Topic: Who wants to help a Premiere n00b?

[Sloan Simpson]

nevermind, figured it out 

[hyperplane]

silly prerequisite question here, but are you running Premiere Pro or a previous version (like 6.0 or 6.5)? let me know, and i can give you some tips.

[Sloan Simpson]

silly prerequisite question here, but are you running Premiere Pro or a previous version (like 6.0 or 6.5)? let me know, and i can give you some tips.

Pro.  I was trying to figure out how to cut between two different cams.  Turns out the tutorial I  was looking at was for 6.5, so I got that figured out.

At the moment I've been trying to get it to output a file so I can make a test disc, just to see what it'll look like.  It's a 45-minute show, and I've edited the angles on about 15 minutes or so.  I was just going to export it and let the last 30 minutes be one cam, just wanted to see how the edits on the first 15 minutes look.

The file it outputs didn't play in Windows Media, acted like there was no file there.  Also last night tried the "Export To DVD" option, and over 12 hours later it was still at about 20% complete (I have a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB RAM).  I'm assuming it hung up because of whatever the problem with the file was. . .

Any of this sound like something familiar?

Thanks

[hyperplane]

sounds familiar, yes. i never do Export to DVD, for said reasons - a lot of people report that it takes "forever" essentially.

are you using any plugins (like color correction, sharpening, or anything else)? the more plugins you use, the longer it will take to render/export the video.

what i do is always export to Microsoft DV .AVI file (which should be about 9 or 10 GB for a 45 minute video). then, i use MainConcept or Cinemacraft Encoder (aka CCE) to encode the DV .AVI file to MPEG-2, and then it's DVD authoring time!

also, if you want to simply make your "test" video export, to check it out on a TV (or whatever), you should adjust the timeline markers (also known as the "work area bar")... it's the thin yellow bar in te upper area of the Timeline palette. that way, you can export, say, a 5 minute portion of the video, encode/author it, and see how it looks on a TV. that's a BIG time saver, for me... i did a 2-cam of a 95 minute video (tons of edits/cuts between the two cameras, but no filters applied), and that took 8 or 9 hours to export to DV .AVI and then another few hours to encode to DVD MPEG-2 format. oh, and i'm using a machine with similar specs (P4 2.8Ghz with 2GB RAM). i can't complain about the exporting time, though, because the quality is primo.    for that DVD, i had done the 5 minute segment exporting, with various filters, to see which one looked best on a TV set.

[Sloan Simpson]

Hmm.  I did another test tonight saving it as just AVI, not DV AVI.  I only rendered about 5 minutes of it, and it took about 2 1/2 hours?  I can deal with it if that's just the way it is, but that seems slower than what I'm hearing from others.  No effects of anything, just back and forth between the two cams. . .

[Sloan Simpson]

I think I got this one straight as well.  There's a bug in the encoder that 'causes it to hang up.  Installed an update, seems to be taking care of it.

[renho3k]

premiere is optimized for working with DV. remember, it also comes out of the camcorder as DV so naturally it would save fastest in this format since you're not converting to another format. exporting to DVD takes forever because you're essentially doing the encoding from DV to mpeg-2 stage of the project. in this case you're using the mainconcept encoder built into premiere. this is probably the longest part of the production pipeline and factors like length of project and compressor settings (# of passes, compression quality, etc) will also influence the encoding time. 12 hrs to encode for just 45 mins of footage seems a little too long but definitely expect this stage to take hours to complete. that's normal. the only thing you're skipping out on when you export to dvd from premiere is authoring the dvd because premiere sets your video as first play so you don't have menus and all that to make. it makes a very basic auto-start playable dvd when you put it in. you could output out of premiere as DV and encode in your dvd authoring program too but it would take long either way. i recommend encoding it BEFORE you author the dvd like h_vargas said because that makes building test DVD projects really fast in the authoring stage. i find most preview features in authoring programs a little inaccurate so i prefer building dvd images on the harddrive and testing them with my dvd playback software.

i'm not sure what you guys are checking for when you make sample tests but just remember that mpeg2 is the required format for playable DVD. if you save as regular avi, no matter which compressor you chose from the long list of options, you're not going to see it like that on a DVD because you always need to end in mpeg2 format. if you want to test a sample of the compressor setting, you should adjust your work area slider up top to a small segment of your project and use the export==>adobe media encoder. then select mpeg2-dvd in the format drop down. also take into consideration that video encoding algorithms compare previous and next frames. so if you have a segment where the footage is relatively the same over time, it will usually compress nicely but since your compression settings are usually applies to the entire project, you should also test a section where lots of things are going on and moving about. the same settings used in the calmer scenes might produce artifacts in a more complicated shot. hope that helps.

[hyperplane]

oh, i forgot to mention, in my own experience, if you want to export fromt he Timeline and directly encode to MPEG-2 video, it runs a lot quicker on my machine when i use FrameServer (freeware)... which can be found here:

http://www.debugmode.com/frameserver/

then i simply drop the tiny signpost "AVI" file it creates into ProCoder, CCE, or MainConcept and encode.