I'm going to shoot & edit a DV feature next month (final running time to be approx. 90 minutes) that will ultimately be transferred to 35mm film. I was all set to purchase a $9000 turn-key editing system (either a G3 w/Premier or an NT/Rex system) HOWEVER, the salesman at a major New York Dealer strongly cautioned me against this. He said that while DV is a great acquisition format, it's not a a great post production format. He went on to say that editing a long project (90 minutes) on Premier based system would be enormously frustrating in that I would not be rendering my cuts in real time. (He did say, however that Premier was fine for short projects of less than 10 minutes). I think there is a misconception out there about these low cost editing systems being the answer to everyones prayers...Does anyone out there have any experience cutting a long project on Premier? I would love to hear your experiences/advice. Thanks.

-- Eric Eason (eeason@pdn-pix.com), May 11, 1999

Answers

Eric,

Premiere and other same price-range options have their limitations, but hey -- for well under $10,000 -- I've got a system here that, with just a little bit of patience and a 2 or 3 week learning curve, can compete with at least a $30 - $45,000 Media 100 suite!

I work with Premiere 5.1., on a Dell 450 Pent II/128 mb ram, 30 gigs (more soon) of IDE IBM drive (sustains 15 - 20 mb sec), and -- the MIRACLE HARDWARE/SOFTWARE INTERFACE -- the Canopus DV Rex! It's an awesome system. Yes, you will probably want to break your longer projects up into 10:00 files, but they will string back together seemlessly in the timeline for your final composite output. (and you can work longer if you want -- you just need to factor in some extra application time here and there: I'm presently 23:00 into a 28:00 doc, all one file, and yes, my saves take a full minute -- but then, I have the luxery of shuffling and tweaking any of several hundred transitions/clips/ cuts to any point in the timeline (actually, let me check here... I have a total of "383" preview files going here (6 tracks of audio, anywhre from 1 to 4 layers of video, and some killer Boris FX title effects too!)

Anyhow it all looks great and is going to broadcast -- the only downside to Premiere 5.1, really is a GODAWFUL titling package; you'll want another app for titles.

E- me if you want to know more,

Brian Smith SouthPaw Digital (Northern Cal)

P.S. And let me add my name to the lonnngggggg list of ever-so-happy XL-1 users!!!

-- Brian Smith (solsun@neteze.com), May 14, 1999.