Calling on Deviant D!

[deviantdee]

Call the Devil, and he shall appear!

The fundamental problem, is that, PPro's own DivX
codec is rubbish, and it isn't too crash-hot when
any new DivX ones are installed either. This problem
has plagued them for years - have a spy around
the Adobe PPro forums - http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/main.html -
('Login as guest') and you'll find lots of com-
plaints about it.

It's best to stay clear really. Keep it simple, and rip
or capture any footage as .DVAVI; import it into
PPRo, do your editing, and export it back out as
.DVAVI for the Doc to have a bash at.

I exported the 'Judge Nutmeg' file as .DVAVI, and
even though it was 500+ megs, the Doc still managed
to get it down to 24megs, and that's keeping it
full screen, 48khz audio, and I didn't even bother
meddling with any of Doc's presets.

--

PPro's learning curve - getting to know your way
around the GUI, learning the shortcuts, etc. -
is relatively easy for an Adobe product. I'm
finding After Effects a real hassle, but I couldn't
live without it now.

You're normally only using a few buttons:
- '-' and '+' to zoom in and out of the timeline
- 'c' to cut
- 'v' to move your footage around

Tip:
After you've applied your effects and keyframe
animation to a particular piece of footage, and
you want to copy those settings onto a different
piece, but you can't be arsed redoing all the
keyframing, right-click the original piece, copy
(ctrl c) it, right-click the second piece and
select 'paste attributes'.

Final Cut Pro allows you to select exactly which
ones, but PPro doesn't - well, it does, apparently,
but the way to do it is too tedious for me.

--

Another PPro hassle, is the length of time it takes
to conform audio, but I think they're working
on that.

The forums are pretty fantastic (there's some
really pro filmmakers lurking amongst them),
but any probs, drop me a mail, okay.

D. [img]graemlins/devil.gif[/img]

<font color="#FF0000" size="1">[ September 14, 2005 08:08 AM: Message edited by: Deviant D ]</font>

[Sandy-Hazard]

Hey Darren,

I thought I'd ask you this, since you're the resident video guru around here.

I've recently installed Adobe Premiere 1.5 and ripped some DVD footage ala Dr.Divx.

It appears the Premiere does not like the Doctor and is giving me a case of the frustrates.

I tried importing the ripped Divx footage, but I get an error of "unsupported compression in file" So I did the obvious and googled. Found that If I rename it to .mpg then I can import, but now I get an audio compression error.

Any pointers D?

Do you recommend Premiere for a novice? or am I better suited to some other program that is more user friendly. I'm very computer savvy, but don't want to get a nosebleed trying to figure out everything. How steep is the Premiere learning curve?

Cheers

[Sandy-Hazard]

Hey D.

Thanks for all the tips. Much appreciated. Most of my archival footage is on DVD. I found an app called DVD Ripper that seemed to work quite good for ripping VOB files to MPEG2.

I'll play around with Premiere and see what shite I can come up with. I'll check out the Adobe forums as well. Thanks for the info!

[deviantdee]

Cool. MPEG2 is fully supported by PPro,
of course. You'll find lots of streaming MPEG2
(and Quicktime and WMA) save-as-options support
if you're producing something for the interweb
and not exporting something larger for offline
viewing. Frankly, I never use it though. We
(Spark TV website) had loads of trouble with the
Quicktime streaming option, and ended up doing it
all in, of all things, iMovie (no problems
whatsoever). And why bother anyway? Let people
download DivX - it's free.

D.

<font color="#FF0000" size="1">[ September 15, 2005 08:35 AM: Message edited by: Deviant D ]</font>