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

[winterevanesce.livejournal.com]

What I did when I used to work with Adobe Premiere was place one clip at a time. First, I put the song on the timeline. Then I leave a little bit of space behind the song and add 1 tv show video (ep. 1 or w/e). I cut every clip that I want to use or maybe want to use for my video. Once I cut up the whole episode and delete the remains of the ones you don't want, I then put episode 2 on the timeline.. and keep repeating this step.

This is what I do to cut clips, but I'm sure there are other ways to do it in this program.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

I make a working folder called "clip library" for each vid. If I'm vidding a TV series, for example, I rip the episodes and then go through each one to clip out scenes that I think (or know, if I've storyboarded the vid beforehand) that I want to use for the vid. Then I store those individually prepared scenes in the library folder on my hard drive. I pull clips out of that folder and place them on the timeline in Premiere, and then start editing them - when each one is edited, it gets saved in the primary project folder in its edited form.

Storyboarding can be enormously helpful.

[bananainpyjamas.livejournal.com]

You can use AviSynth to consolidate multiple episodes into one source file.

Download AMVapp (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtechold/amvapp.html) as it has everything you'll need to work with AviSynth in one package. Alternately, you can download the components separately; make sure you have AviSynth itself and the Premiere import plugin.

Then open a text editor and copy this code:

#ASYNTHER Default (AVISource)
AVISource("file1.avi","file2.avi","file3.avi","file4.avi","file5.avi")

Save it as "[filename].avs". Now you have one AVS file (i.e. a script) you can import into Premiere that contains five episodes that you can edit as you normally would. If you need 20 episodes, this would cut your number of source files down to four. As far as I can tell there's no limit on the number of episodes you can put in one script, but obviously the more you cram into one script the harder it is to scrub through and find the clips you want.

If the episodes won't play properly, replace AVISource with DirectShowSource. That usually fixes the problem with most standard codecs. Also, another nifty trick is to use the KillAudio filter. This eliminates the audio track and thus prevents Premiere from taking up all that time and space it wastes in conforming audio. To implement it, write KillAudio(AVISource("file1.avi","file2.avi",etc)).

Hope this helps!

ETA: Please note that if you are working with raw DVD rips the process isn't quite this simple. You'll need to use DGIndex (included in the AMVapp) to index the VOBs. This will spit out a bunch of .d2v files that can be included in AviSynth scripts and be read by Premiere. You can then use those to consolidate the episodes however you wish, using the same procedure as outlined above.

[counteragent.livejournal.com]

What bananainpyjamas just said.

Or, you can make clips and then import them...I link to the relevant part of The Bible below, but keep in mind that you need to follow the whole process (as bip warns above in her ETA), not just this part: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/videogetbmeth1.html

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

oh lord, if i put a whole season of episodes into Premiere it would blow up in my face. *g* yeah, make clips in virtual dub--i can load dozens of short clips into a project, no problem. (short ranging from 2 seconds to 2 minutes)

[thevetia.livejournal.com]

Yes, vidding a movie is much easier than vidding a series, but the very fact that a movie can be ripped in it's entirety to a drive has lured you into a dead end.

The following remarks come from an old-school vidder who began vidding with VCRs. The current software tools for computers can be fabulous, when you know what you're doing, but at the fundamental level of vidding, what you're trying to do is find a lot of very short clips from your source, clip them out, and rearrange them to your liking.

You really do have to scan through each episode and clip out the scenes you think you're going to use. Everybody has their own method of naming the clips you come up with; I don't trust Premiere as a library tool so we not only name each clip with keywords, but also write down - on paper! - each clip, its episode location, and a note about what's in the clip that we want to use.

You only have 20 episodes to scan: plenty of people vid series with a hundred episodes or more. The benefit of scanning the episodes before vidding is that you will inevitably see scenes you had forgotten that will be perfect for the vid. (Scan with the sound off - you see much better that way.)

And then, when you have your library of short clips and a rough idea - a storyboard if you will - of what the vid is going to look like, you can begin laying clips on the timeline, at which point you will discover that many of the clips you thought were going to work are all wrong, and you will have to go back to the episodes, scan them again, and clip new scenes into your library.

There really is no easy way around this. You could rip your entire series (only 20 episodes! you lucky person!) onto your hard drive, if you have the money to buy the drive space, but now you just have 800+ minutes of giant source instead of 130 to scan through to find
your clips. Ultimately, you still have to visually scan the whole thing. Much better, in my opinion, is to scan your source first, and do a kind of triage of possible vid clips.

So the short answer is yes, you do cut each clip with VirtualDub, or whatever means you have to get your source into your computer, and work with a number of small files in Premiere, going back to them time and time again, and clipping more as you need them.

Nobody said vidding was easy.