Saturday 30 November 2013

Georgian subtitles - encoding and workaround

It happens to me to add subtitles in rather unusual languages. This time was Georgian.

Don't even try to guess what encoding it uses - the fact is that there is no Georgian encoding! All you have to get is Georgian font, which will "translate" your letters into Georgian letters. Try to copy/past some text with other font than Georgian, it will show you something like transliteration of Georgian words.

Premiere Pro: Warp stabilizer and speed can't be used in same clip: Workaround

Here the good video tutorial by Michi Leber how to use Speed and Warp stabilizer in Adobe Premiere for the same clip. The main idea is to use nested sequence and apply Warp stabilizer to original clip, and Speed to nested clip.

Monday 21 October 2013

How I solved problem with blurry jittering text in rolling titles in FCP


I've prepared TIFF file with all my final rolling credits and logos in Photoshop, I've got TIFF with LZW compression as it is usually recommended and with dimentions 1920x1080 as soon as I have HD project.

But after rendering and exporting titles from Final Cut they looked awfull - pixels, blurry and having these interlace lines.

What helped me (maybe it will not work for you). I've entered my Sequence Settings (in Final Cut - Sequence => Settings or cmd+0).

In General I've changed Quality to Best. 

In Render optiongs I've changed Field Dominance: None (I had Upper by default)
The way it looked in my case you can see on the image below.

Monday 26 August 2013

Arabic subtitles for DVD Authoring in Adobe Encore

Problem: I had .srt file in Arabic language made in Subtitle Workshop 6.0 which after trying to convert to Adobe Encore subtitles (.txt) had bad encoding and impossible to convert to normal view. And I needed to import it to Adobe Encore to use as an language option. Encoding in Subtitle Workshop was Arabic. By the way, in Subtitle Workshop 2 the text wasn't shown properly.

Reason: Subtitle Workshop usually doesn't use proper encoding when saves files (not Unicode which is usually required to show all the letters properly).

Soluion: To convert subtitles to Unicode I usually use Subtitle Edit which opens and saves subtitles in different formats. There is a possibility to choose encoding.
In this particular case when I opened my .srt file or .txt file with subtitles in Arabic, it showed me some scribbles.
To avoid this problem I opened subtitles via File => Import subtitle with manual chosen encoding...
and then choose encoding Arabic. Then File => Save as - choose format you need (for Adobe Encore I used Adobe Encore w.line .txt). It should import to Encore without any problem!

P.S. Sometimes if the problem still there it's better to change font to Arial Unicode or Adobe Arabic.

Saturday 15 June 2013

Premiere Pro CS6 - bloating and project size

I'm editing 30 min. documentary in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. Previously, I've edited few short films with it.
First few weeks everything was perfect and I was fascinated with what I've got - possibilities to work with AVCHD and h.264 natively, great stabilize effect...

But I've encountered the first serious problem. Once I was starting the project and it just haven't open. I saw Load project window and very slow loading. Than it just stopped in one place and no movement in next half an hour.

The problem is in a project size. When it reaches some limit, it loads very slowly (so there is a chance it will open - but it could be in few hours or days). It's a bug Adobe knows about, but there is no fix for now.
Some people tell using warp effect increases size, but there are people who had 5gb projects without any warp effect. My project reached 400mb and after 1h of waiting I resined.

One of the solutions is to import project in a new project. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes not.

I just started to check project size after saving it (but not closing it!). it's more often happens that Auto-saves are huge, so just control your saves by yourself. And at some point it's good to make reserve copies. So if something will happen tomorrow, you have do to again only what you have done for that tomorrow. 

If the problem is critical -it seems it's possible that Premiere will open this large project - but after long-long-long time. I have never waited, but maybe somebody will. 

Monday 14 January 2013

JEvents - Set up date range

I maintain web-site using Joomla ans JEvents v2.2.8. Events in calendar are displayed in List Raw.
After I added an event, it was displyed in list. The reason - it wasn't in data range set up for the list.
To change the data range DON"T go to the Configuration in Components -> JEvents (that what I did and spent few hours trying to figure out how to change data range). The answer is much more simplier: it lays in menu item in Joomla, which links to your calendar.
Open Menus -> Main menu (or what is yours) -> in the list of items there will be your calendar.

All the settings about date range, where you cn add absolute or relative date, number of months or weeks you want ot display after actual date and so on.

Monday 7 January 2013

Some Copy/Paste shortcuts in Avid MC (Shif+V from FCP, Alt+C)

I used to shortcut Shift+V in FCP which is called Insert Paste or Splice in.
To do the same in Avid MC if you need just to copy some timeline segment and paste it anywhere else without overiding other clips, go to the timeline segment mode (yellow arrow) and click ctrl+v. It will paste your clip or fragment in the timeline without affecting other clips.

Also you could load the fragment or clip from timeline (select In and Out to define this fragment) by clicking Alt+C. Be aware, it you have remapped Copy to Clipboard function from C key, it wouldn't work. After you see your clip in sourse monitor you can patch it everywhere you want.