I'm with Ed there. Its far more easier to export a single frame at a certain point, than it is to usse the frame hold function. It also gives you more options i.e. you can change its length to anything you want.

All the best,

Ed Smith

Jeez, then what IS the frame hold funtion good for?! lol

Has anyone noticed a shift in color once the footage ends and it displays the outputted single frame?

"Has anyone noticed a shift in color once the footage ends and it displays the outputted single frame?"


I've generally noticed the opposite. The frame export closely matches the action footage, particularly if you don't edit the still. I apply flicker removal but that's it. You can make a frame export look very good in Photo Shop but it will no longer match the rest of the clip.

David Hurdon

Is it worth purchasing an Itanium2 workstation for NLE ?
I use a Canopus Dv Storm2 card
Thanks

I suppose the big question is what are you planning to do with it? But my initial reaction is 'no'. It really depends on your workoad I guess.

I am creating NLE video productions with an average of 10-15 videotracks and want to reduce the rendering/waiting time.

The Itanium 2 is a 64 bit architecture cpu and i dont think that its natively compatabile with 32 bit applications such as Adobe Software. So I dont even think that the stuff wil run on the Cpu. Not to mention there is no NLE othe thatn stuff made for IRIX that could use the power of 64 bit word size. So even it for some reason it did work it would be a total waste of CPU power. If your looking for a 64 bit cpu with backwards compatabilty try the AMD Opteron. I would suggest to you however you try a dual Cpu Intel Xeon machine


BTW what are you currently using for Hardware?

Thanks for the info. It's a real help. I indeed searched extensively for 64 bit support on Premiere, but could not find it anywhere, now I know why :)
I am currently using a P4 2,8 ghz. Would an upgrade to dual Xeon 3 Ghz be worth the investment you think ?

If you want to render faster the only real option you have right now would be to go to a dual Cpu machine. Which if you wanted to stay with Intel would mean that you need to go with the Xeon. I wouldnt go with the Opteron quite yet as it doesnt have all of the optimization that Intel productions have.

To answer the question about rendering you must ask yourself what are you willing to spend to get a 30-40 percent gain.If you really want that faster rendering then yes it will offer a noticable gain. I guess you arent too concerned with the money as you were planning on getting an Itanium.

Since your using a Canopus DVStorm you will get even a larger increase in speed because of it Scalable architechure. Or thats whats Canopus says anyways..

Hope this helps

Not too concerned about the money ?? I wish that was true. :)
Of course I cannot grab the money from a big pile, but I do have a few euros to spare.
Still I do want to invest it well, and the waiting for rendering is something I really hate.
Thanks a lot for your vaulable comments.

Upgrading from 2.8 to dual 3.0 I don't think you will see much, not to mention it gets $$$ quick. Seems Dual XEON boards need a special power supply to supply enough power on the +12V lines. I opted to go from my 2.2 GHz 400FSB to a Single P4 3.0c 800FSB on a i875P chipset. I picked up dual DDR 400 Kingston HyperX CL2 RAM and now have a screaming system. Not the full benefits of dual CPUs, but I can no render and the system stays responsive. And the money I saved I can buy a 3.4 CPU or faster when they come out later in the year. Essentially my upgrade cost me $250 for the MB, $525 for CPU and $215 for 1GB (2 x 512MB) CL2 RAM. The Xeon CPUs woudl be over $600 each and the MB another $300 and the power supply $130. And with the Dual Xeons you would still have only 533FSB. The Gigabyte MB has a TI 1394 onboard which was a nice feature, although the onboard Gb LAN is flakey under XP, so had to stick a PCI Gb card in. Best 2 875 MB options are ASUS and Gigabyte, ASUS has less features and is a tad faster.

Unfortunately the Itanium (I don't know about the Itanium-2) is plagued with performance hits when trying to run 32-bit apps much like the Pentium Pro had trouble with 16-bit apps. From what I've read the AMD Hammer CPU's will not be plagued with perfromance problems when running 32-bit apps. Maybe worth a look. Cheaper to boot.

I tape using Sony's TRV900 and PD150, captured with Canopus Rex card.

My questions are, should I set the audio on the 150(48k) DVCAM to match the 900(32k)
And can I use the 900 VTR to capture both?

I've experimented a little with this and don’t see any obvious problems.

If you have any other setting hints I sure would like to hear them.


Thanks Dave

Not a problem. AFAIK, the 900 will not down-convert your 48 Khz sample rate. I thought the 900 had a 48 Khz sample rate?

I am currently working on a short graduation slide show using Adobe Premiere. I ran a test export to see the quality of the video. It looked awesome, but the file size was unbelievably large! About 1 minute of video took up almost 1.5 gigs! Unfortunately, I don’t have 200 gigs to work with, so I just wanted to know if anyone out there could tell me what I could do to achieve a smaller file size, while preserving quality.

I am planing on making the slide show about 10-15 minutes long, and I will be showing the video using a projector. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance...

John

When you say "I will be showing the video using a projector", I presume you mean from a PC? Will the PC have the file on it, or are you planning to burn to CD?

You could try exporting to quicktime. The files are generally smaller than native DV/AVI output and the quality is good if you tinker with the settings.

Yes, I will be projecting the video onto a screen.

Anyone else have any ideas/techniques?

Thanks for your replies...

The 900 has 12 or 16bit option, is 16bit a 48k sample rate?

Dave

If you're worried about playback and storage, why don't you output it to VHS and use a VCR?

I have just created a 2 minute promo of a modified car show, which when exported was 3.5gigs. I used TMPGenc (www.TMPGeng.net) which compressed it down to 128meg as an mpeg2 file. The quality is great and i'm pleased with the results.

Regards

Nick

thanks for your replies. I actually managed to compress the same 3 gig file down to 200 mb. and the quality is still there!

All i did was change the compressor to microsoft avi...

Ill try the TMPGeng compressor also though, to see if there is any difference.

Thanks again!!

<<<-- Originally posted by John Garcia : thanks for your replies. I actually managed to compress the same 3 gig file down to 200 mb. and the quality is still there!

All i did was change the compressor to microsoft avi...

Ill try the TMPGeng compressor also though, to see if there is any difference.

Thanks again!! -->>>

Out of interest John, what codec did you select when you used microsoft Avi? I tend to use uncompressed and then compress with TMPGenc as i mentioned previously but i'm keen to known what compression you used to retain the quality.

Regards

Nick

Alright, here are my settings, before (large file) and after (smaller file)

Large file settings:

File type - Microsoft DV AVI
Compressor - Cinepak Codec by Radious
Frame Size - 720x480
Pixel Aspect Ratio - D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2)
Frame Rate - 29.97
Depth: Millions, Quality: 100%


Small file settings:

File type - Microsoft AVI
Compressor - Cinepak Codec by Radious
Frame Size - 720x480
Pixel Aspect Ratio - D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2)
Frame Rate - 29.97
Depth: Millions, Quality: 100%

I guess the only difference would be the file type. Nonetheless, the file was much much smaller, and for what i'm doing, the quality is more than enough. Hopefully this answers your question.

Ill do a couple more tests to see which compressors produce the smallest file size per quality...

John

Yeah, turns out with those settings, the output file size runs about 100mb per minute. Still much better than 1gb per minute. 10x more!

actually, you know what guys, I ran 2 seperate files, one DV/AVI and one AVI, although the AVI file is much much much smaller, the DV/AVI file has fairly better quality. But in my case, i really cant tell when I project it. It looks basically the same.

Hope this helps...

I'm doing the same thing, actually! I'm making a slideshow for my graduation class. There was a fire at school, but luckily the computer all the photos are on was a fair ways away from the fire, so I'm hoping the hard drive is fine :)

I'm planning to export it to a master VHS tape and play it off a dub with the video projector.

right on! yeah, the best output that ive gotten is using DV/AVI as the file type. The results are much better, but the file size is 10x bigger. If you've got the space, go for it. In my case, I dont have a large hard drive, so ill have to do with a loss of quality, but thats okay, because when I project it, it still looks great!

good luck with your project.

John

I re-installed Premiere and it still won't recognize it! I think I might call ADS tech support and bitch to them for a bit :P

It's quite frustrating that it recognizes the card fine, just not anything plugged into it.

The amount of bits has nothing to do with the sample rate. For
example: my Canon XL1s can do 16 bit 48 khz and 12 bit 48
khz (notice the same khz here).

Keep in mind that the Cinepak codec is lossy and therefor you
WILL loose quality. I would definitely not use such a format when
doing an MPEG2 encode lateron. If you are going to a final format
and you can live with Cinepak, by all means use it. If you need
to recompress it further go uncompressed if you can.

Does anyone know of a good VFW/Directshow LOSSLESS
compression codec?

That your card is sharing IRQ's might be a problem. It doesn't
have to be, but it might. Also do you have your camera set in
VCR mode? Otherwise it won't work (at least on my XL1).

My camera was set to VTR mode as always and it still wouldn't work. Even before when it was working I could use it in camera mode.

Right now it's just sharing IRQ 5 with my TV Wonder card.. is there an easy way to reserve an IRQ just for the firewire card?

I am using Premiere 6.5 and I want to pull my preview window over to my second monitor, but I can't. The only thing that moves are window palettes (such as effects, navigation, etc.). I would also like to stretch my timeline onto the second monitor as well. Basically, I want to unclutter the Premiere workspace. I haven't been able to find any settings within premiere to allow for previewing on a second monitor (besides through firewire). Does anyone know if this issue can be resolved?

Daniel,

What you have to do is not maximize your using the maximize button but actually drag the workspace to fill your two monitors. This will only work if you are using two monitors of the same size/resolution, ie two 17"/1024x768 monitors etc. Once the Premiere workspace fills the two monitors you should be able to move your windows around as you please.

There isn't an easy way anymore..... Best thing to do is remove
the wonder card and test it. If it works then you know where
the problem is and you can then fiddle around in your BIOS to
try to get them off the same IRQ channel.

Keep in mind that Windows sometimes can't do overlay video on more
than one monitor (your primary). If you can move the preview
but you only see a colored frame inside then you know you have
this problem (some ATI cards work around this problem).

If this is the case set your hardware acceleration for your OTHER
video card (not the primary one) to a lower setting and you
should get video althought you loose some performance.

Rob,
Thanks, I'm going to try that right now! I'm very close to gutting my computer and running just the video, sound and firewire cards to see if I can get anything working.

Adrian, You had the answer I needed. I could kick myself for not thinking of it. I just got the dual setup a little over a week ago, and I'm still figuring out and enjoying all the new things I can do with it, such as splicing pictures together in photoshop in order to get a different picture on each monitor. And Rob, I can play video on both monitors, so that is working fine. Thanks guys!

I had the same thing when I switched to dual monitors. Glad you got it sorted.

Still didn't work. I don't think I've completely gotten rid of the Texas Instruments drivers because it still installs those drivers by default.

I've been looking all over the place for a place to download the Microsoft-certified drivers for XP, does such a thing exist?

My Premiere has been acting oddly lately- and it seems like it started after I started messing with the audio mixer. The bug acts like this- when I highlight the timeline and hit the space bar to play, I hear no sound. I notice in the history palette that the audio mixer is the last action taken (even though it's not...the audio mixer isn't even open) when I hit the space bar again to stop the play head, the audio mixer in the history palette dissapears. Could this be caused by a corrupted preference file, because it was fine before I opened and worked with the audio mixer a few weeks ago. Can this be remedied similar to in Photohsop by simply deleting the preference file then running Premiere again? And, lastly, which file in the Premiere directory is the preference file? Thanks in advance.

The prefs file is probably not in the Premiere directory. I'm not at my Premiere PC right now, but the path to my GoLive prefs file is:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe GoLive

The prefs file has a key icon and a PICSRules File type. Instead of trashing it, either rename it or move it to the desktop. When you restart Premiere it will create a new prefs file. See if that fixes things. If not, you still have all your earlier settings to hand.

Nigel, is that the path via an XP machine? I do run XP, I just figured I'd ask because when I used to run 98SE all Adobe files were available via: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere

It's W2K, but I can't imagine that XP is vastly different. Following the path in Windows Explorer and see if it's there. I vaguely recall that W9x stores prefs in the application directory, but they're generally in the User settings folder under NT.

On my XP machine, the prefs file is located here:

c:\Documents and Settings\Paul Tauger\Application Data\Adobe\Premiere

If my memory serves me correct you can clear/reset the preference file by loading Premiere while holding CTRL+SHIFT. Is this true?

Let me try to put into words what I am trying to do. I'm am wanting to create a pseudo widescreen look in premiere 6.5 with the titler by placing thin black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. The problem is that on one of the interviews I did, I failed to leave enough headroom to place the black bar- and so the guys head gets cut off. I've been experimenting with the "transform" section of the video palette (i.e. camera view, horizontal flip, roll, clip, etc). What I can't seem to do is create something like the "roll" effect, but that it would rather permit me to roll the entire screen down only about 2 inches and hold it there, and then later cover that two inch gap at the top with the black bar from the titler. Is that clear? Can anyone help me with this? Is there anything I can do? Thanks

I figured it out - thanks

I'm going to answer myself on this one because I think that this is
a pretty important issue. I don't know about anyone else but this
issue has been greatly troubling me. So I hope this helps anyone
who reads it, because I remember a discussion about doing a
pseudo widescreen look in post by using the premiere titler to mask the top
and bottom of the screen. I found however, that as cool as that
looked, some of the head room I shot was too tight to mask, and the
head got cut off. So maybe I'm just an idiot and everyone already
knows how to correct that problem, but after much research and
struggling, I figured it out, and it works great and is saving my
little neck because I had some shots I wanted to use, but had shot
prior to realizing that a widescreen look could be done in post.

I created a picture-in-picture (PIP) effect by placing the
background video in V1 and a copy in V2. I right clicked on the V2
video and selected "video option" then "motion." I dragged the
frame down a few inches (in "distortion"), and set both the start
and end keyframes identically to keep the video still throughout the
entire effect - and it worked. I don't know if I really need V1 &
V2, but that's the instructions I read somewhere for a similar
effect.

So if you've shot tons of video with tight headroom, and want to do
a widescreen look in post production, here is the way to solve the
problema!

That is true. Everything in premiere will be re-set to how it was when you first installed it. So you will have to locate all projects again i.e. it clears recent files etc

All the best,

Ed Smith

A re-install might help as well. Also non playing sound etc. might
also be due to external factors (like a missing audio codec,
corrupt one or incompatible codecs installed).