Hi all,

My first ever post- how exciting.

I have dived in with both feet and am editting a 1/2 hour movie of a conference and learning as I go along. I have a number of questions that seem unanswerable by the trade 'because its Christmas', so can you folks help? My deadline for the job is Tuesday next week.

I am using Pinnacle editon 5 on a twin Xeon PC with 3 gig of ram. Clips are stored variously on a firewire disk and some on internal drives.

1. I am unable to export my sequence as an avi- it comes out as jumbled green rubbish and no matter how long I make the sequence the .avi is always4gig and always rubbish. What am I doing wrong? Studio 9 which I used previously was always fine for this (when it was not crashing everytime the wind changed direction...)

2. I am unable to get smooth play back outputting through my cam to a TV monitor, or on screen using the playback on my TFT. Its all lumpy and jumpy, sight and sound. I could have thought that a machine like mine would be fine for power. If I leave the machine alone for a bit or try to play after it has rendered one of the avi's it will play perfectly once and once only.

Would a card such as a matrox rtx 100 speed up the rendering and avi production? Or do I have another issue? I need it to be quick quick quick.

3. Assuming it will do what i want, the Matrox card seems only to work with adobe premiere as far as i can see on the websites. Can anyone confirm it will work the editon and if not what card should I get?

4. Which camcorder should I buy?

Okay- Q4 was a joke but I really need help with all the other questions before I really loose it ...

Kindest regards,

Stuart

Hi Stuart, not many folks use Edition on these boards but hopefully you'll get a reply from someone who uses it.

1- The 4GB limit corresponds to the maximum file size of the FAT32 file system. Maybe that's it??? You can check by going into My Computer and getting properties for your hard drive. The file system will be NTFS or FAT.

2- The MatroxRTX100 only accelerates Premiere Pro.


As far as your program goes, I'm really not sure. Some things you can try:
A- Do a backup of the project file first.
B- Try getting the patches for your program.
C- Try duplicating the project file and reducing its size. i.e. Make 4 duplicates and delete footage in the project so that there's less footage in each project file.
D- If the proverbial excrement really hits the fan, you could try this:
Play back from the timeline, and hit record on your DV camera/deck. This will at least put your edited project on miniDV tape. Then you can use another program to make your deliverables.

Thanks Glenn- much appreciated.

My biggest concern is why nobody uses edition - is premiere king because its better or because everyione uses it?

S

Common complaints I've heard about Edition were instability/bugs, lack of certain tools, and weird workflow / some things need lots of button pushing. I don't use it at all so I have no idea.

I'm a Vegas evangelist so I'll tell you that Vegas is better than Premiere (and Final Cut). :D Anything you can do in the other programs you can do in Vegas. The audio tools in Vegas are much, much better than everything else because Vegas started as a multitrack audio editor.

Premiere is alright... kind of like Final Cut Pro for PC. Final Cut is better in my opinion, but I haven't really played around in Premiere. Perhaps why Premiere is popular is:
A- In the past, it was one of the few editing programs around. So it has a user base there. On the other hand, Premiere used to be really buggy.
B- It has the Adobe name + reputation behind it.
C- People think its fast because you can buy hardware acceleration for it (i.e. Matrox RTX100). I haven't played with Premiere much, but I suspect it's about the same speed as Vegas on a dual core dual Opteron. The thing about hardware acceleration cards is that they only work for specific effects. Anything else will be slow.
*From what I hear, Edition is actually fast and not exaggerating too much with its real-time claims.

But really, at some level the editing programs more or less do the same thing. When it comes to pure editing, cuts and dissolves are the same between the various editing programs.

Edition really is not any bugger than any other.

Stuart, what video card are you using? This all seems related to the video card and/or driver. Unlike any other editor, Liquid really does use the video card. The faster, the better, with ATI preferred.

excellent point George. You want to have an ati or nvidia 3d card with at least 128 megs. For 1080i HDV ytou need a 256 meg card.

ATI cards work better then nVidia with Liquid. It goes back to original joint developement efforts with Pinnacle and ATI on the Pro-One card. ATI continues to offer instruction sets that the Liquyid engineers can tap into.

Gary

"jumbled green rubbish "
this hit home with me..

make sure that ur running teh patches and firmware to support drives over 128gb.. windows XP natively DIDNT support drives of this capacity, however this has now been rectified.. i had the probelm with Sata Drives, adn my Sata controller wasnt updated, therefore wondows couldnt see that the drive was over 128gb..

"jumbled green rubbish "
this hit home with me..

make sure that ur running teh patches and firmware to support drives over 128gb.. windows XP natively DIDNT support drives of this capacity, however this has now been rectified.. i had the probelm with Sata Drives, adn my Sata controller wasnt updated, therefore wondows couldnt see that the drive was over 128gb..
This would not be the issue. And EIDE is really the source of the 128GB issue. XP does ignore it after bootstrap and SP2 makes it seamless.

Stuart, on item 2, I now remember having this issue on a slower machine. Liquid 5 needs a defrag of the render and media drives (especially if they are the same) is probably the most likely fix. If you memory was sparse, you would also benefit from setting the bulk of you virtual memory file (pagefile.sys) to another drive, but that is not a concern with 3GB.