Could one drive being full affect performance?

Yes, it could. Ideally, in a system with two hard drives (C and D) you'd want WinXP and PPro on your C Drive and you'd want to capture to your D Drive. Either of them being nearly full or in need of a defrag could slow the seek head on the hard drive enough to cause noticeable stutters, but the capture (D drive) would be especially susceptible. In fact, the physical limitation of head movements is why it is so strongly recommended to have a separate capture hard drive.

DMA is "Direct Memory Access" which is allows for much faster disk access than "PIO Mode." Go to your system's Device Manager, open the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" >> Primary IDE Channel >> (right click Properties) >> Advanced Settings tab. For your hard drives, if it says PIO, you'll need to change that to DMA, which MIGHT require you to reboot and select it in the BIOS. Otherwise, just select it in the dialog box. If your D Drive is on the Secondary IDE Channel, you'll need to repeat the process for it.

Anyway, if you do have a drive that's almost full, address that first...move some stuff off of it you don't need and run a defrag. Then let's see where you stand.

This should not be possible, because you are not doing an analog
capture. In analog you could instruct the capture board to use a
different sampling to get a different resolution.

However, with DV and firewire you are not sampling anything, you
are COPYING the digital information from either the CCD/CMOS
chips or the tape drive directly (with some added compression).

So if it supports this it will simply do a recompression which you
can do in the timeline yourself as well.

But really, why would you want to do this? Any computer can handle
DV signals without any problem. If there is too much footage (ie,
not enough harddisk space) you usually screen the footage
first and then only capture what you want to work with.

If you really want to do this do NOT forget to test the full workflow
(make sure you can easily replace the low quality version with the
high quality version later on!!!) before actually starting your
project!

I have tried the Premiere Pro, I think it must be the 1.0. After almost finishing the project, I accidentally pressed the X in upper right corner of the timeline window, and the timeline disappeared. I saved the project to save the work, but I cannot reopen it with the timeline. Is the timeline in this project lost and gone forever? I don’t find it. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Don't panic! Its just hiding.

If you goto the window menu, navigate to timeline. Then select the timeline. This should then hopefully bring it back.

Cheers,

I have an XL2 and I love it - When I capture to my PC thru firewire into Premier 6.0 and select widescreen 16:9, which is the way I recorded it on the camera, the resulting file, when played back seem slightly out of aspect - it's a little fat ?

Any info would be helpful ....

I had this idea recently as well. My reasons were because my computer being only 1.7ghz 512mb it did not render at a decent speed any sort of color correction or effects I was doing. But I really wanted to see how it would kinda look without the 5 minute render for each 30 second clip.

But at the same time I figured it would probably be more work to convert everything back over to the hiq version of the footage unless theres an efficient process for doing so.

Thanks. I had the feelings; the answer should be a simple one. The strange thing is that in this very project, the "timeline" option disappeared in the window menu as well. I've already done all the work once more… Thanks anyway.

I recently bought Premiere Pro 1.5 and am looking for a cheap way to transfer video from my VCR to the computer. I am going to be putting some of my old home movies onto DVD and I was wondering if anyone has used any of the Pinnacle devices or if they will even work with 1.5. I thought they looked like a cheap way to hook my VCR up if they worked. Any input would be appreciated. Any other devices I should look at?

Thanks!

Do you have a camcorder with analog input? That's the easiest way to do this. Use the S-video connection for better quality if you have it on your VCR (that's unlikely though).

What would you suggest as an alternative to all of matrox's effects - many of which are realtime and the mpeg accelerator. These are the only reasons I am personally looking at getting a matrox?

If you have a DV camcorder that has pass-through (sometimes labeled DV-AV or something similar in the camcorder menus), you can hook your analog source directly to the DV camcorder, which will then function as an A-D converter and send the signal via firewire to the computer. Not all DV camcorders do this, but many do. I know the Canon GL2 and XL2 both do, and I'm pretty sure some models from other companys do, too.

Failing that, you could copy to DV tape, then capture. But if you have a lot of material, that's a lot of head wear on your DV camcorder, not to mention tedious.

If none of the above is practical, then you will have to pick up an analog capture card. I haven't used the Pinnacle analog capture devices -- presumably they probably work ok...but I'll leave that to someone who is actually using one the them.

Thats a good idea. I do have a XL1S and I didn't want to use it to capture stuff because it puts wear on the heads, however, if it is just sending it to the comp, it's not actually putting any wear on the heads. I'll have to try this. Thanks for the responses.

I'm still interested to hear about the Pinnacle stuff if anyone uses it.

Hi all,

IMHO no card ( in the semipro class ) is worth the money any more. Get a decent computer and get realtime without any hazzle.

If you REALLY want/need MPEG encoding hardware, canopus has both an internal PCI card and an external box that will do MPEG only. Won't cost you a bunch either.

// Lazze \\

I was curious just how fast others' pc's are working at as far as rendering goes with Premiere Pro so I can compare how my setup is doing. I don't remember seeng a discussion about this in the forum.

For example, a video with almost no effects or transitions except a couple of cross fade transitions- one at the beginning and one at the end, and just a couple of dozen straight cuts renders out to an DV AVI for me out in just a little over 50 % speed on my main workstation, a Dell 8300 P4 2.6 Ghz HT-enabled desktop with 1.25 Gb of RAM running Premiere Pro 1.5. For example a forty (40) minute video renders in approx twenty-two (22) minutes The same video used to render in just less than real time, approx. thirty (34) minutes for a forty (40) minute video using Premiere 6.5 on the same computer. So being optimized for Win XP and the hyper-threading makes quite a bit of difference I suppose.

Any of you guys have faster pc's that beat these render times (be honest, he he) and if so, what system and specs are you runnning?

The spec above delivers similar results to yours. Motherboard vendors have posted benchmarks for years using premiere and Photoshop. Most users will know how to shut down the winxp dynamics and oprimxe their system for maximum performance.

The big switch for me was to dump the realtime capture board and go all software for rendering. Sure I no longer have realtime previews, but with wipes cuts and fades, I can previsualize this.

Premiere Pro is very stable.

You'll proberly find that the Pinnacle analogue capture cards will not work with Premiere.

Pinnacle used to bundle Premiere with some of their capture cards, but now that they have Edition they have stopped doing so.

I have an old DV500+ and that will only work with Premiere 6.5, you can still use the firewire ports to capture with Premiere Pro though!

As already mentioned you could use your XL1s, or by an external analogue to DV concertor (canopus do a few) or you'll have to buy a hardware acclerator card like Matrox RTX100 or some from the Canopus range.

Hope this helps,

i just bought a contour "shuttlepro" for video capture with premiere 6.5, all the buttons set as i assigned them, but i couldn't find the shortcut key for the shuttle control at full speed in the video capture (rewind & fast forward while the video is playing)

can anybody help me out please !!!!

Why do you think the capture is going wrong? The capture with
DV / firewire is only a digital stream copy, so it basically cannot go
wrong, it either works or doesn't.

What are you using to play the file with?

I would just stick with the normal DV, it will save you time in other
places etc.

Have you tried contacting contour? It is more likely they'll have
an answer on that....

yeah,

I just captured straight DV. I'm doing a pre-edit on my machine, then I'm going to edit on a FCP system. I just have so much footage, and I'm sort of writing as I edit, so I thought I might try to capture low quality...mainly because I was having problems with dropped frames and I thought that might solve my problem. I did a search of the forum and someone mentioned defragging the harddrive. Did that and all went well...no dropped frames during 40 hours of video.

As a side note, most of my limited experience thus far has been editing film transfered to digibeta, and boy is DV a different beast. There are wierd little things with diagonal lines and I have an interview where a guy has his hair gelled spikey like and theres all this funny digital noise around his head. Interesting to learn though.

Rick

Rob,
Capturing at a lower rez, IE 15:1, or greater, is standard workflow for editing film, and SD though not so much for editing DV.

This is why AVID allows for it in capture settings. Someone editing a documentary say, with maybe a hundred hours of footage to work with, might downrez, capture, edit then uprez only the edited portions. BIG space saver on small (IE laptop) systems.

Hi Kim,

I think the adobe shortcut keys are 'F' for fastforward and 'R' for rewind.

Adobe has all the shortcut keys listed. Simply open Premiere go to the Help menu and then select Keyboard. All of the windows shortcut keys for Premiere are listed in there.

I recently moved all the avi files for a project to an external HD from the internal drive where they were captured to. Now Adobe cant find the files. How do I direct Adobe to the files without having to click on each separate file (50 plus) when asked for?

Is there a simple way to direct Adobe to the files? I thought I was being cool by organising all the video from one project in to one folder and moving that to an external. Hey it sounded good at the time!

If you tell it where one is and all the rest are also in that folder it should automatically find them.

Richard: I know! Although I've never done it that way I know how
this is done especially in the documentary world.

I take a different approach if I have massive amounts of footage
(which I can't capture).

I go through the tapes and make notes which takes I want to
capture (like if I shot 5 takes of a scene, 2 - 3 takes might be
unusable (actor forgot lines, too dark, etc.). So I end up with
2 - 3 takes that are okay and could be just. I make notes and
then only capture those scenes maintaining flexibility in editing
(in the case that I really need some other takes (or part of, since
they where bad) I can always refer back to my notes to see what
extra takes there are for this scene and capture those as well)

However, there are probably programs out there that allow you
to "capture" (more like realtime convert) a DV stream in some
other format. You can even do this by simply getting a videocard
with analog in or a TV tuner board and simply capture the analog
DV out of your camera in a 50% high compression MJPEG file for
example.

The only problem I see with this is how are you going to substitute
the full high resolution footage without timecode (which conversion
to another format will 99.99% surely not maintain!) etc. in an
easy (automated) fashion (since there is a LOT of footage)!

If anyone wants to go down this road I suggest to thoroughly
try the COMPLETE workflow before doing it that way, so you are
not going to get into a lot of problems later on (like lots of manual
work [which could've better been spent upfront looking at the
stuff, which you always want to do before editing anyway!] or
problems where footage is longer or off by a couple of frames etc.)

I know AVID (and FCP) has full support for this. However the
lesser programs (in that regard) like Premiere might not, so that's
not really helpful for the original poster (since we are in the
Premiere forum!)

With DV I'm just inclined to do it the other way (as I described
above). Besides even laptops are powerful in both processing
and harddisk space. Disk space is cheap these days.

For example, my laptop has 80 GB of internal space and an
external (USB2/firewire) connected drive with another 160 GB.

On just the external harddisk I can store over 12 hours of RAW
(=compressed) DV material. If I where to make a 2 hour movie
that is 6:1 ratio, which is more than enough footage for me to
sift through (so if I have more I can always decide beforehand
which 12 hours I want to capture). Then let's say I have 20 GB
of software and other stuff installed on my system (that's a lot),
I still have 60 GB remaining (which is 4.5+ hours of RAW DV
footage) to output stuff and do MPEG2 encodings or music mixing
etc.

Another thing you can wonder about is if having so much material
to work with (either not captured, offline or online) is a good thing,
but that also ofcourse depends on the project, experience and
what works for you or not....

I hope this explains my "feelings" etc. a bit better.

Hi.

UPDATE:
Just go to this link then you see what I want.
It's called "Stop motion" or "Stop-frame motion"

http://www.nickhodge.com/mne.php?mcid=397

The problem is that the userinterface of PremierePro 1.5 does not look like the userinterface of Premiere that is used in the example in the link above......

So how do I make this work in AdobePremierePro 1.5 on a clip that is allready captured?



***** ORIGINAL QUESTION BELOW....

I'm new to PremierePro and want to do something special (effect) to a video-clip on the timeline.

I could not find this effect listed so here is what I want to do.

I would like to repeat frames in a clip.
I would like to be able to decide how many times the repeated frame is repeated.
I want to keep the duration for the clip in the timeline unchanged.

In more detail:
I want to be able to decide how long in (seconds or milliseconds) each frame is to be repeated or eventually to decide how many frames the repeated frame should span.

The software should handle the clip like this:
1. Start with the first frame in clip and repeat as long or as
many frames I specified.
2. Then sample the next frame.
3. Repeat this fram as long or as many frames I specified.
4. Repeat 2 and 3 until end of clip is reached.

The duration of the clip should be the same after the effect is applied as the original imported clip.

NB! The footage is interlaced video.

I do not want to apply a slow motion effect as it is done when adjusting speed/duration of the clip in PPro.

- Is there a name for this?

- Can I do this in PremerePro without any plugins or extra software?

- If this cannnot be done in PremierePro, is there any other software out there (not to expensive though) that can do this.

Do I understand correctly that you want to "freeze frame" your video, in other words have a single frame displayed for perhaps several seconds?

Two ways that I can think of to do this are to:
- take a frame grab using File>>Export>>Frame, choose your settings, and then place the frame on the timeline on top of the place you want it. I think PPro defaults to displaying a still image for 5 seconds, but you can change it to whatever you want. This is the way I'd do it. Be watchful of interlace/progressive and aspect ratio settings when you save your still frame.
- put an instance of the clip 1 frame long on top and then change the speed of just that clip so it plays longer. PPro should just repeat that one frame. You can delete the useless stretched audio track for the 1 frame clip if you want.

----

EDIT: Re-reading your post, I see that you want to do "freeze-frame" for a successive series of frames. The ways I've suggested so far would be tedious!

Although you said you don't want to do slow motion, You actually CAN use PPro's speed/duration function for what you want. First, you must disable Frame Blending: Clip>>Video Options>>Field Options>>(uncheck/disable) Frame Blending. Otherwise, frame blending will use your fields to interpolate for a smoother slow motion, which you didn't want.

Now you can simply trim a clip instance to just the frames you want and pick a very slow speed. In PAL, 1% would cause each original frame to appear for 4 seconds, then the next would appear for 4 seconds...

----

Let me know if I've understood correctly what you want to do.

Happy New Year!

Rob,

AS you point out, working with DV rarely requires such downconverting, and your workflow is typical of a workaround for dealing with large ammounts of material.

I posted my explanaition of "WhY' someone would want to do this...

A)After you asked why the poster would

B) After the original poster posted that he normally worked in FILM and Digibeta with a downconvert.

I was simply outlining (To anyone reading the board) what HIS reasons might be for a film/digibeta/SD workflow was.

Feature films with a decent budget will have a much higher ratio than 6 to 1 in terms of footage. And the documentary I am currently editing has thirty hours of footage for what will be a one hour project. (And I could have used another thirty!)

Didn't mean to imply that you didn't understand the workflow, just filling in the gaps for others, by answering your questions.

Happy New Year!

Hi Pete and thanks for reply.

I tried what you suggested and it did not work as I was hoping.....

I might have done something wrong... but I try to explain again what I'm looking for.

Let say I have imported a video clip that is 10 secods in length.

Then say I would like to repeat every sixth frame in that clip and maintaining original clip length.

The result would be like this:
Frame 1-5 should be like frame 1.
(original frame 2-5 will be replaced by frame 1)
Frame 6-10 should be like frame 6.
(original frame 7-10 will be replaced by frame 6)
Frame 11-15 should be like frame 11.
(original frame 12-15 will be replaced by frame 11)

And so on until processing whole clip.

Important that playback time of clip is not altered because I want it in sync with original audio of that clip.

I would very much like the software to handle the copy and replacing of frames as this would be very timeconsuming....

I just want to enter a number of how often the software should make a new sample (copy) of a frame and press go or drag to clip to create the desired effect.

Hope this was more understandable :-)

Thanks Jacob!

After fiddling with it a bit I figured it out. I just came back to post my findinds but you beat me to it! That is in fact what happens. Thanks again for your response.

Hi again.

After some more search on the net i found this link which does what I want .... BUT it does not work as suggested with PremierePro 1.5 since the userinterface is no longer the same.

Do you know how to apply that "effect" in Premiere Pro 1.5 ?

The "effect" is called "Stop motion" or "Stop-frame motion"

Here is the link..

http://www.nickhodge.com/mne.php?mcid=397

Eureka!

The solution is (drum roll please): Effects>>Video Effects>>Time>>POSTERIZE TIME

Not sure why Adobe changed the way this all works, but Hold Frame rolls footage until you hit the frame it is supposed to hold on and then gives a static image of that. The capability you're looking for is now a PPro 1.5 EFFECT called Posterize time.

EDIT: Tore...and I thank you very much for asking the question. I just now realized that several hours of very old family 8mm film footage that was poorly telecined to give every third frame irretrievable artifacts can be dealt with very handily by this. I've messed with this in PPro and AE for endless hours over the past year or more and couldn't figure out how to do this. You saved me hundreds of dollars and much aggravation by leading me to a simple solution I had at my fingertips the whole time!

Hi again Pete.

Tried your suggestion late yesterday. And it worked great.

Thanks a lot for that tip.

However, I see now that I need to do something more to get the final effect I'm looking for.

Since you also obviously like this effect maybe you have a suggestion to my last challenge as well....

Okay... let say I used your technique to make the "stop motion" to the clip.

What I would like to do now is to:

1. Be able to mark several different areas (frames) in the timeline of that specific clip. In a non-continous manner and each area can be of different length.

2. Remove the previously "stop motion" effect for all the marked (selected) areas in the timeline for the clip.
(it might be that this step is not needed)

3. Apply the same effect to these marked areas but now with a different frame-rate.

I once saw a video using something that looked like "stop motion". But some areas of that video had less "stop motion", that is, a higher frame rate applied to it. I must say it looked great. But again, the whole clip must still be in lip sync with the audio clip so I must be able to use the same technique you found.

***** FAR OUT START ****
After testing and looking around in PremerePro to figure out how to do the above I also came to think about another thing that would be nice to be able to do.
To apply "Stop motion effect" to one or many persons (moving objects) in the clip. This is probably a lot more complicated to do, but the end result could be a lot more interesting as well. Would I need AfterEffects to do this or is there any other cheaper tools out there i could use to to this.
***** FAR OUT END *****


Again, thanks a lot and happy new year to you to .....

I think I must have missed that original film line, sorry about that.
No problem Richard! It's always good to have different views etc.,
and we value the opinion/experience/knowledge that everybody
brings to table! Just wanted to elaborate a bit <g>

I've moved this thread to our Adobe Premiere forum, also renamed
the title since it no longer needs to have the name in it.

I'm not sure I can exactly picture the complex special effects that you envision.

I suspect this might work for you though:

Once you apply the Posterize Time effect to a clip, open the Effects Control window for the effect and add keyframes. You can then set the frame rate that you want to take effect at each keyframe.

There is a caveat in the Online Help for that effect -- it cannot use Bezier interpolation, only "Hold" which means each that the frame rate will change abruptly at each keyframe. So if you want a smooth change from, say 25fps to 1fps, you'd need to place several keyframes, each with a slightly slower framerate, to give a smooth appearance to the framerate change. I tried this and it looks like it works pretty well; it took just a couple of minutes to set up a change from 30fps to 1fps in 3fps steps.

Happy New Year!

Thanks again Pete for the tip to use keyframes.

It did the trick.

Great help.