What’s the Difference between Preset Bins and Custom Bins in Adobe Premiere Pro?

This question was kind of driving me crazy, as there didn’t seem to be any clear cut answer anywhere on the web.  So here it is…

Custom Bins simply store shortcuts to presets.

Preset Bins actually store the presets.

I mean, they’re both containers for data stored elsewhere, but this is how they function within the Premiere interface: one holds links, the other holds the actual presets.

Thus, Custom Bins allow you to organize presets while leaving them in their original location, which is useful when setting up a bin for commonly used presets.

Preset Bins are great for holding presets that are project specific.  For instance, I’m currently working on a project with some pretty bizarre color balance and level settings.  It’s not likely that I’ll ever use them on another project, so I’ve set up a Preset Bin named with the title of the project.

On the other hand, I use things like Cross Dissolve, Reverb, Brightness/Contrast, Colorista, and Exponential Fade in most of my projects.  Thus, I’ve set up a Custom Bin named “COMMON” with those effects in it.

And now you know.

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Authoring Mixed Aspect Ratio DVD’s in Adobe Encore

This is an old issue, but one that still comes up often enough for me.

I haven’t authored a 4:3 DVD in years.  This is because I haven’t seen a 4:3 screen in years.  Almost every television and computer monitor is now being made with a 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio.

However, we still delve into the archives often enough to find SD video that was shot 4:3.

When creating a widescreen DVD in Adobe Encore, these 4:3 videos usually wind up getting “stretched” on the screen to force 4:3 to conform to the 16:9 aspect ratio.  This is especially problematic when the video stretching makes your wife’s butt look wider than it actually is (doh!).  Thus, finding a solution was imperative.

For a specific example: I recently created a "wide screen" DVD of 20 or so archival live dance videos, along with some newer live dance videos as well as some dance for the camera pieces we had recently created.  Some of the archival videos were from quite a few years ago and had been shot 4:3, though most were shot 16:9.  When viewing the DVD (which is created as 16:9), there were still a few videos displaying 4:3 stretched to 16:9 rather than "pillar boxed" so there was no stretching.

Most of the clips were also rendered out of Premiere with the correct MPEG-DVD settings so that no transcoding was needed.  However, a few videos were still being transcoded by Encore, and this is where the problem was arising.

The solution for me was to go to those videos, right click on the video asset (not the timeline, but the actual video), "revert to original," and then "select transcode settings."  From here I could set the transcode setting as 16x9 HQ DVD instead of "automatic" so that the final video output was widescreen instead of the 4:3 that was getting stretched (Encore wants to leave a 4:3 original video as 4:3, which might make sense, but is not what we want for a 16:9 DVD!).

Hopefully this information helps someone find what they're looking for.

Show Background Video in Adobe Encore Menu

I was getting frustrated when no matter what I did I couldn’t see the background video running in my Adobe Encore cs4 title menu preview.

I searched hi and low, and the only thing I could find said I had to remove all graphics from the menu for the background video to work (this is completely untrue).

Finally, I discovered that when you are looking at the preview window in Adobe Encore, there is a little “disc” icon with an arrow pointing to the right in the top row of the preview menu on the far left hand side.  Click that icon, and the background video is rendered so that you can see it in the preview.

I put all my text and graphics back in the menu (using Photoshop), and it still works flawlessly.

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Trims and/or Chapters Adjusted

Add this to my long list of gripes about Adobe Encore (currently using CS4).

Just opened a project that had been burning fine.  Changed nothing.  Now after I click “build,” Encore gives me an error of “Trims and/or chapters adjusted.”

Most solutions found via the web suggest this problem arises after transcoding, however, my video and audio is all MPEG-DVD generated out of Premiere (no transcoding occurs in Encore).

Lame.

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Authoring BluRay in Adobe Encore CS4

For nearly a month I couldn’t create a BluRay in Adobe Encore CS4.  I tried all kinds of different export options for my media (H.264 vs. MPEG-2, different audio formats, different file sizes, different bit rates, VBR 2 pass vs. VBR single pass, etc.).  I tried changing the location of the files used in the project and the location to where the .iso was being written.  I tried shortening the name and removing spaces from all files involved.  I even sacrificed a live rooster under the full moon while chanting preset options.

None of it worked.

The answer to the problem is so simple it’s embarrassing… for Adobe.  If the thing that ABSOLUTELY prevents Encore from creating a disc/image is this simple to fix, why wouldn’t Adobe release a patch to fix it?

Here it is: the name of the disc, in other words, the name you give the disc in your project (not the .iso file, or the name of the project file, or the name of any of the other files involved), cannot be more than 15 letters, or the disc cannot be created.  You will get this error:

Blu-Ray error: “fatal error”, code: “6”, Note:”

I did come across this solution in my previous searches, but I didn’t understand that when people were referring to “disc name,” they didn’t mean the name of the file you were creating (the .iso image) or the name of the project.  Because it seemed like something as simple as the actual “name” couldn’t possibly have anything to do with an entire BluRay authoring session failing, I didn’t realize they meant the name you type in in this field:

If you make sure that the name in the “name” field above (where it says “Disc Name”) is short, your BluRay will burn.

Really?  FIX THIS (or at least document it), Adobe.

 

For what it’s worth, these are the settings I use when exporting my media from Premiere via Adobe Media Encoder:

MPEG-2 BluRay, 1920x1080, 23.976, VBR 2 pass, bit rate min: 25 – target: 30 – max: 35, Dolby AC3 audio at 320Kbps, “maximum render quality” ticked.

When creating a new Adobe Encore project, I select NTSC, 1920x1080, 23.976 (but oddly the Encore timeline still always shows 30 frames… can’t figure this out).

If you alter the length of the audio or video on the timeline, you are apt to receive other error messages that will prevent the project from rendering.  I advise making sure the audio/video are exactly as you want them in your Encore project before exporting them from Premiere.  I also am a fan of setting the Encore Chapter markers in Premiere.

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Encore CS4 Will Not Burn BluRay

[update at end of post or simply go to my solution post here]

Blu-Ray error: “fatal error”, code: “6”, Note:”

This statement is the current bane of my existence.  It pops up just as an Encore BluRay project enters the “initializing burn” phase.

I just want to burn a BluRay so we can submit our film to smaller festivals and project in HD (BluRay) instead of SD (DVD).  I made a couple of really expensive coasters before at least realizing I could change the settings to render a BluRay .iso (rather than burning directly to media) so I’m not trashing an expensive BluRay disc every time I attempt to create a disc.
Adobe, in typical fashion, simply states that Encore does not fully support Vista and Windows 7 (Really? --in the year 2010 you don’t support the most commonly used OS on the planet?).  To further the issue, I am running 64-bit, so Adobe supports that “even less” if that’s possible.

I have found little to no information on this subject, and what little I did find did not work to solve my problem.  Still, I will list the “solutions” I found in my searches.  Perhaps they will work for you.

And if you have more information or know of a solution, by all means post your suggestions in the comments!

Via Creative Cow:

Download and install msxml 6.0
It should fix the error.

People report this as a fix, but it didn’t work for me.
From the same Creative Cow thread:

What finally worked was changing the disc name and the filename/location. I changed the name of the disc from "Smith-Jones Wedding Unedited HD Footage" to "disc" and the filename from "unedited_footage.iso" to "disc.iso" set to build to the root c: and I was able to build a Blu-ray ISO image.

I can see how removing spaces or shortening names could possibly help the issue (though, pretty lame that software in this day and age can’t accommodate spaces and long file names), but it didn’t work for me.

There is some information in this thread stating that bit rate spikes will prevent a project from burning correctly, but the solution seems to be a bunch of other software (and adhering to some extremely specific settings) to create the video and audio files before importing into Encore for burning.

For a little humor on the issue, this was one of my favorite threads during the search for a solution.  It’s just a bunch of people bitching about how ABYSMAL Encore is, most concurring that Adobe should be taken out behind the barn and shot in the head.
Some people have suggested that the “code 6” error is related to oversized menus (menus being too large), but I tried different menus and even removed my menus altogether (so that the BluRay was just the movie file), but still I got the exact same error.

UPDATE: I have since been able to burn a BluRay.  I’m not sure which of the many things I tried finally got me there, but I will tell you that I used Adobe Media Encoder to create MPEG2 BluRay (which Encore prefers) built upon the MPEG2 BluRay preset.  My audio is .ac3 (Dolby), and I used VBR 2 pass (not 1).  For some reason, these settings actually burn infinitely faster (2 hours vs. up to 43 hours previously), so I’m not really sure what’s going on.  All I know is that I can author BluRays with Encore now, so I’m happy.

The runtime for our film is 102 minutes, and the film alone is taking around 24.6 GB of space (my VBR is set to minimum 25, target 30, maximum 35).  A single layer BluRay will only accommodate 25GB, so I can only author a disc for projection purposes (adding menus and extras would exceed the disc capacity).

UPDATE: I know understand the secrets to the Universe, or at least authoring a BluRay in Adobe Encroe CS4.  Check the post here.

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Multicore Processing RULES!

Stupid me didn’t realize you have to actually enable multi-core processing in Adobe After Effects for the software to take advantage of the feature.  All this time I’ve been rendering video files using only one core.
I just discovered this setting (in the usage/memory area of preference settings) and I’m now rendering out files at nearly FOUR TIMES the speed I previously was.  Currently I’m removing 3:2 pulldown from a ProRes QT file, applying a watermark, and changing the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 (taking advantage of being able to crop letterbox bars at the top and bottom).  The whole process on a 102 minute 720x486 file (rendering to lossless .avi) takes less than an hour.
Woo-hoo!!!

Mind the Gap: dealing with gaps in timelines when authoring 24p DVD's in Adobe Encore

I've been authoring DVD's of our film using Adobe Encore CS4.  The original footage is glorious 4K 23.976 fps shot on RED at 1:2.35 aspect ratio, so needless to say, the 29.97fps footage I'm outputting for DVD is a little lackluster.  I'd like to at least get rid of the "video" feel by exporting the footage at it's native 23.976 (instead of the 29.97 required by DVD's).  However, when I do this I get errors in Encore ("The gap before the video clip at __;__;__;__ must have a duration of either zero, or at least 0.4 seconds").

The project is broken up into five "reels."  I assume if there was just one video stream (all five reels exported from one timeline), this issue wouldn't even come up, as the issue arises in Encore on the movie timeline between these clips.  But I'd really like to find a solution that allows me to keep these "reels" separate.

I've been researching the issue for the past day or so, and there is a lot of discussion about pull down, field order, flags, and a bunch of other stuff that I don't necessarily want to become an "expert" in.

I realize there is a standard for DVD's that requires all NTSC footage to conform to a 29.97 frame rate.  I also realize that "pulldown" (or "pullup," depending which way you're going) refers to making 24 frame footage conform to a 30 frame format by adding/removing frames.

Almost every source states that it's best to output your footage for DVD from Adobe Premiere (rather than let Adobe Encore transcode it).  Encore will then take your 23.976 footage and use it on the 29.97 DVD supposedly without issue.  However, there is some tweaking that needs to be done in the export, as the Adobe Media presets used by Premiere do not work "without issue" when authoring the DVD (see the "mind the gap" error message).

If anybody stumbles across this post and has some helpful information, please post in the comments!  I will do my best to keep this post updated via reader comments and whatever I find in my searches on the web.

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