Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with premiere

Video-Editing for Dummies!

newfers — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:39:04 -0800

I'd like to make a presumably simple video in the style of a series of opening credits for a tv show. What's my cheapest way to do it, and how? I am attempting to make a short video for friends, and my idea is to have a 1-minute video playing and at 4 points during the video, a photo appears in the center of the video, with the friend's name underneath.
Each pic appears briefly, disappears (or twirls or shrinks, whatever - doesn't need to be anything special)... and then the next pic appears, until all 4 are done. It's kind of like a series of badly done opening credits.

Before I go ahead and purchase Premiere Elements, is there another easier or cheaper method to do this very thing, and if so, can you give very basic instructions? The only media I will be using will be the video clip and 4 image files to be placed within the video as it plays.

I use a PC primarily, but also have a MacBook Pro, so if iMovie can do this, I'd be happy, but I don't see the option as I played with the program. I'd prefer a PC solution, or a platform agnostic solution.

After Effects Resolution vs Adobe Premiere

bostonhill — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:22:09 -0800

After Effects Resolution vs Adobe Premiere Hey everyone,

I just bought After Effects and I am sort of a noob when it comes to this so I am hoping someone can help me when it comes to aspect ratio/resolution.

I have a file that was created in AE where the resolution is 1280x720 (16:9), however, the format I am working with in Adobe Premiere is 720x480 (I use a DVX100b camera).

What do I have to do in order for the 1280x720 resolution to fit properly in Premiere 720 by 480?

Much thanks

Harry Potter premiere tickets?

jammy — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:24:05 -0800

Tickets to the premiere of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows? A young friend of mine really really really wants to attend the premiere of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows and I would love to help make her dream come true. How does an ordinary muggle go about finding tickets to such an event?

(I realize that the movie isn't coming out 'til November 2010 but I figured a headstart might help)

Premiere Attire?

peachykeen — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:30:39 -0800

What should one wear to an L.A. movie premiere? I've scored tickets for a movie premiere tonight and am clueless as to what I should wear. I'll be attending as a member of the general public, not walking the red carpet or anything.

The catch- I'm leaving in an hour! And what's more, my wardrobe is pretty limited. Jeans, some cute tops, sundresses, and one LBD. Will the LBD be too fancy? Jeans and a dressy top too casual?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Where can I find this dress?!

theRussian — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:41:07 -0800

I love this dress! - who made it? Ok, so this dress worn by Teri Hatcher at the Coraline premiere in Sydney is awesome. I certainly can't afford it, but I'd love to find out who made it/where I can get one. Anyone in MeFi land know??

More pics here.

Thanks in advance!!

Cannot install Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0.

tangyraspberry — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:03:41 -0800

Cannot install Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. My wife bought me Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 which I only recently got around to trying to install, however, upon attempting, I'm getting a "could not find any audio drivers" message. Any thoughts or ideas. Thanks in advance.

Help with workflow from Handbrake to Premiere CS4, please

Slothrop — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:49:27 -0800

Art teacher / animation project / OS X 10.5 : I am using Handbrake to rip portions of DVDs into digital files. I would like to edit these files with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 into 2-12 second segments. I need a little help figuring out how to do this properly, please. I am an art teacher working with a few advanced students on an animation project. I have done lots of work in Flash and figuring that out is no problem. We have begun experimenting with frame-by-frame style animation - where an image is drawn for every frame or every other frame in a sequence, like traditional animation. To help with that we find videos and export them as JPG or TIFF sequences. We can then draw over those image sequences to get a feel for how to draw and capture motion.

I have started using Premiere so that we can focus in on short manageable sequences to animate. With Premiere CS4, I can take a sequence from YouTube and edit it down to 2-5 seconds pretty quickly. I'd also like to take interesting motion sequences from DVDs I have and work with those as well. I downloaded Handbrake and used that to rip files from my DVD. I tried the different codec options (MPEG and h.264) but none of the resulting files will import into Premiere. Video production is a bit of a blind spot for me as a digital artist/teacher, so I need some advice. Handbrake produces AVI and MP4s (I think).

I'd like a freeware-oriented workflow for the short term that allows me to get video from a DVD that Premiere CS4 can open. In the medium to long term my school can probably purchase a more "professional" set of tools, especially once I demonstrate how this process will work.

I should emphasize that I am not pirating or copying movies in any way. We are using very short segments of videos to get a feel for how to draw and animate different kinds of movement.

Thank you in advance for advice and suggestions.

Have a Very Furry Christmas!

katyjack — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:27:25 -0800

I bought some stock video footage of a dog on a green background which I plan to chroma key out. Then I want to morph seamlessly into a graphic - still with the background masked out! And I want to do this all in Flash! For my Christmas Card! Not a total newbie at all of this - details inside. OK, so I do know Flash and Photoshop pretty well and I've got the entire Adobe Suite to use but I've only used Premiere and After Effects a little bit. I've masked out the background from a video before so I think I can remember how to do that with a little difficulty, but what I'd like to do is to use After Effects (I guess) to take the last frame of the image, turn it into a gif or a png and get rid of the background all together so I can take the image into flash and - well - turn it into a talking dog. My lame attempts so far at this have looked far from seamless - my vision of my talking dog christmas card is far exceeding my ability unfortunately. Does anyone have any tips for me on how to best achieve my dream?

What video editing software is best for me?

nitsuj — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:42:29 -0800

What video editing software is best for me? I've got a Macbook Pro (2.4 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, OSX.5.5), and I'm looking to edit HD video (from this camera). I'm fairly new to the Mac, but on Windows I was very proficient in Adobe Premiere. I've never worked with HD.

Looking through the Apple site, I see a bunch of different versions of Final Cut (Pro, Express, Express HD, etc) and I'm not sure which, if any, would be good for me -- considering I'm a Premiere guy. Is there anything about Final Cut that would make me want to switch to it in my situation?

Also: Does my Mac have the specs to edit HD footage well?

I'm doing prosumer level work -- nothing too fancy.

why is such a simple effect so hard to accomplish?

sandra_s — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 02:45:24 -0800

Adobe Premire 6.5 - How do I get a still image (5 seconds) to fade in from black (or out to black)? Bonus question - How do I get still images to fade into each other (smoothly, not dithered)? I'm a novice at Premiere. The "transparency" function has me stumped. I have poured over the manual and tried every "key". Even with a totally diagonal transparency line from one corner to the other using any and all settings, all I ever get is 100% image or 100% black.

"Fade" in Premiere only seems to apply to audio

Can someone explain in plain speak how to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Bonus Bonus question: Please explain the transparency tools in plain speak. arrrrgh!!

Thanks in advance!

XO

Changing resolution in Premiere Pro CS3?

wubbie — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:23:03 -0800

Is there a way to change the resolution of an existing Premiere Pro CS3 project, or is that something that can only be set up before you begin work? I'm new to Premiere. I've spent several days editing a Project with a resolution of 1280x720, and have decided I want to change that resolution to 1024x768, since it will mostly be played back on computer monitors, not on HDTVs.

When I go into Project Settings, the General category (where I could change Editing Mode to Desktop and specify a custom resolution of 1024x768) is grayed out. I've Googled to no avail.

I'm hoping I don't have to start my entire editing process over again, which would be especially daunting since you can't seem to be able to have two Premiere Projects open at the same time to copy/paste between.

Why can't I change pixel size / resolution in Adobe Premiere?

Flying Saucer — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:24:25 -0800

When I change the pixel size in Adobe Premiere Pro...why doesn't it change? I'm editing DV footage with a partner. He's got an Apple and FCP; I've got a PC and Adobe Premiere 6.0.

Somewhere along the way we realized that my videos, output as 720x480, show up on Quicktime (on both machines) as 640x480.

Premiere seems to have three settings that relate to pixel size:

- The presets, which you select when you start a new project. One of them is "720x480 NTSC for Quicktime," which STILL turns my videos into 640x480 when played on QT.

- Clip > Advanced Options > Pixel Aspect Ratio, which doesn't seem to do anything.

- The Pixel Aspect Ratio menu under Project > Project Settings > Video, which also has no effect.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Is it something I failed to do during capture, forever dooming this footage to black margins when they're played on a Mac?

I've looked all over the web and Adobe's instructions and can't find a solution. Thanks for any suggestions.

Does "Premiere" mean what I think it means?

chocolatepeanutbuttercup — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:14:57 -0800

What, precisely, constitutes a film premiere? Say I had an independently produced film that I wanted to submit to a film festival such as AFI or Telluride or Venice or Cannes or whatever. Most festivals stress that they want a film to premiere at the festival, and that preference will be given to films that do.

Does “premiere” mean “first time shown at a festival,” or “the first time shown anywhere?”
In order to qualify for a festival, do I have to keep the film locked up and not show it to anyone?
Can I show it locally to friends, family and cast members?
Can it run for a week at a local theater (here in the boondocks?)
Can it be marketed and distributed and sold ahead of its festival premiere?

Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5/2.0 compatibility?

noisia — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:26:04 -0800

Is it possible to take Adobe Premiere Pro project files back and forth between 1.5 and 2.0? At school we're using 1.5 in the editing suites with the VCRs. At home I've got 2.0. I would like to be able to capture at school, then take the clips/project home to edit (portable HD), then take back to school to put back on video tape.
It seems to be fine going from 1.5 to 2.0 but when I try the reverse, it refuses to open the file. Even exporting the video as a whole file and then plopping it into the time line doesn't jive, as undesirable as it is, the video turns choppy in 1.5.
With Illustrator, it at least lets me save a CS2 file as CS compatible, even if it does add stupid clipping masks. Premiere doesn't seem to have any similar options.
Is there any way to make the files work, or should I just downgrade to 1.5?

Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 encoding (export) problems.

cheero — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 09:55:59 -0800

Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 encoding (export) problems. Hopefully someone can help me out! I am having an issue with my Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. Recently, I worked on 30 minute video for a local band and whenever I tried to export, I get some type of an error. For example, I have tried to do Export To DVD option, but it only burns half way and then it says stops with 'Unknown Error'

The other options I have to burn with come via the Adobe MPEG Encoder which has mpeg1, mpeg-vcd, mpeg2, quicktime and windows media. No matter which option I choose, the rendering time is extremely slow (up to an hour of rendering for a 30 minute file) and when I actually exported it as mpeg1, it came out very very tiny (in resolution) and the actual video was much darker than the original one I have within the timeline.

I have tried to work it out for the past 9 hours, I am completely baffled.

Does anyone have any tips/suggestions to what I should do? Is there a way to encode this 30 minute file that will not be huge in size and actually export the file correctly and not small and darkened?

Thank very much in advance!

Adobe Premiere and Encoding

curiousleo — Sun, 07 May 2006 15:12:48 -0800

Adobe Premiere Pro question... I am just starting to dabble Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
I mainly want to create a nice animation clips with my TIF picture files created with 3D CAD programs.

I usually render TIFs with 720x486 pixels (or they call it NTSC standard size) + square pixels

Usually I can encode them with QuickTime MOV file via Radus codec?? anyways.. the quality seems acceptable.

The animations are usually 1 min. to 3 min. long....

However I really need to encode the file to something that is more general like AVI or such so that other people can play the file without hassle.

I just can't seems to be able to encode them in Premiere Pro... First of all .. there are too many settings and pre-setting for me to figure out... When I do use some of the presets.. I usually get horrible quality AVIs or sometimes the system crashes during encoding...

What settings do you use... ? Is 720x486 pixel too small?

I want both high quality and small file size file....

I searched couple of books and even googling around.. but I guess my problem is so basic to most of pros that I can't find any solid answers...

Can anyone suggest good detailed book about this? or website...? I need down to earth answers. like

1. pick "Windows Media AVI" 2. Set xx setting to "xxx number" 3. Click off "optimize" 4.......etc.. etc.. to create nice portfolio quality AVI that can play on most machines... etcc.. etc...

thanks for any help

Burning a DVD

cheero — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:13:25 -0800

Hello, We have a video project that we have made inside Adobe Premire 1.5. We have tried to burn it to DVD via Premiere, but it kept giving us a record error. We also have Nero 6, but whenever we select DVD Video and place the avi file into the browser, the record button for burning a DVD is not enabled. Thank you in advance for your help.

Images in Premiere, Flash

zardoz — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 06:33:50 -0800

I want to make some movies using photos (jpegs), as a photo montage with mp3s in the background. How should I go about doing this? 1) Should I make Flash movies or actual mpegs (avis? mov. files?) with Premiere? I've tried this in the past with Flash, but no matter the resolution of the original, the movies come out pixellated/with funky color changes. And with Premiere the end movie is waaay too large, far larger than the sum of the pics and music. And also with the funky color/pixellation. 2) Should I convert the jpegs to bitmaps or some other format before importing? What's a good resolution?

Is Reason and other programs making music production too easy?

Napierzaza — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 08:01:49 -0800

I have a question that relates to the recent announcement about Reason 3. Reason is a intuitive and relatively simple (probably the easiest) software based music program. Is Reason and other programs making music production to easy? Has it been demystified? Coupled with the internet there is certainly a lot of electronic musicians nowadays.

I just have trouble when I think about it because I make music (with Reason) and I'd like to believe it's original and everything, but maybe it isn't.

I have a friend who makes short movies and he says that it has happened to movie making because of Final Cut and Premiere. But I can't imagine this is so because films are (or should be) complex and there are so many things that have to be done right.

Is the musician not special anymore? Does anyone think that music is too simple a thing to learn? I've been making it for a little more than a year and the learning curve has really slowed down, I'm learning less about music and more about the program itself.

Will people who listen music have to change what they're looking for? Vying for the more complex and unique than the perfectly timed? I myself (I'm using my own opinion to try and relate to everyone else) am moving towards the more and more complex music and genres.

Is it like that for many of you here?

How do I rip a DVD into MPEG or AVI?

vraxoin — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:39:21 -0800

Best way to rip video from a DVD into MPEG or AVI? I need to grab scenes from a movie and monkey with them in Premiere (Windows).