I built a boat in my garage that won't fit out the door!!

[frankandjoan]

I became a member of this forum out of necessity, and it was so helpful that I stuck around. I had a serious digital video problem which I could not solve, and the help here was tremendous.

To get to the bottom line, I did in fact solve the problem, and today my wife and I expect to finish our first digital movie, a 45 minute vacation video about a week we spent in Key West. I am quite happy with the results, and I want to thank everyone who helped me to get to this point.

Now, comes the next problem. My wife has a rather puny 18 G hard drive on her computer, of which almost half is being used already. She has about 10 G free, and I know that Adobe Premiere outputs uncompressed AVI files when the timeline is outputted. I really don’t expect our 45 minute production to fit on her available HD space. It’s sort of like building a boat in the garage, then discovering that it’s too large to fit through the door.

Two questions: First, is there any other format I could output with that will fit? I can use any format that will play on Windows Media Player or the Zoom player, but I fear that everything that Premier 6.0 can output will be too large. Is there a way I can calculate the final output size?

Second, assuming that I have created something that’s too large to extract normally, can anyone give me the proper links to the programs I will need to learn frameserving? I can’t seem to find the specific versions called for in the guides and links section of this board. The guides look complicated, but I believe we have no choice but to learn. I don‘t mind, but I can’t get off the mark without the proper titles and versions, and all the associated plug-ins.

Thanks in advance. This board has been good to me. 8)

Frank

[Heavensent]

i think Adobe Premiere can output to mpeg2 directly ,

anyway, you can frameserve from premier using
"Premiere Video Server Plugin v0.93"

download it from here
http://home.concepts.nl/~hzon00008/bin/VideoServerPackagev093.zip

[BJ_M]

premiere can not output mpeg2 directly but can indirectly .. version 6 (what you have) has the ligos encoder ... or you can save your output as QT files ..

[mkelley]

Hate to state the obvious, but sometimes it's better to think outside the box, so to speak: buy another drive.

With 120gb of drive going for less than $100 there's no excuse for not having enough hard disk space nowadays. She obviously needs the space -- be a good guy and upgrade her machine and you'll reap rewards in oh so many ways <g>.

[BJ_M]

yea - she will stay up nights later on the computer more now ...

[mkelley]

yea - she will stay up nights later on the computer more now ...

LOL. And not wonder where YOU are or what you're doing. Exactly.

[frankandjoan]

Thanks again, boys and girls! I have already ordered a new 180 G HD for $99 after rebates. I'm guessing I might have arrived at that solution myself in a couple of days, but I would have had a sore head from beating it against the wall. Not to mention putting the movie at risk through digital file manipulation.

This was the simplest and most expedient solution of all. Thanks again

[Rickster]

Hey, Frank,
If you're serious about this video stuff, here's some pointers:
1. Take a good look at that hard drive you ordered. Make sure it spins at 7200 RPM or better for maxium video throughput.
2. Shut down all your screensavers and desktop pics that you have running (they really don't do anything with today's monitors), because the screensavers use alot of video memory that your Premiere program needs to run smoothly.
3. You can actually go into your control panel and assign virtual memory from some of the space on your wife's 20Gig hard drive so that things will run even smoother. This makes the computer think that it has more memory than it actually does.
4. When you finish editing a project on Premiere, don't render it as an .avi file--this will take many hours for a 45 minute production. Instead, go to 'File', then to 'Export Timeline', then to 'Print to Tape.' This will allow you to send your edited project back to your camera (as a Microsoft DV AVI file). Then just re-capture your finished video back to your hard drive and assign it a new file name. This will be in an .avi file. After you review it with Media Player, just go back into your hard drive and delete all the components that you used (video clips, titles, etc.) to make your video. Remember that about 18 minutes of video in .avi format will come to about 3GB of hard drive space.

[frankandjoan]

Went out last week and picked up a new hard drive for the wifes computer, and put it in on Friday night. Yes, that’s the state of the art in my sad pathetic little life, installing a hard drive on Friday night! And I felt great about it, too.

I tried to extract my Premier file to an uncompressed AVI file next, and it failed about 1/3 of the way through. Of course, it took all night to fail, so I didn’t find out about it until the morning. So I tried again the next day, Saturday, and it failed again, this time two thirds of the way through. Now it’s Saturday night, and my wife is beginning to raise her eyebrows whenever I walk by. “Not yet, honey, these things can be a little complicated” I said to her. I go back to the computer, and this time, I defragged, powered down and up again, and rendered the movie before I tried to export it again. Then I went to bed, hopeful that the third time would be a charm.

Got up early Sunday morning, and discovered that it had failed again, 2/3 of the way through. Now I’m desperate. I decided to export to Quicktime, and then convert the output using TMPGenc when I was done. Unfortunately, I didn’t have Quicktime installed on my machine, so I had to download the program and restart her machine. When all that was done, I selected “Export to Web” under the file menu, selected Quicktime, clicked OK, and an amazing thing happened. My Premier program started another program called Cleaner 5 EZ, and to my delight, I discovered that I could export my file to a wide variety of formats, right off the timeline! It works, because I tried several formats with great success!

Beyond that, all of the outputs I generated in this way fit on my small (18 G) HD AT THE SAME TIME with no problem.! I only write this because no one mentioned that to me, and I wonder how common this knowledge is. I had to wonder why no one told me about this.

I’m so new at this that I really have no idea what happened, but as near as I can tell, it’s acting like an automatic frame-serving system. The Premier program still shows like it is exporting, and yet no large AVI file appears. Instead, the EZ Cleaner 5 program also seems to be processing the movie, and the output is reasonably sized. I can’t believe no one else has discovered this, but if that is the case, I hope you can benefit from this information.

[mkelley]

Frank,

You shouldn't have been trying to export an AVI from Premiere -- I'm sorry if anyone here (particularly me) gave you that idea. In general, if you want to author to DVD what you want to export from Premiere is MPEG (and if your DVD tool supports it, elemental streams). Premiere 6.5 comes with the MainConcept MPEG encoder, which is a better encoder than TMPGEnc for MPEG2.

If you need other formats, you've already discovered how to do that -- but I thought the bottom line was you were authoring a DVD. Perhaps not, I don't remember the entire thread now.

In any case, the good thing is you got it to do what you needed, as well as having a hard drive with enough room (you never have too much disk storage, so that's a Very Good Thing you did Friday night).

[frankandjoan]

Mkelly, you are way ahead of me. I don't even have a DVD burner yet, although it's now coming on my radar screen. For the time being, and until I get a little more skill and knowlege , I'm still trying to output to video tapes and to run off small MPGs on CD-ROM. The cool part of the ATI AIW is that it extends the desktop to my TV, allowing me to make recordings on tape by simply dragging my media player to the TV section of my desktop, starting my file, and hitting the record button on the VCR. I'm thrilled, but I'm sure I'll be wanting to do more soon.

I'm sure there will be yet more stupid actions and comments out of me before I'm actually up to speed. Stay tuned.