TheTreeAMV wrote:Uhh... could we maybe NOT turn this into a "he-said-she-said-Mac-vs-PC" battle? Please? How about we all do the mature thing and drop the subject? O: (please, no one kill me for saying that.)]
I believe you're misunderstanding my intent here. My point, in fact, is the exact opposite of a "Mac vs. PC" argument. What I was pointing out was that while there exists differences in programs, the
essentials of the process are
identical regardless of platform. My concern was that StrawberryKiss's earlier statement could be construed as implying that the process was significantly different on the mac, and that just isn't the case. There are certain steps to be followed, and it does not matter whether you are on windows, or mac, or even linux. AMVs are a very specific kind of editing, and so the process is different than other types of editing, and that's on the same platform. However, for the AMV process, which is the same concept no matter the platform, the required steps are the same across platforms. The important thing to know here is that the mac user does nothing
essentially, inherently different than the windows user. The process may have differences in packaging, but that's all just so much window dressing, if you'll forgive the obvious pun.
Black, actually. Though I'm not sure how the colour is relevant
It's not, it's just now, that specific line is referred to as the MacBook White line to differentiate it from the MacBooks that came before, and the MacBooks that have come after. So when I tell someone I have a MacBook White (and admittedly mine is the white version), this is much more referring to what is inside the case than it does the outside case itself. So when you hear someone debating the merits of the MacBook White versus the MacBook Unibody, as an example, you can know your MacBook (even if it is actually colored black) is identical to the former. The MacBook White is still in production, but you can only get it in white, which is how the etymology of that product versus other products came to be. Make sense? So, for purposes of technical advice, we'll call both MacBooks you and I have "MacBook White" or MBW for short.
Unlike previous versions of Premiere, there actually is no "Export" option. The only way to export is via the Adobe Media Encoder. Premiere sends the sequence to the encoder, and you set your settings there. My problems occur when exporting in widescreen, because when I export a widescreen video with fullscreen settings, the encoder produces a letterboxed version of my video but maintains the correct AR. But when I export with widescreen settings, the encoder still produces a fullscreen video, it just compresses the AR horizontally. I've been having to take these retarded squished exports and re-export them (correcting the AR) in StreamClip. It's the AR compression via the encoder that's killing the quality, as far as I can tell.
I have an awful hard time believing that Adobe Media Encoder would disallow uncompressed export. I find it even harder to believe that it would do so without allowing you to choose a lossless codec to deal with, or at least something like Apple Intermediate Codec, which as it implies, is precisely designed for moving high quality video between programs with minimal loss of quality. I have to believe that it can, and I will investigate it this weekend, or possibly tonight, depending on how quickly I can acquire a copy of CS4 for testing purposes.
In that same vein, I also have a hard time believing you would be getting letter boxing. Now the only thing I can think of is that the CS series seems to dislike changing project settings after they have already been established. Now this seems awfully stupid of Adobe if they removed letterboxing/aspect ratio control from Media Encoder, but I can see if you are editing outside of your desired AR, Media Encoder might take your settings and lock you into them. I don't honestly think this to be the case, unless Adobe has really just screwed the pooch. Again, I'll investigate further. If this happens to be the case, then my suggestion is probably going to be converting all of your clips via another process (probably using avisynth via crossover to get access to really high-quality resizers) and then adding your entire project, timeline and all, to a new timeline in CS4 with the settings that represent your desired AR, be it 16:9 or 4:3. I believe, IIRC correctly, this a 16:9 video, so you want to resize your clips to a resolution of 848x480 for distribution purposes. Regardless, I personally
always recommend editing in your desired resolution and aspect ratio, from clips rendered out previously in your desired resolution and aspect ratio from the get go. Do it in pre-processing, and you can avoid such issues. No need to resize the final project. Hopefully, no need to do any post-processing of any kind. Please note, that when you choose a resolution to represent your aspect ratio, you need to set Premiere to a 1:1 square pixel aspect ratio. It is your resolution choice that will determine if the video looks correct. 848x480, as the example here, is not true 16:9, however it is the generally accepted distro resolution representing 16:9. Representations are not necessarily the same as true aspect ratios, so be careful.
Also, I prefer my footage uncompressed for editing, since Premiere runs very slowly when working with just about any codec. Is there a way to completely decompress footage for editing in Premiere (without importing, rendering, and re-exporting) or some particular codec that works?
As LittleAtari points out above about my sticky, I generally recommend huffYUV. It's cross compatible, and placed inside a .mov container, I know for a fact Premiere CS3 loves it. Now, there is a huffYUV encoder for mac (or actually, it appears to be a compiled source originally for linux, but it seems to run...), but I am not quite done with testing so, no one get too excited yet... However, using amvapp's vdubmod inside of crossover will allow you to take clips in avi, convert them to huffYUV, drop them into SimpleMovieX or MPEGStreamClip, and move them (WITHOUT REENCODING! THIS IS A VERY, SUPER, ULTRA IMPORTANT POINT) into a .mov container. Although the Premiere family is supposed to take avis, sometimes they tend to dislike it as a container. Why? I don't know. The codec is identical, but whatever the reason, there is no difference between the actual encode in the .mov container, so might as well just do it because it works every time without argument from Premiere.
I don't think you need to start a new thread in the Adobe forum, since our discussion is directly relevant to this video (I assume you archive your project files in case some major error is caught after initial release!) and you can hopefully produce a better copy for upload, we might as well just do it here. Less forum clutter. Given that you may need to start messing with avisynth, now may be a good time to read my sticky, as LittleAtari linked. It is
here if you don't want to go back to find it. I originally didn't mention it because you seemed to have already done your pre-processing. Since I consider AR part of pre-processing, I wasn't sure a large portion of that guide would be relevant. Now it clearly is.
Regardless, I will do research with CS4, as well as continuing work on my native options for huffYUV and some filtering aspects and get back to you on what I find out. Please do tell me if you are editing outside your desired AR, and if your original clips are outside of your desired AR. If they are, I imagine, at the moment at least, that is probably part of the reason you seem to be having so much trouble.
) and this time it was pillarboxed. Do you have any output suggestions? I used AIC this time and changed some other settings... I'm kind of at a loss 
