Could use some general adobe advice. Please!

[Nic Brown]

Hello
I'm a completely self taught editor, having exclusively used adobe premier since back in the 3.0 days. I'm about to start my largest project ever, which took over a year to film and was completely self funded - bottom line, its extremely important that all of this time and money i invested doesn't go to waste, and I'm becoming concerned that the techniques I developed might not be optimal. I have 25 tapes to edit, and want to figure this out before I start the massive task. I was hoping someone could take a quick look at the process I'm going to use, and tell me if there are any glaring flaws.

Its fairly simple:

I capture all of my footage using the standard DV NTSC at 29.97 (the footage was shot on 24p, but i've never been able to properly capture/edit/export in 24)

Then I go through the tapes, and export chunks of footage into much smaller scene files (eg. 'david canoes to shore take 1.avi'), which I organize and store in various folders, backing them up onto external HDs and DVDs in case of disaster.

Then I basically decide on all of the scenes I'll be using, and put them into my project and start putting them together, eventually exporting into a finished whole using the same settings as always (DV NSTC AVI - 29.97) and burn to DVD using encore.

My main concern is that this process is causing a drop in quality, although, from the tests i've done, the quality looks pretty good.

I could use some pointers from people who have actually been to school and/or are well versed in the technical side of adobe.

btw I'm using Premier Pro 2.0, the footage was shot using the panasonic DVX-100a

thanks!

nic

[Ed Smith]

Hi Nic,

This is a general work flow issue so I have moved thread into the PC NLe forum for now.

Personally I would go down the old fashioned route - Look through every tape and create a log sheet with timecodes and comments of clips you want to use. From there create an EDL (Edit Decision List) from the log sheet, using the best clips. The edit decision list will also give you an overall idea of how long your production will be. Then use the batch capture feature in premiere to capture the timecodes from the EDL. Sure searching though 25hours of footage is going to take a while but the benfits include: Not much wasted storage space, you have an idea how the finished video will look, and no re-creation of AVI files. I might have some Log sheet and EDL word document templates if you need them.

The other way is to simply capture your 25hours of footage (provided you have enough space), and simply mark your in and outpoints in the source viewer and drag from the source viewer into the bin, it will ask do you wish to make a sub clip, say yes and give the sub clip a specific name. A sub clip is a timecode reference to the master clip (No generation loss). You can then add the sub clip into the timeline and build your edits up.

hope this helps,

Ed