Export a frame and open in photoshop.
Select the area you want to isolate for the effect.
Alt + backspace to fill black.
Invert the selection.
Fill that area white.
Now you have a matte.
Back to PPro ...
Duplicate the clip in the timeline.
Place the photoshop matte in track 3.
The upper clip (track2) will have track matte applied to it.

Un-eyeball track 3.
Apply whatever effect you want to track 2 and only the revealed space based upon the track matte will have the effect applied.
The above is for locked down scenes. For more complex work with motion mattes, you are best to play in A/E. Lots of patience for that.
YWA!

Ed:

I haunt the Adobe forum from time to time and I can feel the desperation in the words of the people who post their hardware/software conflict problems. In this particular case, I had the same problem and could not sleep because of it (literally). I awoke at 0300 hours and worked on the problem and searched the Adobe forums and read every post and solution until I found one that worked. So I like to pass it on to anybody who has this issue which is simply solved.

Now that you are here, I seem to be having a problem with the Adobe Audition 1.5 software. When I first started using it, I could rip individual music tracks from CDs for use in Adobe Premiere 1.5. However, now all of a sudden, when I try to rip individual music tracks, the software recognizes my drive but tells me it does not recognize any music with the .cda extension (which is cd music!) So now why, all of a sudden, can I not rip/import tracks from my Sony DVD burner?

By the way, if you click the links on my fist post you cannot get onto the Adobe site unless you are a registered user so here is a cut and paste of my post:

<<You need to remove then re-install Premiere Pro so it recognizes the new drive. The following paragraph cut and pasted from the Adobe site explains why:

<<18. Reinstall Adobe Premiere Pro.

DVD driver entries can be accidentally deleted or become misprioritized in the Windows registry, resulting in errors. Removing and reinstalling Adobe Premiere Pro can replace a deleted DVD driver entry or change the priority of a DVD driver entry in the Windows registry.>>

I did what it said and now my DVD burner works great.>>

Very cool! Thank you so much!

In Adobe Premiere Pro, I am gradually losing lip-sync even after rendering. If I stop and start again in the same place, the lip-sync is restored, but is lost again in around a minute. Can anyone come up with a solution?
Thanks in advance,
Mike Wham

Edit:
The computer Fujitsu N series Laptop, with a 1.86ghz Pentium M processor,
ATI Mobility Radeon X300, 1.00 gb ddr ram. It runs windows XP service pack 2 home edition.

I was wondering if this card
(ATI All-In-Wonder X800 XT 100-714200 All-In-Wonder Radeon X800XT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3)
was good to use with Premiere Pro. I currently have ATL 9600. Works great but I could use a faster one. HAs anyone had experience with this card? From all reports it appears to be a great card. Just wanting to get all your Ideas.

Thanks
Harry

Harry,

What type problems are you having with the ATI 9600? I have one running with Pro1 in a Dell Optiplex, 2.8 Pentium IV, w/1 GB ram for about 3 months now and everything has been working flawlessly. Rendering times seem to be reasonable. Of course I am not running any other programs in the background so I think this has had a positive effect.

Regards,

Mark

Hi Mark
Actually I'm not having any problems with the 9600. I 've had it for about 1 1/2 years. Like you I have 1 Gig of Ram 1.8 mhz board and render times are ok. Nothing blazing but that's ok. It is a solid card.I also like to Flight Sim alot. It's there that I have alittle problem. Things that are aggravating like changing views it hesitates somewhat. anyway as for PPRO 1.5 it does, I guess, as advertised. Just putting feelers out to see if anyone has had experience with the x800. Thank you very much for your reply. I appreciate it.

Harry

I do not think you'll get any faster render times with a new video card. I believe encoding DV is mainly a CPU operation. I dont have experience with the X800 but im sure it is a fast card, but only get it if you need more 3D performance. Get it for flight sim not for Premiere. Premiere is 2D, and I do not imagine it to be extremely demanding from your GPU. I, too, have an ATI9600 and even it doesnt seem to make 2d apps run any faster than a budget nvidia fx5200.

Hi Noah
I guess I should save my money untill it comes down abit more. $300 is a chunk of change. I can put up with a little stutter with my Fltsim until then. I appreciate your input.
Take Care
Harry

Try a MATROX Parhelia.

No need to go back to Photoshop.

1. Duplicate your clip and place it on a track higher
2. Apply the garbage matte filter (4, 8 or 16 point) to the second clip
3. Make sure that the garbage matte includes the sky only.
4. Apply effects to the sky as needed.

- Aanarav Sareen, ACE
Adobe Certified Expert, Premiere Pro

No need to go back to Photoshop.

1. Duplicate your clip and place it on a track higher
2. Apply the garbage matte filter (4, 8 or 16 point) to the second clip
3. Make sure that the garbage matte includes the sky only.
4. Apply effects to the sky as needed.

- Aanarav Sareen, ACE
Adobe Certified Expert, Premiere Pro
?
I guess so ... but show me a clip with perfectly polygonic sky that has exactly 4 or 8 selection points that allow the creator to precisely key the sky against say a stand of trees. Or perhaps a few buildings...
Impossible.
Photoshop is the essential tool for this effect.

?
I guess so ... but show me a clip with perfectly polygonic sky that has exactly 4 or 8 selection points that allow the creator to precisely key the sky against say a stand of trees. Or perhaps a few buildings...
Impossible.
Photoshop is the essential tool for this effect.
Unless you want to do it frame by frame, then yes Photoshop is your best method. But, if you want to eye-ball it, use the 16 point garbage matte. Either way, both methods won't be perfect depending on the amount of movement in the video.

waht your wanting is something claled a "region Filter" which many Canopus would be used to using.
basically it does exactly what u want it to do to either a specific colour, colour range, or selected area.

2 ways u can get this happenin in premiere is to get a Storm2 card, install the plugs and a plugin called "storm effects" and run the canopus driver plugins and hope that they dont fall over...

or u can grab a copy of Edius Pro 3 and run that on ur premiere system and do it in software... u can find cheap s/h edius packages on ebay

Like i mentioned earlier, I shoot High School and College sports. Unfortunately i can't just break out the digital camera and take pictures of the action. Is there a way I can take a single frame of my video in PP 1.5 and save it as a jpeg picture file that i can edit in Photoshop or Msft PictureIt?


Hi Ryan, I just came across your post 6 months later. I was looking for the same. I just found a software developer that makes a program that will pull single frames from your video. You can download a free trial. the final product will only cost you $30.00. Go to http://www.frame-shots.com

Hi Ryan and Co

I do just as Sheila says, very quick and easy....and from my FX1 I get pretty nice stills for a video camera...

a couple of points...
1) I find it better to de-interlace the shot in Photoshop
Filter> Video > de-interlace...

It sort of snaps the shot sharper by removing the aliasing and interpolating a new field in its place...

2) As it shoots 16.9 I have to stretch the shot out to the right proportions using the image resize...

Hope this helps

Gareth

Hi Mike,

Lipsync can be associated with disk bandwidth/ general performance.

How much space do you have left on your media drive/ how much is used up? What sort of Harddrive is it? What speed does it run at?

You also need to meet the recommened system spec here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/systemreqs.html

Just a few things to look into...

Cheers,

FWIW I have similar symptoms regarding the drifting out of A-V sync. I'm my case, it is related to the latency/delay caused by using a M-audio USB Audiophile. When I use the PC's soundcard there is no problem.

Regards,

Ken W.

Question: I have made a movie using Premiere Standard, but when I encode and burn it using MyDVD 4.5, the footage temporary freeze's after each "Black video" clip. It also begins at the first image rather than the begining of the video.
I'm new to this so any advice would be great. I also tried burning it with Honestech with the same result.

Petr.

In Premiere Pro, go to Project>Project Settings>Video Rendering. Uncheck "Optimize Stills." Then re-export your avi and encode/burn your DVD.

Thank you for the replies. My computer meets or exceeds the system requirements. It have 1gb DDR ram, 1.8ghz processor, 781mhz front side bus, and 131gb of hard disk space. The hardrive is a 300gb Maxtor one-touch and it is 7200 rpm. It is connected via usb 2.0, which I believe has a speed around 480 mbps. Fortunately, when I export the video to tape, it says "render audio before export?", and I do. From there it works fine. However, it is still a big anoyance because it makes it difficult to tell if the narration and music are in the right places.

Thanks,

Mike

don't know if it's relevant, but some people believe that you should always put a black leader onto the beginning of the dvd, at least 3 seconds long? do it within premiere, then have premiere do the encoding to mpeg2... make it all one long clip, you should then be able to import the mpeg2 to your dvd encoding app and assign chapter breaks to it there.

Need an honest, down to earth assessment from seasoned PPro 1.5 users concerning Premierer Pro 1.5 and a RAID 0 setup.

Question #1: Is the speed increase with RAID 0 worth the chance of losing everything if a hard drive crashes? I am using five, internal 250 gig hard drives for data only. Should I just use the scratch disk feature in Premiere Pro 1.5 and use a separate hard drive for vidcaps/audcaps vid previews/audpreviews conformed audio?

Question #2: If I decide to use RAID 0, how does that affect the way I set up scratch disks?

RE Question #1: No, in my opinion. The more hard drives you throw into a RAID 0, the greater the odds of a failure. At one time I had a RAID 0 setup for video editing, and lost files when one of the drives went south (since the data is striped across two or more hard drives, you lose everything when one fails). Since then I've stayed away from RAID 0. DV doesn't need the speed increase. I'm not sure that HDV does, either.

Of course, you should really have a backup solution in place for your video projects, regardless of whether or not you are using RAID 0. I finally implemented one myself (it took me long enough!).

RE Question #2: Your OS will see the RAIDed drives as a single hard drive, so there won't be anything special you will need to do in Premiere Pro.

Thank you, Christopher, for this response and the one from the Editing on the PC thread.

Thanks, I will give it a try.

What is currently the best software for authoring and burning, for a reasonable price? Somethiíng that works well with Premiere?


Cheers Petr

I actually use RAID 0 and non-raid. All SATA of course.

Anyways, my original raw footage is on a 500GB Hitachi SATA II drive. My export scratch disks, and previews on a RAID 0 two 250GB Sata Drives. While my audio conforms on a a Single 80GB 10K Sata Drive.

So in this case, I have never had a problem and if they raid goes south, all is not lost as the original footage is on the non-raid. For me it's a huge difference in rendering because of the RAID 0 vs. Rendering to a non-raid scratch disk.

Pent D 3.2Ghz
2GB DDR2-667
OS Drive: 2x74GB Raptors (Raid 0)
Media: 500GB Hitachi SATA II
Render/Export: 2x250GB (RAID 0)
Audio Drive: 80GB 10K SATA drive (Audition and Premiere Use)

I am curious - In using Premiere, is it possible to select a section of a frame and add an effect just to the selected region (i.e. blown out sky in otherwise well exposed scene)? Or is this only done in After Effects?

TIA!

Shaughan

You would be much happier doing it in AE and Keyframing the mask along the motion..:)

My 3 systems have 3 different types..

Matrox P650 AGP
GeForce 6800 PCI-E
GeForce GTX-7800 PCI-E (It doubles as my gaming system..) :)

Well, the problem I'm experiencing is rather consistent. On short audio clips, say 1-2 minutes, the audio files update after tweaking in Audition (using edit original after render and replace). But when I work on a 20min clip in audition and do the save as, and go back into Premiere, I can see that the file is conforming, but after it is done, the audio clip is still the same. I waited for 5 minutes but still the old unmodified clip. If I save the project and close it and reopen it, the new audio file is present. Any ideas?

Kevin

Save problem I have run into as a recent.. I found that if you have the options to perform a mandatory flush upon savings it would occur with me.. The other workaround, is once its conformed delete it from the timeline and put the Audition created file now over in your project list in it's place.. That has never failed me yet..

Although, after it conforms I have also selected edit original again and then just closed audition after it opened and the new one appeared in the timeline.

Hi all,

I'm a little stumped on preview render speeds in Premiere Pro 1.5. I'm new to Premiere.

When I use Vegas and apply a Magic Bullet film effect to a video clip, I can resize the preview window to a small size, say 25%, and set the preview quality to draft mode. The resulting preview render occurs in real-time. It's pixelated heavily, but that's ok -- it means I can apply a number of video effects and still play them back in real time to get an idea of what they look like.

However, in Premiere Pro 1.5 I'm having trouble getting the same performance. When I apply a Magic Bullet film effect to a video clip, set the preview monitor to 25% size, and force the preview quality to draft or leave it on auto, it still plays back quite slow and choppy. Eventually it catches up and renders to memory most of the frames and plays back smoother, but in Vegas it plays back smooth and real-time right from the start.

I have noticed that the preview window in Premiere, even when at 25% and draft quality, still is not pixelated like my small draft window in Vegas. As if Premiere just isn't going low-resolution enough to render in real time.

Anyone have any tips?

Thanks!
Adam Woodworth

I have some magic bullet stuff, and well You just have to render it.. When I first got it, I thought this is cool and worth the wait.. However, after several projects I find you don't tend to use them that much because of the render speed.

Avid allows you to do draft as well. However, with Premeire it's not possible or at least I haven't figured it out and am stuck with you have to render the Magic Bullet effects before they are barable to watch..:)

Your other option is use After Effects with MB and then set you render to Draft and that works much better..:)

Is there a way to capture video clips in chronological order, when they are sprinkled across many tapes? This happens when I want to minize the number of tapes I use, and the scenes(clips) are of varying duration, that I can't afford to lose due to a tape change during a scene.

I use an XL2 and Premiere Pro, use scene detect during capture, and can sort out the clips using the timestamp when they are all in one tape, but not many.

E.g., If my tapes are labelled A, B, C, and my clips in chronological order are 1,2 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8, 9, and are recorded onto the tapes as

A1269
B347
C58

can I get back to my original sequence of clips 1 through 9, which I can then proceed to edit?

Or do I have to keep track of what I did and unravel the clip sequence manually? I think the XL2 can put on a "time of day/date stamp" but am not sure how to go about this if at all possible.

Any advice is welcome!

ajai

I don't know if I follow you correctly. But you can log in and out points on your tapes and name them whatever you want.. Then pop the tape in and batch capture and sit back while it captures them as individual clips..

Trapcode's is much better than the one in AE anyways, in my opinion.. I use it all the time..

I have noticed after dropping 4 or more audio effects you need to render it for them to sound as you planned. For example, I dropped a reverb as effect 4 and didn't notice the reverb effect until I rendered.. But it could have been a fluke..

Anyways, Audition is what I use for any of that anyways..

i use nero for burning the finished dvd... and reeldvd for simple authoring, it's been largely bulletproof and very compatible... it's too old to recommend these days, tho... once you create the mpeg2 and it's associated ac3 audio file, try downloading the 30-day trial of dvd lab pro... spend time reading their forum first, so you'll know what you are getting into.

in this day and age, you should be capable of creating good web video, and you absolutely must be able to create quality dvd's... the latter means that you'll need to understand the basic workflow: 1)edit the video 2)create a dvd-compatible mpeg2 file 3)create a dolby ac3 audio file 4)create a dvd menu 5)import all of the above into a dvd authoring application, where you'll set the chapter breaks to match the menu you created.

for the last couple of years, the trend has been to mish-mash it all into one application, which results in a situation where newbies don't understand what encoding is, what is required to do it right, where it's being done, what app is actually doing it, etc... but you can also get tremendous value for the $$ with some do-it-all packages.

are you saying that the scenes are not being shot in chronological order? you are having to shoot scene a, scene b, scene a, scene b, etc., instead of scene a, scene a, scene b, scene b, etc?

even with scene recognition, there is no way for the software to recognize scenes and place them together... it can only break 'em up chronologically as a function of when they were shot, so the date and timecode won't help you there... unless you were indeed swapping tapes as you jumped from scene a to scene b??

ummm... in that case there should be a date and time stamp on each clip that's included with the captured dv avi... i'd guess that you'd need a way for the editing program to list 'em by that data? i'm shooting from the hip here, lol!

I originally asked why it renders audio tracks that have NO filters applied. After more thought, I believe it renders unfiltered audio tracks if they are stacked, slightly or mostly overlap, have any band adjustments, etc. even though no filter is applied.

Premiere Pro doesn't include an AC3 encoder (well, except for the trial version of the Surcode encoder). If he goes with DVD-Lab he would need to use something like BeSweet (http://dspguru.doom9.net/) to encode his audio to AC3, since DVD-Lab does not transcode video and audio to the required DVD formats.

Well than that's a good question.. It doesn't on mine.. It only renders if I A. Lock the Track or B. Apply more than 4 effects. Not to be confused with conforming audio of course..

I do lock the tracks when I finalize a project. Maybe that is it. I know that when I unlock a locked video track that has already been rendered, it loses the render and I have to re-render it. If you catch it, you can just undo to restore the render without re-rendering.

I talked to Red Giant Software, the makers of Magic Bullet, and they told me that Magic Bullet for Editors version 2 (shipping Oct 9th) will support GPU rendering.

This means that if you have an appropriate video card (for example, an nVidia 6x or 7x series card), then the Magic Bullet plug-in will use the processing power of the GPU on the video card to render the effect. This will cause a DRAMATIC increase in performance!

Check out http://redgiantsoftware.com/mbe2whatsnew.html for more information.

Here's the information that I received from Red Giant tech support:

You are correct; the optimization for Sony versus Premiere Pro is ridiculous in Sony's favor right now due in part to how our API is written and how the computing algorithms are processed through each platform, however we are in the midst of releasing Magic Bullet Editors 2.0 with GPU optimization/capabilities. Our tests have been extremely positive in the Premiere Pro environment. If you have a GPU card the "choppiness" in Premiere is eliminated at almost any size or mode. Multiple stacks of Look Suite sans MisFire blaze in preview mode and render output is nth times faster depending on card and hardware setup.

Check out our website-- redgiantsoftware.com over the next couple of weeks
to demo the new version.

I've had similar (but not exactly the same) problems in Premiere. Fixed it by adding a audio track under the black. Just set the volume to 0 db. Not sure where I found out about the fix but it's apparently a known issue in PP.

Hi,

Could someone outline the process to create a WMV-HD file from a 1080 60i project on the Premiere Pro timeline? I am using the IOData DVD Player that handles WMV-HD.

Pat! That's ingenius! Let me figure out how to set mine up like you. By the way, of all the scratch disk locations, which are the best to combine?

Should I save Video Captures and Audio Captures to one disk and Video Previews and Audio Previews both to another disk and Conformed Audio to it's very own disk?

Or Audio Previews and Video Previews each to their own separate disks?

I ask this to free up some drives to set up for RAID as per Pat.

I currently edit on premiere pro 1.0 not 1.5 and haven't been able to find out much about it's 24p support vs. premiere pro 1.5. Im ordering a dvx100a sometime early next week and need to know If im going to have to update my software as well. So any information on this would be greatly appreciated, does 1.0 support 24p advanced?...just 24p? or neither? again,thank you for any information on this at all.


I also was wondering if it will be able to do a real 24p timeline so If I put 30p footage into it it would be slowed down a little? I shoot action sports often and was hoping to be able to add 30p footage into the timeline to get a little true slow motion.



-Jake

You can output directly from PP, using the

File/Export/ADobeMediaencoder and then picking wMV from the combo box.

After doing severaltrials, i found that this does not easily gives you enough control on the various Size/compression parameters. And Deinterlacing seems weak too.

So now I use the following workflow:
a/ I first output an avi file using

File/movie and selecting "settings" for the Cineform codec , and asking ( in the Keyframe and Rendering panel) for deinterlacing at this stage.

When you feel secure that this is what you want,

b/ produce all the various format i need for a given footage. for instance
Hidef 1920*1080 WMV, MidDef 1280*720 WMV, SD DVD mpeg2, Divx, etc...

You can use the free Windows Media encoder, or ( better but 50 bucks..) use the TMPGENc Express front end, with the ability to batch all these jobs. or the Canopus Procoder..

Globaly i find the result significantly better and much more flexible...You can also trim the project safely and keep the avi just in case some faster/better codec emerges ...

Thanks Pierre,

I have found that when I try to export to wmv-hd using Adobe Encoder from Premiere, I get an error message about the audio quality being too low (it's the standard audio captured from DVCAM).

So do I understand correctly - are you outputting an AVI using the Cineform codec and then using TMPGEnc to do the AVI to WMV-HD conversion?

audio-video sync is the reason that you put a black leader on in front of the dvd video clip, so it's not just pp... i should have mentioned the blank audio as part of it, thanks for bring it up.

it's been awhile since i looked at dvd lab pro, but there was a lot of talk about adding an ac3 encoder to the package.

Petr,

I second Dan's suggestion about using DVD Lab pro. You can download it for free for 30-days use from mediachance.com. If you do, don't forget to also download the 3rd-party plug-in DVD burning program. Both programs are fully functional. I think thier site also has info. about an AC-3 encoder that is a plug-in although I use PCM audio.

DVD Lab pro works in a logical pattern. Menu creation is a snap. Import of assets (video, audio and stills) works very well. But the most important thing is it worked for me with absolutely no faults and produced great dvds which were DVD compliant and ready for replication.

Regards,

Mark

Thanks Pierre,

So do I understand correctly - are you outputting an AVI using the Cineform codec and then using TMPGEnc to do the AVI to WMV-HD conversion?

Yes that's exactly it.

When you use the "direct route " you might be willing to selct another Audio codec than the standard one...but anyhow the output is just worse..