adobe PREMIERE PRO

to discuss all things Adobe Premiere Pro.

Questions.
Comments.

Even if you hate it and want to make sure everyone knows you hate it, feel free to post your comments here.

I recently installed it on my computer and am learning slowly. So far, I am enjoying it.

I'll start with one question for now. I do not have any manuals for the program. I will be buying some soon, but in the meantime...

1. How do you mask your footage with widescreen bars? You know, "fake" widescreen. I'm not talking about squeezing the image, just masking it with bars.

'clip' or 'crop' the footage. dont know where its exactly at or what the difference between those two is though.

what i dont know nothing about is the sounds. all those buttons. they hurt my brains.

To access the clip and crop functions, go to 'video effects' in the 'project' window. Open the folder entitled 'transform'. Scroll down to where it says clip and crop, and click and drag the effect you want from he 'project window' to the video in the 'timeline' window you wish to use the effect on.

Clip is the tool you want to be using if all you want to do is add black bars (or any colour bars). The crop effect makes part of the video you use it on transparent, so that you can see the layer beneath. If you only have one video in the 'timeline' and there is no layer beath that video, then when you crop the video, it will produce the same effect as cliping, i.e. black bars.

Does that make sense? I only ask because I know it doesn't. I think the thing to do is load up Pro and try out both effects and you will inatantly see what I'm refering to.

I find that crop can sometimes be quite a useful tool. I will use it if I have a scene in which there is not a lot of motion in the scene, the camera is stationary, and preferably indoors in a situaton where lighting and shadows are controlled, and do not fluctuate with the clouds.

An example of how I used it recently (this is a very basic example, and if you quickly find this both boring and patronising, then stop reading, no-one is forcing you to):

Scene shot in a restaurant (which we had to ourselves, so no one was walking around in the background), and a very traditional two-shot and two medium close-ups arrangement. We wanted to cut from the medium close-up of the woman (sat on the left), to the man (sat on the right). Unfortunately as the woman reaches the end of her lines, the man leans forward, and fills about 5% of the right hand side of the image. As the man does this, he drinks from his glass of wine. This is the point at which we want to cut to a medium close-up of the man, but in all of the takes we had, none of them had the man drinking his wine at this point, infact in all of them, the man's glass was sat in front of him on the table. Cutting from the man with wine to his lips to the man with the glass in front of hm was obviously quite jarring.

The solution: The solution was to remove the man from the woman's medium close-up, so that when we cut to the man's medium close-up, we did not know where his glass had just been. We could have done this by zooming in on the woman, but we liked the cmposition of the shot as it was, and were reluctant to do that.

Instead we selected the woman's medium, and placed this in the 'video 2' layer on the timeline. We then chose a frame from the woman's medium, which did not contain the man. We exported this frame, then reimported it, and placed it in the 'video 1' layer in the timeline. This frame was now beneath the woman's medium. We then cropped about 5% of the right hand side of the woman's medium. Now the part of the image, into which the man moves is transparent. When the timeline is played back, we see the left hand 95% as normal, but the right hand 5% is from the layer below. The layer that is the single frame without the man (a very crude 'clean plate').

Does that make sense?

I give up, I'm going back to bed.

i've used each version of premiere from premier 4 (i think) and pro is the biggest improvement by a long way.

It hasn't crashed once and i'm now in the middle of a third project using it. The old versions used to crash 3 or 4 times an editing session.

However after i've finished with this project i'm going to make the switch to Avid Express DV. I kind of feel like i've mastered Premiere and most of the media companies i've spoke to have asked if i have Express experience. It also seems to be a lot more powerful than premiere although perhaps not as user friendly.

Thanks for the replies.

I actually found it, although I just cant seem to get it to play properly in the timeline.

File-> New-> Title-> Templates-> Title Designer Presets-> Mattes-> matte letterbox

But like I said, after I click on that and save it and drag to timeline, it doesnt appear when I actually play the timeline.

I also realized how you can make your own aspect ratio. In Titles with the rectangle tool. Just make 'em black and place 'em at the top and bottom. The only problem with that is that the edges are soft, because all of adobes titles edges are soft so that they dont look like hard video titles, but more like film.

If you are planning to make a video with an aspect rationof 16:9, why not open a new file, and when it asks you which ype of file you would like, choose either NTSC or PAL 16:9. Then when you import your 4:3 clips, you can resize them, while maitning the correct ratio of width to height, and move themso that the most important section of the video is always displayed.

Sounds like it would it work.

Looks like lots of different options.

Thanks.

So far its a very user friendly program.

I've used Avid but it was ages ago. Never did Final Cut Pro.

I've yet to really tighten my project. No color correction. No audio mixing yet.

Out of curiosity, for those of you who use APP, what are your pros & cons about it?

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Originally posted by MatJimMood:
It [Avid Xpress DV] also seems to be a lot more powerful than premiere although perhaps not as user friendly.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I don?t know where the perception that Avid Xpress DV is more powerful then Premiere Pro comes from (Perhaps it is because Avid is the high-end industry standard?). Having used both systems fairly extensively, the only feature I can think of that Avid has and Premiere lacks is the ability to flag footage that has been used twice in the timeline. This is very useful when you are editing film to generate an EDL for a negative cutter (since, obviously you cannot use one shot more then once if you go down the traditional post production route). Avid is full of infuriating little idiosyncrasies (The ?strong man?. Christ, don?t get me started on the strong man). Also, it forces you to view your rushes in a linear editing style monitor and create in and out points, whereas Premiere gives you the option to do handy little snips in the timeline, using the razor tool. Premier Pro?s software mixing desk and support for Cubase VST plug-ins are fantastic. Avid Xpress?s audio tools are virtually non-existent.

I think the reason that Avid's interface appears to have been designed by a six year old and is absolutely unintuitive is because it is relatively old, and based on archaic software made before the GUI was perfected. Avid stuck with the interface for political purposes.

I suppose proponents of Avid Xpress would argue that if one hopes to ever ?move up in the world?, one has to embrace Avid. This is true. I plan to put it off for as long as possible.

What's the strong man?

Come on, let it out. Vent.

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Premier Pro?s software mixing desk and support for Cubase VST plug-ins are fantastic.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Can you expand on that? What is that stuff?

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ May 20, 2005 02:52 AM: Message edited by: Tasty Fish Lips ]</font>