Newbie question: working with a lot of clips

[adhara.livejournal.com]

I've been browsing the community memories for a while now and haven't been able to find an answer to this. It seems to me (please, correct me if I'm wrong) that all the how-tos and "vidding for newbies" and the like just give for granted that I know if I'm going to work with several clips, and how to do it.

The problem is my Adobe Premiere works alright as long as I'm using just one source vid. So far I've only vidded movies, so I just needed the whole movie file and everything went smooth. Now I want to make vids for TV series but I've been running into this problem again and again: how do you do it, clip-wise? There's no way I can use 20 episodes at the same time in Premiere without my computer exploding. Do you join all the clips you want to use in the same file? I've tried that with Movie Maker but it didn't work very well. Or do you cut each clip with Virtual Dub and still work with 20 different clips on Premiere, only they're small ones?

I'm really lost with this, so any help with your personal preferences and tips would be great.

Comments

[adhara.livejournal.com]

i know i have to scan the whole series to do the vid :) actually i'm planning to make a buffyverse fanvid, which between angel and btvs have far more than 20 episodes. the problem i have (and i'm sorry if it wasn't correctly worded!) is that once i do have those 20 clips i'd like to use in my video, i'd rather have it sort of glued together in one because i'm not really sure my computer will have the strength to work with a timeline made from different files, and since i have no experience at all with it just wanted to see how somebody else dealt with it.

i'm really sorry if this makes no sense, i can't seem to find a better way to explain it. never wanted to implied vidding was easy though, especially since it's obvious it isn't for me :)

[thevetia.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I see. I'm sorry if I sounded snippy. Without knowing what kind of setup you have there's no way to be sure, but I've made vids with Premiere on some seriously old and underpowered machines - slow processor, slow bus, slooow drives - and the number of clips in the project has never been a problem. *Rendering* could take forever, and there were times I had to wait and hum the Jeopardy theme while the video refreshed, but since Premiere uses pointers to the source files and not the files themselves, you might actually be making it easier for the machine by using several small files rather than one big one.

That said, I am a vidder from the age of the dinosaurs and working with multiple clip files is much more like working with tapes. Premiere is not the most forgiving program - finicky bitch is more like it - and if your source files have been ripped with different settings I can see how Premiere might choke on them.

But really, try multiple files. It's actually very efficient when you get used to it.