Premier Pro Still Pic Editing

[alldayeveryday]

I have adobe premiere pro 2.0 on my pc at home. First off the computer is not built for editing it is just a common emachine that I bumped up to 1gb ram. It will edit and render all video effects fine but if i put a digital still pic down I have to resize it down and then the rest of my video will not play quite right (jumps, freezes). If I delete the still off of timeline the video plays fine. Any suggestions? And yes I know I should have a better computer for all of this stuff.

[Necktie Boy]

I think the problem is that the still is too big....I will guess that you are editing SD video....So your frame size is 720 x 480. If your still is too large, and you are resizing it in PP, it may be too much for the computer. I use Photoshop to resize the still before importing it into PP. I hope that you are using a different hard drive than the C drive....That also slows down the computer.

[EditOne]

Render out the still pic to an .avi of the desired length?

[Tom Servo]

yeah, this sounds like a render issue to me. Unless your machine is beefy, it generally can't handle playing unrendered stills.

[Stormgod]

I had this exact issue myself while building a Christmas of years past type of DVD for my family. It was all pics...about 300 of them...and each and eveyone had to be re-sized to render properly. My machine has a bit more horsepower than the posters but still had trouble. Resize them outside of pre pro and then re-import the new pics......I was also putting a transistion between each pic manually. It was not until I was nearly done that I realized that there is an "automate" setting that would have done all that for me! Grooooaann.

[alldayeveryday]

Thanks for the help everybody, when you say not to capture to the C drive do you mean that I should work on a external HDD.?

[Necktie Boy]

Yes, you should have a drive just for the media and renders. You can use an USB 2.0 drive that spins at 7200 rpms. You will have to reformat it to NTFS to get the best performance. You should make a folder where all media and render will be. PP like to see everything in the same place.
Or you can install a drive in your computer. As long as you have space and can be put on its own cable.

[Stormgod]

I put up a storage array on the cheap for rendering/storage etc. Like most people, I have 5 or 6 older HDs sitting around from previous upgrades. I bought some ext enclosures from Microcenter for $20 each and for a total cost of about $80, I have a terrabyte of storage space. Yes, they are USB, but better than nothing. My next desktop will have the horsepower to run a real array.

[papa t]

Each photographer at our paper is assigned a Dell Precision M65 2.00 MHz, 2 MB RAM and 512 MB on a Nvidia Card, with 100 Gig HD.
Trying to edit a 2-minute video with Premiere 4 is nearly impossible, especially since the C:/ drive only has about 30 Gig free. I read where you recommend a big ext. HD to render files. Is the additional HD space a quick fix solution to my problem and or how critical are RAM and the video card memory?

Thanks,

Frank

[Necktie Boy]

First question: Premiere Pro 4? How much software is loaded on the laptop? I have an 80 gig drive. It's loaded with Adobe products and a few other graphic software. I still have 50 gigs to play with. I do have an older version of Premiere Pro. But I do have some video projects on the C:drive. It's a no no, but I don't really have any problems. They are 5 minute projects. But my projects are very simple.
Your laptop spec's are fine. One question is the speed of the internal drive? You can get away with a 5400, as long you have empty space. But with only 30 gigs, you may be pushing it a bit. An external drive is recommend to keep the media and the operation system separate. An external drive is common fix for a laptop. You should also try to get a 7200 rpm drive for the extra drive. 7200 rpm drives easily handle DV. You did not mention what format you were are editing. HD will require a faster interface for the drive. Also at the end of the day, with only the internal drive, I would back up the video files onto another computer, hard drive, or server to free space on the laptop drive. With only software that you really need, and the media files, you should be okay. I use an older laptop. My renders are a little slower that my home computer.

[papa t]

I recently started using a Canon XH-A1 HDV for both video and stills. I'm running standard versions of Prem 3 and 4, not Pro. I believe the HD is a Hitachi HTS7210 and I have cleared off all Avi files, ...etc. Normally, I download and edit on a desktop workstation with a 500 G sata drive, but on location i use my laptop. It's been just fine for transmitting still files, but the first time I actually tried video capturing and screen shots into photoshop, it kept dragging ass between apps, not to mention actually editing the 4 min video. This all pretty new for me especially coming from a newspaper environment, so I open to any suggestions ans recommendations. I've been shooting in 30f mode for the stills. I tried 60i and had terrible results. Any suggestions there as well. Thanks, papa t

[Chugach3DGuy]

I have to pull still images from 60i footage quite frequently. The one thing you have to remember is check the little "de-interlace stills" box in your preferences menu when you go to save your image. If I'm not mistaken, it should work that way for Premiere Pro versions 1, 2, and 3.

Are you sure you're working on Premiere 4?? I can barely remember the days when I was using that version, since it has to be nearly 8 years old now!