premiere time limit? (1 Viewer)

[Christ Reynolds]

i'm working on a project in adobe premiere 6, and my project length is about 3.5 hours long or so, but i cant place any more clips in the timeline past 3 hours. anyone know if this is a limit within premiere, or a setting i need to change? ive looked around for a setting, no luck so far. thanks in advance

CJ

 

[Scott L]

Holy macral! What kind of files are you editing (what codec are they using)? If 3hrs is the limit you could always edit up to the 3hr mark, then create a new project for the remaining 30 minutes. Then join the two together using a video joining program.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

i'm making DVDs of the upright citizens brigade. each episode is 22 minutes long, x10 per season is 3.66 hours. i would make 2 different projects and then join them together, but i'm worried about audio synching problems. if they would only release the seasons on dvd, i wouldnt even have to worry about this, argh! i even went through the trouble of making title cards for each episode in photoshop, i want this to be at least semi-professional looking. i hear premiere 6.5 has dvd authoring, is it worth upgrading to? $149 is steep right about now though, i just want to do this for as cheaply as possible, and i have access to 6.0 now, i was thinking maybe 6.5 would have a longer timeline length. anyone know?

CJ

 

[Christ Reynolds]

ok searching through the premiere forums, i found that the timeline in premiere, 6.0 and 6.5, is 3 hours. i asked if there was anything i could to in order to increase it, and the guy said "sure, you can buy Avid." even though i am aware of the program he is talking about, i want so badly to quote the immortal Dignan, and ask "what do you mean by avid?"

CJ

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Avid is the system that most TV shows and movies are edited on. BIG bucks

Honestly, you're not going to fit more than 2 hours on a single DVD, so just cut the project in half and do it that way.

6.5 doesn't have longer timeline, no one really needs it and anyone who does just does 2 projects.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

6.5 doesn't have longer timeline, no one really needs it and anyone who does just does 2 projects.

its not too hard to work around the 3 hour mark for my simple project...i'm no software developer, but how hard would it REALLY be to extend the timeline to something more. three hours is by no means unworkable, but a little more couldnt hurt. i'm not doing the most extreme premiere project thats ever been done, thats for sure, and a twelve hour timeline would really come in handy.

CJ

 

[John_Berger]

i want this to be at least semi-professional looking.

That changes the parameters of the situation, though.

 

[MarkHastings]

My question is: Why do you need all of them on one time line? Why not make separate timelines for each episode?

 

[Christ Reynolds]

Why do you need all of them on one time line? Why not make separate timelines for each episode?

well, i dont honestly remember anymore! i believe it had something to do with the ease of dvd authoring, post premiere. i could make one long avi, make the m2v with tmpeg, and rip the audio with vdub, and let the tmpeg dvd author make the dvd from one file, and insert my chapters wherever i wanted. if i did this for each episode, i'll need to do this thirty times. if there was no three hour timeline limit, i'd have to do it only three times. however, i cut the project in half last night, and exported it to avi. i found that i filled the remainder of my 60gb drive, i had a 40gb avi file, and it wasnt even half done with the first half of the first season. of course i realized my error, i used huffyuv for a codec, low compression. i'm exporting it again now with divx5, and in an estimated twelve hours, it will be done. the rate is 0.02 fps, yikes. i dont have a slow computer, either. if the file is still too big, i'll have to deal with that after. i'm fortunate enough to have a 60gb hard disk, but nothing beyond that. hopefully it will work out, i'm dying to watch UCB without having to switch discs all the time, and i never know exactly which episode i'm watching. this will make it much easier, but who knows how much time i've wasted trying to save time so far

CJ

 

[MarkHastings]

Premiere 6.5 has direct to MPEG2 encoding now. No need to render out an AVI file and then recompress it for DVD.

Although I don't know if you can use the "batch" method to do more than one project.

 

[Ken Chan]

i'm making DVDs of the upright citizens brigade. each episode is 22 minutes long, x10 per season is 3.66 hours.

Seems like the right way to do this is to create ten separate Titles. This way, each episode starts at Chapter 1, 00:00:00. (This is how TV shows are usually done by the studios.) Each Title is a separate MPEG file.

Of course, you'd need a DVD authoring program that actually supports more than one Title (until recently, only higher-end programs did), and if you wanted to have a seamless "Play All" option, you'd need to do some scripting. And it is more work. So maybe that's a can of worms you don't want to open It would eliminate the time limit problem, though.

//Ken

 

[John_Berger]

You can have the best of both worlds to an extent by making two seperate movies with the individual episodes as chapters. Then the WORST that could happen is that when you get to the end of the fifth episode, you go back to the menu and start with episode 6.

It's obviously not going to let you go through all ten at once, but only having to select from the main menu twice (once for 1-5 and once for 6-10) sure as hell beats ten times by having to select each episode. (Are you listening, 20th Century Fox?!!!!!)

 

[Christ Reynolds]

i'm going to try to make 2 seperate movies and then join them together, and then author the movie, which will be 10 episodes, as one big title, and each episode being one chapter. i would take ken's advice, but i'm not sure i have access to a multi-title program. the seamless play all option would work in my planned out scenario, hopefully it will work. i suppose i should think about windows XP file size limits, i never had to think about it yet. it has to be beyond 40gb, because i had a 40gb avi file on my hard disk this morning. i'm guessing its way above that though. the old one was 2gb, and given the way exponential math works, i'd say its much higher. 2gb is 2^28, i think...anyway i'm thinking out loud now...or typing out loud.

CJ

 

[John_Berger]

I know that Jeff Kleist and other will just roll their eyes at me, but Ulead's Media Studio Pro does not have a limitation on how long a project can be. As I mentioned earlier, it allowed me to make a single MPEG-1 file that was 4 hours and 45 minutes in length that I then burned to an MPEG-1 DVD; and it's had DVD-ready MPEG-2 support built into it for over two years.

If this is something that you're going to be doing more than once, you might want to consider using MSP instead of Premiere.

i suppose i should think about windows XP file size limits

As long as you are using NTFS, you will not have any problems. I've created files that were over 8 GB in size. You only have a size limitation (2 GB to be precise) if you are using FAT32.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

As long as you are using NTFS, you will not have any problems. I've created files that were over 8 GB in size.

Yeah, you need NTFS without doubt. My Star Wars LD captures are a cool 26gb each - in one file!

 

[Ken Chan]

Once you have passed the 2 (or 4) GB AVI limit the next limit you may run into is in hardware: 137 GB per drive. You need an ATA-133 (or Serial ATA) controller to get past that one. (Note that you can use a pre-133 RAID of two 120 GB drives to get 240 GB, for example. This also has the benefit of higher throughput, which is very helpful for these huge files. Of course, if you use RAID 0, you are doubling the chance for data loss, because if either drive goes down, you're hosed.)

//Ken

 

[Christ Reynolds]

I know that Jeff Kleist and other will just roll their eyes at me, but Ulead's Media Studio Pro does not have a limitation on how long a project can be

see thats what i would hope for in premiere. a project's limit should only lie in hardware, not software.

CJ