suM fings wOt i lernd (Ppro & AE)

[blabbler]

I freely admit that I don't *really* know what I'm doing, but here is a list of things that I wish I had been aware of before I started editing a few weeks ago, to help my fellow numpties:

Premiere:

1. TURN OFF FRAME BLENDING. When you import a clip, right-click it and deselect frame blending. Frame blending is the tool of the devil when you're editing fast shots. Do it at the beginning, as it's a pain to go back to a project and 'unblend' every damn clip. You can probably make it default to off somehow...

2. You can load up an .avs script in Premiere to allow you to scrub through a big clip (even if it's not a normally editable format) to choose scenes and make rough edits. This way, you can save encoding time and disk space. However, you will need to make sure that you export the clips as AVI files and bring them back into a new Premiere project with no .avs clips if you intend to import the project into AE, as the .avs scripts will crash AE outright.

3. Nested sequences kill the real-time preview speed (granted, my computer is ancient). You can get around this by exporting sequences as AVIs and bringing them back into your project, then deactivating the nested sequence.

4. Avisyth and Virtual dub seem to be much better at resizing footage than either Premiere or AE.

5. When starting a project in Premiere, make a custom profile and choose 'desktop' editing mode. You will then get access to encoding options other than the DV presets.

After Effects

1. Audio MUST be a multiple of 48khz, preferably WAV files. Any other rate can lead to loss of sync. Also make sure AE exports at 48khz, as 44.1khz is the default(!).

2. The AE sound driver is pump (or my system doesn’t like it). On my system using it resulted in almost a full one second delay in preview audio. I'm now using an alternative asio driver that happened to be on my system, this works very nicely.

3. The driver for the built in sound (AC'97) on my VIA motherboard converts all audio to 44.1khz for some obscure reason. I needed to change the driver settings to allow 48khz.

4. You can specify a layer as a matte to provide transparency info to another layer. Layer A contains the masks or alpha info or whatever, layer B contains the footage. For Layer B, select Layer A as the matte. Layer B will now have transparent areas.
This is often better than masking the footage layer, as you can move the whole matte layer, rather than keyframing the masks - thanks to AtomX for explaining this to me.

5. A layer will inherit motion properties of its parent. For instance, you can use a null object as a handle to move and animate a complex arrangement of layers. This is very useful if combined with the motion tracker.

6. Click the graph button for a layer, then hit [SHIFT]+[F3]. This brings up the graph editor, which is very nice when you’re fine-tuning keyframes, and brilliant for time remapping.

That’s all I can think of for the moment. Hope this helps somebody.

Cheers,
Blabbler

[Kariudo]

the 48KHz isn't quite right...you don't need to have 48KHz audio
dvd audio may be at 48KHz, but most cd audio is at 44.1KHz.

if you don't do proper resampling, it can really mess up your audio.
Maybe it's just me...but you won't really notice the difference between 44.1 and 48.
The only time I've run into sync problems is when I had a small delay between the start of my video and the start of the music

[blabbler]

It could well be specific to my computer, but until I converted my audio to 48khz the ram preview would sync fine, but the compiled output would be around a second behind the video.

I was tearing my hair out for ages over it.

I suspect ensuring that the project, the output, and the original audio file are all the same frequency is the key, rather than that 48khz is some magic standard.

Cheers,
Blabbler

[blabbler]

A couple more things:

Hold [CTRL] when scrubbing in AE to play sound as you drag the time position indicator doohickey.

Press [.] on the numpad to preview audio from the current time indicator position. Every time you stab it, playback starts over. You can press [*] on the numpad to place markers on the selected layer while doing this.


Blabbler

[Scott Green]

3. Nested sequences kill the real-time preview speed (granted, my computer is ancient). You can get around this by exporting sequences as AVIs and bringing them back into your project, then deactivating the nested sequence.

Just press ENTER and Premiere will render a preview =P
It's faster then exporting and importing + saves HDD space

[blabbler]

Just press ENTER and Premiere will render a preview =P
It's faster then exporting and importing + saves HDD space

Aaahhh... I see.







I had the real-time previews turned off...

Good point.

Cheers,
Blabber