that.

If you just have a DV camera and want to capture that and don't
do a lot of post work a simple firewire card (if the machine doesn't
have one) will work just as good with a lot less money spend.

But then again this seems to be the way you where going in the
end. I just wanted to clarify it a bit.

[Rob Lohman]

I couldn't find anything on the net so I think your on your own
when reversing this format. Didn't Premiere also support EDL
export? That is an "open" format.

Tried a websearch for frames to timecode conversion algorithm?
Can't imagine there isn't one available.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Pete, I'll find out what the up-sampling does precisely, and then check the idea.

In the mean time, basically the problem is a "psyco-visual" one. I mean, our eyes are very good in recognizing any kind of "order" in visual images. This is to say, when a 4:3 footage is cropped and up-sampled to 16:9, the result is not pleasing for our visual perception recognizes (subconsciously) the artificial flavour in the image which is due to (bilinear or bicubic) interpolation.

Tools, such a Genuine fractal, do also create, I think, artificial data into the image, but the result is pleasing for there is "no visible artificial order". In simple words, Genuine fractal creates new information out from nowhere, but in a clever way which pleases our visual perception. It does not matter that the new information is made from nothing; the only guiding line is that the new information should embed into the image such that it is not visible.

What you seem to suggest (this is the point I need to check) is a trick the professionals in printing houses used in the past. When they had create a copy twice the side of the original image, they first zoomed an image four times larger the original one, and only then came downwards zooming the large copy to the size matching twice the size of the original image.

Now, why that same idea should work with digital images is something I've occasionally thought about, but have not yet found a satisfactory answer. But that's basically what you are suggesting, and it would be interesting to fully understand this issue.

[Adam Beck]

My new Dell WS670 dual processor will arrive here in a couple of days. This computer will be a video editing PC only(may be one computer game NHL 2005). Is there any way I should set it so I can acheive the best performance out of it as possible? I already have software (PPro 1.5, Audition 1.5, Encore 1.5, Photohop 6.5, and After Effects 5.5.) that I will using.

My Specs:
dual xeon 2.8ghz processors H
Hard Drives 40 & 160
ATI FireGL PCIe 128mb
1 gig of ram
dvd+r writer
IEEE 1934 Port
17" Flat panel montior (hopefully a second one for Christmas)

[Glenn Chan]

IMO you only need to do the following:

Take steps to keep your computer safe from spyware and viruses. If you do not know what spyware is, I *highly* recommend you do either of the following.

A- Keep your computer off the internet completely and only connect it when you need to download things like updates (i.e. the latest version of your music software).

OR

B- Take some spyware and virus prevention steps.

Spyware prevention:

Use Spyware Guard.

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

Block unwanted sites with a HOSTS file:

http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Virus protection:

The best thing to do is to not check email on your computer. If you do check email, you may wish to use antivirus software. If you do use antivirus software, configure it to turn off real-time scanning features as it can cause problems.

Firewall (protects against viruses):
If you computer is behind a router, it is already firewalled.
If not, one option is to use software firewall software. I recommend you use the firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2.

2- Check that your IDE hard drives are in DMA mode.

Go to start --> settings --> control panel --> system --> hardware --> device manager --> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers

right click the hard drive controller.
In the second tab, check that the drives are using ultra DMA. For your situation, it should be 4 or 5 unless you're using SATA drives.

3- Did you get a hardware acceleration card for Premiere Pro? I don't use PPro but it might give you better performance than getting an overpriced dual processor machine.

[Gints Klimanis]

That's a nice computer. If you're spending that much on dual processor Xeons, consider upping your main hard drive to the fastest available : Western Digital SATA 74 GByte drive that runs at 10,000 RPM .

[Michael Bernstein]

Originally posted by Glenn Chan :

IMO you only need to do the following:

Firewall (protects against viruses):
If you computer is behind a router, it is already firewalled.
If not, one option is to use software firewall software. I recommend you use the firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2.

I prefer ZoneAlarm. They offer a free version; that's what I use and have been fairly pleased with it, and Zone Labs keep the free version up to date.

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/conten...ku_list_za.jsp


Unlike ZoneAlarm the Win XP SP 2 firewall doesn't restrict outgoing traffic. Restricting outgoing traffic (at least, being able to restrict it) is an important part of keeping your machine secure.

Michael

[Jimmy McKenzie]

If you are importing a photoshop psd into your project, the transparency key is either alpha matte or black alpha matte.
Your post indicates that you are using the luminence key. 0 or 255 bang on might work, but anything I have ever read or used has always been the alpha channel trans. key in premiere.

As for TitleDeko, I agree. This is an awful program that has no respect whatsoever for any standard keyboarding conventions.

[Pete Bauer]

I'm actually quite glad that you asked the question. I have a large number of old family 8mm films and Hi8 tapes so may try similar tricks to get the most out of those archives. If I have time today, I'll try this with one of the Hi8 clips and let you know what happens.

[Adam Beck]

I have seen some security problems at work. Securing my computer will be prority #1. Thank you all for the input it has helped me get a little more focused through the excitment of getting a new PC.