(Hope I chose the correct forum. If a different forum or different site altogether would be more appropriate, please advise. Thanks.)
Premiere Pro 1.5 is giving me fits and I'd appreciate any help you can provide. I'm running Win XP SP2.
I have some home video shot on DV and captured to AVI. I'm making a credit sequence in which the right half of the screen is black with titles overlayed and the left half displays video. I'm modifying dozens of short clips and each one requires its own individual settings. I'll use one clip as an example.
In Clip A, Cousin Bertha is in the center of the frame. I need her on the left side, so I use the "Position" effect to move the video 220 pixels to the left. That leaves a big black rectangle on the right hand side of the screen, measuring 220 pixels (wide) by 480 pixels (high). And that's good; I *want* a black rectangle. That's where I'm going to display my text. But I need that rectangle to be larger - 360 pixels wide, to be exact - so I want to use the "Clip" effect to add another 140px.
Except that I can't; not directly, anyway. In the "Clip" settings, the default is to measure everything in "percent." So you can make the rectangle five percent of the width or 20 percent of the height or whatever; anything up to 99 percent. There is an option that allows you to change the measurements to pixels, but when you do, the counter will still only go up to 99. The visual confirms that it's clipping pixels instead of percents (if Clip > Right is set to 99, there's an extra 99 pixels of black space visible on the video) so it *can* clip by pixels. It just can't do more than 99 of them. I need to clip 140 pixels, so I'm SOL.
Now, since I know the dimensions of the video, I can, theoretically, translate from percent to pixels. I set up some tables in Excel to help me (1% = 7.2px, 5% = 36px, etc.) and, using them, I can get pretty close, but I can't get it exactly right. Plus the numbers can quickly get confusing. It's slow going and I need to do this with dozens of clips, all of which need to match up. With the percent conversion method, they never quite do. And god forbid I should have to go back and make any editorial changes. Then I might have to re-jigger everything.
I considered doing the clipping in another program and then importing the clips back into Premiere. I'm concerned that I'll have to reencode and this could make things even more complicated than they already are. If someone more knowledgable than myself can offer some words of reassurance on this option, I'll certainly re-consider it.
I considered moving the whole project to another big league video editor such as Vegas. The problem: it took me forever to get comfy with Premiere. I don't really have the stamina or time to learn a whole new program.
I tried setting the measurement to pixels, closing Premiere, then re-opening it. The setting stayed where I left it, but the problem persisted.
I tried upgrading to Premiere Pro 2.0, thinking maybe Adobe has fixed the bug. But for the new version, Adobe tells me, I'm going to need a processor that supports "the SSE2 instruction set." For me, this means upgrading the processor and the MB. Not an option at the moment, unfortunately.
I suppose I could use Avisynth; set the clipping, import the Avisynth file. This still seems like a long way around.
I've googled the problem and come up with snake eyes. Any suggestions, ideas, thoughts, or methods of committing suicide painlessly?
