Using Premiere at School

[digifreak]

My PC at home is busted, but I have the AMVapp installed on my external. I have to edit a video (an amv) at school using CS5.5. My school's comp won't let Vdub open my scripts and Premiere won't import lossless UT. What do I do?

[digifreak]

But it will let me import the demuxed .m2v. Is that the best alternative? (I'm using DVD footage.)

[digifreak]

I also can't install anything on the school's comp.

[Kionon]

Digifreak,

We need more information:

1) What type of school?

I can give you very different answers for universities versus high schools. If you are at a university, I have found that usually there are labs set up specifically for these kinds of projects and if you work with the lab directors, you can usually get things set up to complete your project. You may be required to skirt the ethical boundary by implying that your work is for a specific class. In my own case, when I edited on some of the Mac Pros at my graduate school, I was not asked what my project was for, they simply let me set things up under my own login profile with the vast majority of my files stored on an external drive.

High schools (and under, I actually teach JHS) are far, far stricter. They also don't have the resources you might be used to at home. You probably also will be heavily questioned, and I would be largely surprised if you were allowed to make AMVs at school unless you are in a Radio/TV/Film program at your high school and this is an actual required project.

I made my first AMVs in high school on NT Workstations running Premiere 5.0, 5.1c, and 6.0 because I was part of the broadcasting vocational program which eventually became a formal RTF program. More than a decade later, and the RTF program now has 30 iMacs available for editing, but the students are far more restricted in what they are allowed to do because it is no longer an experimental program with ten kids just trying to figure out how to use the hardware with an instructor who used to run a TV station. We used to make all sorts of insane stuff just trying out equipment, software, codecs, effects... These kids have actual benchmarks and goals and tests... Don't get me started on how testing ruins everything (one of my biggest peeves about my career choice).

2) Avisynth must be installed in order to run the scripts. If you don't actually install it, even stand alone programs like VDub won't be able to read the scripts. There's no way to get around this. If you cannot get permission to install Avisynth on a school computer, you're going to have to either work with the footage unfiltered or try to use VDub to filter. I don't suggest either of these things. Instead, I would look into seeing if you can get access to anyone's computer (a friend's, a classmate's, a parent's) and use it just to render out clips on your external in a codec which premiere already recognises. You might try 100% quality h264/mp4. I'm pretty sure CS5.5 will take that right out of the box.

[digifreak]

2) Avisynth must be installed in order to run the scripts. If you don't actually install it, even stand alone programs like VDub won't be able to read the scripts. There's no way to get around this. If you cannot get permission to install Avisynth on a school computer, you're going to have to either work with the footage unfiltered or try to use VDub to filter. I don't suggest either of these things. Instead, I would look into seeing if you can get access to anyone's computer (a friend's, a classmate's, a parent's) and use it just to render out clips on your external in a codec which premiere already recognises. You might try 100% quality h264/mp4. I'm pretty sure CS5.5 will take that right out of the box.

Thanks. So avisynth won't work if it's installed on my external?

I'm at a university and I'm doing the video for class. But my prof doesn't care as much about getting good footage as I do. He'd probably say just use whatever.... ugh... I also don't think anyone will let me install anything. Too much red tape to cut through.

[Kionon]

Thanks. So avisynth won't work if it's installed on my external?

If it's not installed in the operating system, it won't work. So I'm not sure what you mean by "installed on my external." Unless you are suggesting that you can hook up an external drive and run your entire OS from it. If so, then your initial questions are irrelevant. You can do anything you could at home. However, while I know Macs can do this (and I do it regularly), I never thought you could do it with Windows PCs.

I'm at a university and I'm doing the video for class. But my prof doesn't care as much about getting good footage as I do. He'd probably say just use whatever.... ugh... I also don't think anyone will let me install anything. Too much red tape to cut through.

I found in my own time that there are a number of professors who don't understand why generation loss is such a big deal to AMV editors. They're mostly working with footage which is live action, fairly huge to begin with, and with codecs which introduce loss which is considered "acceptable." They also aren't working with the level of transitions, effects, and alteration we are, and at the pacing we are. AMVs require so much information in such a short time frame versus TV spot, show, or film editing that in our case, I consider no loss acceptable except at the point of final compression and distribution.