Editing a simple video using Adobe Premiere (SGI)


Easy version

Premiere is a full-featured nonlinear video editing system. There's no hope of covering the full functionality on this page. I've concentrated on a lot of the stuff specific to our setup, and tried to cover most of the gotchas that I've found. There's not much here about the main function of premiere itself, namely working with clips and editing. That's covered quite well in the manual, which you'll want to also read.

Starting up

Settings

There are a bunch of important settings, which will stay set between sessions until you explicitly change them.

Capturing video

If you have some video on tape that you need to digitize, you can do so from inside premiere.
  1. Pick File->Capture->Movie Capture. The capture window will appear.
  2. Route the appropriate deck to moviola. For example, to route the digibeta deck through the Web interface middle-click on the digibeta deck and left-click on moviola. Telect: telect -lsdi -idigibeta -omoviola. See the capture page for more on routing.
  3. Pick Movie Capture->Video Input from the capture window. If you don't see the right video in the capture window, then pick Video Panel from the small popup. In the Default Window selector at the top pick Digital Video. Then pick File->Close to shut the video panel.
  4. Pick Compression from the small popup. Pick JPEG for compression method. Note that this compression setting can be different from the one you set from the Make->Compression menu item in the Construction Window. Close the Compression window and the small popup.
  5. Pick Movie Capture->Recording Settings. Turn off the Post-Compress checkbox, and turn on the Conform to 30 FPS choice. You probably want the Abort On Dropped Frames box off.
  6. If your clip doesn't have sound turn the sound off from the Movie Capture menu. It's a somewhat confusing UI - it's off if there's a big red check next to the sound off entry on the menu.
  7. If you selected Device Control as described in the Settings section above, then you can control the deck from the buttons in the capture window.
  8. If you don't want to bother with precise in/out points through Device Control, then you control the deck locally and just hit the record button at the right time, and then click with the mouse when you want to stop.

    Importing existing content

    Video output


    More detail


    Additional notes

    Don't get fooled by the manual, which recommends 1 sec for the Audio Block Size. In the release notes for the SGI version, it's explicitly suggested to go with the 1 frame block size for smooth playback. Here's the explanation (from /usr/adobe/Premiere_4.2/README):

    Troubleshooting


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    Last modified: Tue Mar 14 17:32:52 PST 2000