Tag Archives: Premiere

Editing in Premiere? Avoid WMV!

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First, let me say that I absolutely love working in Adobe Premiere Pro. The interface is clean and snappy- I can get things done in an organized way without a ton of fuss. Now with batch export through Adobe Media Encoder in CS4, it’s just a real, genuine pleasure to work with.

Now, I also use Sony Vegas Pro on occasion. It is also a nice piece of software. The one thing Vegas really has over Premiere is the ability to handle just about any file type without the potential to choke and die. Lots of material that I’ve needed to edit has had to pass through Vegas for simple conversion before bringing it into Premiere for cutting. I know that formats such as WMV are not meant to be edited, but sometimes you have no choice- you have to work with what you’ve been given.

Over the weekend, I struggled for a few hours trying to import some NTSC format WMV files into Premiere. The import maxed out my CPU and my RAM for quite some time. Premiere did crash on a number of occasions. I had the idea, finally, to process the files through Vegas (AVI conversion) as I would normally do, but then thought perhaps AME would be able to handle this task for me. Sure enough AME was able to convert the WMV files into AVI with no problems whatsoever. Taking these into Premiere, editing them down, and moving them into an Encore project was quick, simple, and really such a day and night difference from my original work flow.

Having done a little research after the fact, it seems there is actually a knowledge base article about this very issue.  I can vouch that leaving the task to complete will work- but it takes forever, and editing WMV files even when the import is successful is not a pleasent experience.  Most of the time, I work with native video, but when confronted with a distribution format like WMV- I can safely recommend Using Adobe Media Encoder to transcode to a workable format.  I may not need Vegas anymore…

CamStudio 2.5 “Beta” Released

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CamStudio 2.5 is a screen recording application I’ve been using to author screencasts for the online courses I teach. These types of tutorials are really useful when teaching new users how to go about building things in Flash. It includes the option to output in FLV as well- so that is just perfect.

I kind of missed the release of this by a week or two. For some time, the website wasn’t updated and I had thought the project abandoned. Glad I was wrong- apparently this is considered a beta because 2.6 is on the horizon. Strange reasoning for a beta- but I can understand the need to release something… but having “2.5 beta” followed by a “2.5″ release makes more sense, in my opinion. I suppose they are only names.

I’ve posted before about some troubles I had with the previous versions of CamStudio getting the AVI output processed correctly in Premiere. I haven’t had the chance to try out this new version yet but it apparently works on Windows Vista and includes some expanded windowing options.

I’m a big fan of the project and very happy to see things moving forward.

New Short: “Window View”

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I’ve completed a new short film called “Window View” which can be viewed at The Memoryspiral.

[IMAGE MISSING]

“A scene from within a house- looking out at events in the backyard.”

I’m very happy with both the concept and the final realization. There were some technical considerations I was able to get around with the tools in Premiere CS2… specifically using a garbage mask to remove props I left in frame on one shot- oooops! Haven’t had a look at the new version yet, but do want to give it a try after the full trial is released to see if it speeds up my workflow at all.

CamStudio: Premiere/After Effects Solution

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CamStudio 2.0 is a free screen capture tool that can be used in the creation of tutorials, demos, and such. You can configure it to either output a SWF or AVI file. I prefer AVI because it enables me to edit, add title screens, and do general production tasks before outputting to FLV for delivery. CamStudio gives the user quite a bit of flexibility in choosing the codec used to compress the video. One such codec is the “CamStudio Lossless Codec v1.0″ which does a fine job of maintaining high frame rates, while preserving small details and even rendering gradient washes correctly.

The trouble with the AVI files produced in this way is that when brought into Premiere Pro 2.0, the quality takes a nosedive. It seems that Premiere does not interpret the codec correctly and so renders a lot of black space (seemingly due to the encoded alpha channel) and really chunks up a huge portion of the video- the framerate is thrown off considerably as well. When attempting to “Interpret Footage”, turning off the alpha channel helps somewhat, but the framerate is still shot. However, performing the same action in After Effects Pro 7.0 actually does interpret the footage correctly! I am able to ignore the alpha channel when interpreting footage and everything renders great.

So if you are only doing light screencasting work and don’t want to spend the extra $$$ on something like Camtasia or Captivate, and assuming you already have Production Studio- this is a really fine solution.

EDIT: I have had good results using the LZOCodec v0.4 codec with CamStudio and then editing in Premier. You still need to interpret the footage by ignoring any alpha channel data, but the video will function properly on output.