CS4 project settings?

[beige]

Is there a helpful guide like this one that's for CS4? Or at least one that's more up to date than whatever version of Premiere this was for in 2004?

This guide also looks helpful but it's for Premiere 6.5, and I don't know how similar that is to CS4, other than the screenshots provided of the interface, which bear a passing resemblance but might not be similar at all.

My footage is deinterlaced (progressive) and 23.9760 fps. It's widescreen, 848 x 480. Obviously I should be selecting "Widescreen 48kHz" from the available presets, right? Am I good to go, then? Or would I want to choose "General" to further customize my settings?





I've read the guides but am still a little confused. Any advice would be great. Thanks.

[milkmandan]

I use CS6, but iirc the sequence settings are similar if not the same.
Here is what I would use:



- I am not sure if it's called "Custom" for the Editing Mode in CS4, but basically you want to set your own settings and don't go with any preset.
- You want Square Pixels for your PAR. 848 x 480. Widescreen right?
- Yup, No Fields, Progressive Scan.
- Audio Sample Rate should match what your audio source is.
- You might wanna play with your Video Preview settings. I usually use Microsoft AVI as the preview File Format and Microsoft RLE as the preview codec. You can use whatever you want. Make sure your previews are also set at 848 x 480. No need to have Maximum Bit Depth or Maximum Render Quality checked. I mean, it's just previews, don't really need the best quality for that.

[beige]

Thanks for the advice. Still, I run into a few problems:

I'd like to choose my own settings and not go with any of the presets, but the "General" tab can't be selected until a preset is clicked on.



It seems like I have to pick a preset no matter what if I want to be able to click on the "General" tab, and the options available to me in there depend on which preset I select.

Furthermore, no matter which preset I select, "Custom" doesn't seem to be an option in the Editing Mode choices. For example, here's what I get when I'm in the DV NTSC preset:



I'm probably missing something obvious but I'm not sure what to do now.

[Brad]

Change "Editing Mode" to "Desktop" and you'll be able to change all of the settings to whatever you want. Then use the settings that milkmandan listed.

The only thing that is a little lame about CS4 is that the Codec settings for Video Previews (which ONLY affects you during your actual editing, not for exporting) is limited to a few select codecs. If I remember correctly, you want to use Uncompressed if your computer can handle it, and if not, then.. something else that I can't remember. But not DV. It'll want to squeeze it down to 720x480 which makes the preview render look funky.

[beige]

Thanks Dan and Brad!