by   •   Daily Shoot, General
 
This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

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Project Four-Panel Update

I am officially severely dissatisfied with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

It all started back when I got the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection and decided to try out Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 for my video editing. I had used Camtasia Studio 6 previously, and I felt as if it didn’t provide me with enough control over my projects.

Ever since I started using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, I have been getting poor quality video results. I fiddled around with the rendering controls for hours on end and looked up many rendering guides online, but nothing seemed to work. Even when it rendered poor quality video, the file sizes were still much larger than the medium-quality videos rendered by Camtasia Studio 6.

Yesterday, I took an hour-long video clip of myself working on developing new content for my website. I threw the raw file into Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and sped it up to over 2500% its regular speed, shrinking it down to two minutes. After rendering it, I noticed that the video was extremely poor quality and saw that it was still over 170 MB in size, even though it was only two minutes long and was 640 by 360 pixels in dimension.

Ignoring the fact that the final product I just produced was complete garbage, I still went ahead and uploaded it to YouTube. The uploading process itself took over an hour because the file was so large (I have a basic 3.0 Mbps DSL connection), and after it finished uploading, it gave me an audio processing error: “We did not recognize the audio codec format for this file, but we will go ahead and try processing it anyway.” I recalled that the audio setting I picked was in MP3 format, but to make the YouTube processor happy, I decided to remove the audio entirely. Rerendering the project took another half an hour.

After it was done rendering again, I reuploaded the new video to YouTube, which took another hour or so. Even without audio, I got the same exact error. Even more unexpectedly, the audio error seemed to have also corrupted the video as well, as the first few seconds flickered white and gray before showing the video.

I was done with using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

I pondered going back to Camtasia Studio (which I had updated to Version 7 by now), but although Version 7 provided a lot more features, it still wasn’t good for advanced editing. The only thing I ever used Camtasia Studio 7 for was getting screen captures of, compiling clips of, and editing game video footage, which I did rarely anyway. I went hunting for new video editing software.

Then I remembered some video editing software called Sony Vegas 7.0 that I used a long time ago. I remembered that I stopped using it because two days before the trial ended, the text insertion tool stopped working. I decided to go back to the Sony website and see if they had updated the software at all, and they did; I downloaded my free trial of Sony Vegas 9.0c.

The first thing I tried was text insertion to make sure the same problem as last time didn’t recur, and it seemed to work fine. Then, I dragged some .MOV files from my camera into Sony Vegas 9.0c to play around with the software, and all I got were blank black screens. When I played back the raw .MOV files, I heard the sound but saw none of the video.

Maybe video production and Adam Parkzer just weren’t meant to be together.

Anyway, I went on Google and did a quick search to find out what was going wrong, and within a few minutes, I found out that the problem was with QuickTime 7.6.6 and the way it displayed .MOV files. I downgraded to QuickTime 7.6.5 and everything started working.

Then I decided to try and remake the accelerated recording video that Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 failed to make, and noticed that I had deleted the original raw hour-long video file. The only thing I had was the poorly rendered version Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 had spit out earlier. I dragged the .MP4 file into Sony Vegas 9.0c and started editing, trying to use media effects to make it look clearer and crisper.

When I rendered the new final product with Sony Vegas 9.0c, the file size went down to around 72 MB. When I uploaded the new final project, I no longer got the audio processing error, but just to continue to drive me crazy, the video was still corrupted somehow that the beginning of the video faded in from white instead of fading in from black.

To put this into perspective, this happened throughout a span of a full day, starting from around midnight when I first started editing the video to around 11:50 PM when I posted this. I decided that I dealt with enough video editing software today to last me the rest of the week, so I kept the Sony Vegas 9.0c version of the accelerated recording on my YouTube account and gave up.

 

Question of the Day

Today’s question of the day is, “Are you ever going to update to Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5)?” Nobody actually asked me this question, so I asked it to myself because I wanted to elaborate on my rage against Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

When I got the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, I intended to try out all the software and use it all to my advantage when doing stuff on my computer. After trying it out for a while, I realized that a lot of the software wasn’t really necessary. The only programs I used moderately frequently were Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, and sometimes Soundbooth. A clear substitute for Dreamweaver is the free Notepad++. If there are massive advantages to using Dreamweaver to write PHP, HTML, and CSS files, I have yet to find them, as I see Dreamweaver as an ordinary colorful text processor that takes a long time to start up. A clear substitue for Premiere, which I already explained above, is Sony Vegas 9.0c. Premiere tends to not work anyway, according to my experiences, and I already made the switch earlier today. I hardly ever use Soundbooth (although I may be using it a bit more once I get more deeply into Project Four-Panel), but for what I need, I’m sure that audio enhancement can be done with Audacity (which is free), and audio compiling can be done within Sony Vegas 9.0c. If I ever need something more advanced, people have told me about a program that has a name that sounds a lot like Fruity Pebbles, and apparently it’s one of the best audio editing programs available on the market.

So as you can see by my desire to avoid using CS4 programs, I’m most likely not going to update my full set to CS5. However, I have always been satisfied with Adobe Photoshop, even though there are a lot of good free photo editing programs available. Something about Photoshop has always made it seem like the right program to use for everything, so I’m going to try out the free trial for Photoshop CS5, and eventually upgrade to the full version.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Ads promote removing wrinkles, but they often add character. Make a photo of something wrinkled, crinkled, or folded.

 

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