play in MSP 5.2

[Birger]

I just switched from premiere 5.1 to MSP 5.2
because everybody told me that it should work
better together with my marvel G-400 than premiere. The play button is greyed out, and when I try to scrub it takes a few seconds untill the picture ends up. Why cant i play the files in the timeline? please help

[fluggo99]

Okay, when you say "play from the timeline," you mean a preview of what's in it? You can do that by selecting the area you want to preview just below the time labels (there's a little recess that, when selected, should turn blue) and hitting Enter, which is the equivalent of the button just to the right of the play button, "Preview." Depending on your preview settings, MSP will render your project and show it to you.

If you're wanting to look at the original footage, double-click on the clip to open up a scratch pad, which shows you the entire file along with your mark in and mark out points, and gives you the opportunity to remark them. Beware that scratch pad has trouble with files >1GB.

Then there's another nifty feature-- turned off by default-- that shows you the contents of a clip as you're trimming it in the timeline. It's the Trim Window, and you can find it by right-clicking on the toolbar area and selecting Trim Window.

fluggo99

[fluggo99]

P.S.-- I have no idea what the other play button is for; I've never used it, and I don't see a need to.

[Birger]

Thanx fluggo99,I think its a little stange that I cant just play a clip from the time line without render it. In premiere you kan play all clips in the timeline without rendering.Ok I give MSP 5.2 a new try but I dont think it works better than premiere together with G-400.

[Patrick]

Perhaps there is a bit of misunderstanding here...

If your capture settings are the same as your preview settings with MSP, you do NOT have render anything (except for transitions) when you want to preview clips from the time line.

[fluggo99]

Perhaps this would be a good time to mention the four options for preview (first tab in preview options):

1. ActiveMovie player -- Everything is rendered into a single video file and played for you according to the specs you gave. I prefer this one because I can watch the same segment over and over again w/o waiting for the inherent pause of starting up the MJPEG drivers.

2. Best -- Any clips with a change to them get rendered to separate files. This includes any not in the format you specify in the preview options box. Those without any changes whatsoever and with the same format and everything get played from the originals. MSP keeps rendered segments to keep from having to render them every time. Best is good for recording a video to tape straight from the timeline since it saves disk space.

3. Optimal -- BLECH!! Only those with changes are rendered; this time, MSP doesn't care what format they're in. Terrible for MJPEG, because the format can change often.

4. Instant -- MSP renders as fast as it can into the preview window, dropping frames to keep time. Without an extremely fast system, this is near useless.

And then there's scrubbing in the timeline, which I don't do anymore because a delicacy involving leaving the MJPEG drivers open makes timeline scrubbing slow to respond. (The readme file details a potential way to get around this, and the tips & tricks section of Desktop Video World describes another.) I don't mind waiting for an ActiveMovie preview. There's also the methods for using scratchpads and the trim window I stated above.

Choose your poison.

I don't think MSP'ers will ever like Premiere and vice-versa. It's the same metaphysical law that applies to those who eat crawfish and those who won't.

fluggo99

[Birger]

Big thanx for the tips fluggo99.

[wkulecz]

I was dissapointed my Marvel wouldn't work with premiere. Now that I'm getting used to Media Studio Pro 5.2 I'm learning to like it better everyday.

One major irratation for me, since my main purpose is to have final output on tape, is there any way to quickly select the entire timeline for preview?

--wally.

[Pertti]

wkulecz,

It couldn't be any simpler (unlike in Premiere, where the preview range selection sucks bigtime).

The preview range is shown on top of timeline with a blue bar, just rightclick on that area to clear the preview range and it will preview the whole timeline.

Selecting a new preview range can be done from the menu, or by holding the left mouse button and dragging it along the previously mentionned area (Pretty cool, aint it )

Pertti

[wkulecz]

Pertti,

Thanks for the tip. I think the reason I didn't grok it initially, was I first selected a small section to preview a transition. Then when I unselect to make the blue bar go away, the preview starts where the bar used to be. If I drag the "instant preview" scrubber and then start the preview with no selection (blue bar) I get the whole time line.

I can't quite get it to work as easy as you suggested but this is a big improvement. Thanks.

One other minor thing, is it just me, or is it absurdly slow to render a single 704x480 tiff image to a 10 second clip. I expected this to be faster as the frame never changes during this time. My project settings are for 704x480 30fps NTSC.

--wally.

[Cut ter]

Hi,
I think everyone hit all right on the nail as far ? goes.

Why ? does it take so long to render a 10sec Tiff (704*480) you say.
Well It needs to Re-render that graphics 30X to a MJPEG per/sec.
Doing the math 30/sec x 10Sec = 300 frames in another format.
If you save them as Jpegs it will help speed rendering. Also a faster CPU and Ram will help out big time.
I have a 200MMX and I'm used to it, but a'm working on getting a newer PIII or G4 machine.
Good luck

[Cut ter]

Does anyone know why there aren't much places for resources tips & tricks on MSP 5.X NLE.

I can find hundreds of sites relating w/info for Adobe's premiere NLE software.

Ulead - whats going on here!
The only official place I've found is (MUG) and it has nothing to help out. The info there on the site has been there as far as I've owned MSP back a while.

If anyone knows any site(s) Please post or feel free to email me at Mpower9489@aol.com

[wkulecz]

Cutter,

Your math looks right, the issue is, weren't the programmers of MSPro clever enough to realize that a single still expanded to an N second video, never changes its MJPEG encoding after the first frame. All that needs to be done is copy 30xN seconds of the *one* rendered MJPEG frame to the AVI preview file massaging the header correctly along the way and interleaving the audio if there is any. (mine was silent).

I was hoping this would be a quick way to make "video slide show" tapes, but the slow rendering makes this idea too slow for casual use.

Im using a K6-3 450 with 128MB, I didn't time it but it seemed to take a good bit longer to render 10 sec of a still image from a TIFF that a 15 second rolling title.

If starting with a JPEG is much faster I'll file that away as a tip.

--wally.

[fluggo99]

wkulecz --

That's fine for MJPEG-- it has all separate frames. Now translate that concept to all the other formats, many of which use any similarities between frames to reduce the amount of data involved. MSP has to leave it up to the codec to discover such similarities and how to deal with them. It would have been nice, in some previous design of Vid for Windows, to make a flag saying that a frame wouldn't change for awhile. No such cheat exists; MSP has to let the codec treat it as a stream of video.

On the other hand , it does sometimes appear slower to render image files. Why? My guess is that MSP decodes the same picture once for each frame. Good modular design, but a waste of time. Hope they fixed that for MSP 6.

[Pertti]

If you make a short clip (1frame to 1sec), create video out of it, and make multiple copies out of it, then it only renders the first short one.

Pertti