Need a sense of what's involved & how to prepare

[Sabihato]

I used to do some work in Photoshop 7.0 and Premiere 1.5 for school a long time ago. Now I have the entire CS3 suite and I'm starting my first AMV to get my hands dirty on what this suite has to offer. I've followed A&E's guide on how to properly make clips. They're all from DVD sources and I'll be editing on a 720x480 resolution with a DVD PAR of 0.9, as that's what the author of the guide prefers. I've also selected my audio; they all have a sample rate of 44,100 Hz. I've created a new Premiere Pro project based on these specs so far.

But I'm currently faced with two uncertainties:
- I'm not sure that I've set up my project to best accommodate for the effects I want to use
- I'm not sure if Premiere Pro will be able to handle the effects I want to achieve (I may have to use a mixture of Photoshop and After Effects, the latter which I have no experience with)

I thought I'd list a few of the more complicated effects that I want to do for my AMV. I would like to know, based on this list, if A) any adjustments to my project settings are needed, and B) if Premiere Pro alone will be able to accomplish the desired effect. My goal is to maintain as much of the quality as I can when I export the final product, so if you feel it's preferable that I make adjustments to the source clips or that I edit in After Effects or any other suggestions, I appreciate your telling me so, as I'm willing to go the extra step:
- An old film look, which will consist of noise, vertically-lined artifacts, grayscale, sepia, and washed out tones
- Image vibration, like from an old film being shown through an antique projector. I genuinely don't know if there's a pre-made effect or I have to create one from scratch. Furthermore, I don't know if this will have an adverse effect on the top and bottom edges
- An old TV/CRT monitor look, with those interlaced lines and a scan line running top to bottom
- Significant use of scaled up clips/frames. This is what's bothing me the most. From my source clips, a lot of the object of focus is not centered. I don't know if I should scale up the image and move it to center, shrink the project size and center the image w/o resizing, or none of the above
- Blurring of various types and directions
- Rotating/Tilted images

I imagine a lot of these images will be difficult to do on DVD PAR (0.9). Will I be able to convert all these effects to the proper aspect ratio, does Premiere Pro/After Effects compensate for this automatically, or am I better off adding LanczosResize(848,480) to my .avs script and working with square pixels instead?

I appreciate your two cents.

[Zarxrax]

First of all, I prefer to work with square pixels because I just find it easier. You don't have to sit there wondering about if something will work right.

As for old film look, I don't know if premiere has a plugin like that. For what it's worth, after effects doesn't have one by default either, you have to get a 3rd party plugin for it. It should be possible to create a decent old film effect from scratch, but it might take a fair bit of work.

I think for the image shaking I think it's probably quite difficult in Premiere as you probably would have to keyframe each shake yourself, which could take ages, depending on how long it happens. After Effects has something called "Wiggler" which can do this automatically. In order to keep the edges from showing, you have to zoom in on the clip a little bit.

Interlaced scan lines can be made from an image in photoshop.

You can change the anchor point of an image to set the images "center". After effects makes moving images around much easier than Premiere.

Premiere can probably handle most of what you are looking to do there... but its not necessarily the best tool for the job.

[Chez]

pretty much most of what zarxx said is true, but if you got ahold of the master collection you can interchange between premier and after effects getting the basic cutting and effects you need from premier and the more complex ones from AE.

The old film look can be created in AE depending on how complex you want it to be.
simple test look

again quoting zarxx you can make the image vibration with the wiggler tool

the old TV look Premier pro and AE both contain bad tv presets for the interlacing lines and distortion like effect but they don't look as good as you might want them to try them out for yourself first.

Blurring again there are many blurring effects, motion blur, fast blur, AE Directional blur might be what your looking for as well, you can also turn on the motion blur toggle switch, the three dots, which when you use a camera movement will blur the image in that direction.

Rotating and titling images is the easy part in AE you can use the rotation tool or toggle the 3d switch looks like a cube.

[xexyzl]

I'll be editing on a 720x480 resolution with a DVD PAR of 0.9

or am I better off adding LanczosResize(848,480) to my .avs script and working with square pixels instead?

I assume you meant:

Code: Select all

Crop(8,0,-8,-0)
LanczosResize(640,480) 

?