From: "Yvan Gagnon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Vidcap, Adobe Premiere, & RealProducer 7.0 I've been using Adobe Premiere (version 5.1c under Windows NT w/sp5) for a couple of months now, and more and more I've been finding bugs in it that have been making my job increasingly more difficult. Generally, the process is as follows: 1) footage gets videotaped using a Sony PC-1 Mini DV camera 2) I use a Sony DSR-30 DV deck to playback the video and use an Osprey 100 board to capture it uncompressed with 16-bit 44khz stereo audio at 15fps, 320x240 using the vidcap utility that comes with the Osprey. 3) I launch premiere, import the AVIs, drag them to the timeline, and begin editing. 4) I spend hours re-rendering transitions that never seem to render properly in the first place, and then end up compromising my original vision and just exporting it already. 5) I use the new realproducer 7.0 beta to encode 4 different size/quality realvideo files. 160x120 for 28kbps, 176x132 for 56k, 240x180 for dual isdn, and 320x240 for adsl/cable. QUESTIONS: 1) I was told that I would get better end results if I was to capture at the TARGET FRAME SIZE. However, my initial attempt to do this resulted in very unacceptable looking, jagged-edged video that looked somewhat similar to a jpeg image that has the incorrect size tags specified. Why is that? My settings in vidcap for the Osprey are set to Svideo input, NTSC-M Signal, RGB24 color format, 176x132 custom video size, with the fixed ratio and standard proportions boxes checked. Is this incorrect for capturing at 176x132? If not, what modifications do I need to make to these settings in order to capture the video properly at 176x132 so that it doesn't have those jagged edges? 2) In reference to the above, the question was brought to mind that I would perhaps get better quality video if I were to initially capture my footage at 640x480 instead of 320x240. I was thinking that there might be very subtle anomalies in the video right now that even though barely visible would be mucking up the quality when encoding to realvideo format. Has anyone else here experimented with this? If so, what were the results? 3) In Adobe Premiere, why is it that transitions don't always render properly? For example, I did lots of cross dissolves in one of my projects. They all looked great when I viewed them in Premiere playing back from the timeline after rendering, .. but there were lots of "flash frames" after some of the transitions in the exported AVIs that I needed to go back and fix afterwards. Is this a new bug in the new 5.1c update? Or is there something I can do when editing to prevent this sort of thing from happening? 4) In attempt to fix those "flash frames" in my exported AVI, I re-imported it into a new project in premiere, made my fixes, and then re-exported it. I don't know if my eyes were just tired or exactly what, -- if anything -- might have happened, but it didn't seem to look as good the second time around after I re-exported it. It almost looked as though the video was dropping frames. Is there something important I should be keeping in mind when working with AVI's that were initially captured at 15fps, like my needing to specify certain project settings? 4) What are the recommended settings for the new RealProducer 7.0 beta? I have all of the boxes checked under the "Video Codec" tab in the preferences. Should they NOT all be checked? The descriptions all seem to imply that they enhance quality instead of degrade it. Is this not the case? Also, are there any tweaks I can make under the "Advanced" tab that would get me better results when encoding? Lastly, does the video resize feature when encoding (Option | video settings) work as well as when using multiple frame-sized videos as the sources for the different bitrates? I know this is a lot, but I'd certainly appreciate some advice on all of this. I'm about ready to totally reformat my machine and re-install everything at this point, but I certainly wouldn't want to do anything hasty if there are some simple solutions to all this. Thanks guys, -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************* The RealForum is an email discussion group focused on using RealNetworks products. The RealForum is a place to post messages about the best methods for creating content using RealNetworks technologies and the planning and implementation of streaming-media web sites. Archives of RealForum can be found at http://realforum.real.com If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, you can send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the following command in the body of your email message: unsubscribe realforum or from another account, besides the address you subscribed with: unsubscribe realforum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
