Well, first off, which version of Premiere you choose will definitely make a difference. I'd suggest any of the Premiere Pro updates (think it works out to 7.0 and 7.5, but for all intents it's been renamed). It's been much more stable for me than 6.0 ever was.
The version I'm using now (Pro 1.0) has never given me trouble with importing WMVs--I can't recall if I ever tried with 6.0. It doesn't like all of the new WMV audio codecs (even though it will happily *export* to them), but video has never been an issue. I don't use WMVs as vidding source, but I have imported them for work-related projects.
Anyway, clips that work well with Premiere...AVIs would be the best choice. It will also work with MPGs (and mpeg-2), and WMVs, and MOVs. It does not like Xvid or Divx files. It may work fine with them for a while, but eventually they'll start corrupting.
What I would suggest as the best option, for high-quality source that comes from a DVD or from downloaded Xvid/Divx episodes does involve learning how to use one additional program. Which, at the start, was waaay scarier to me than Premiere ever was. ;D Not what you probably wanted to hear. :P You've probably seen Avisynth mentioned somewhere? It's a wonderful little piece of software, but in the end whether it's right for you does depend on your computer set up to some extent.
What kind of source do you want to use at this point? DVD, downloaded eps, WMVs? What kind of storage do you have your machine? Lots of room for HQ source or does it need to be space-sensitive? There are plenty of AVI codecs that work just great with Premiere and compress video to varying degrees--it's when you want to go "lossless" with your compression that you start needing lots of storage space. And that's certainly not how I started out vidding. Though I'm glad I can do that now. :)
As for learning Premiere--I think there are maybe 10 basic concepts that will give you more than enough toehold to start exploring. The biggest hurdle is just having someone point out how to do the simple things, so that the interface loses that first feeling of total mystery. ;) I don't have any really good intro tutorials on hand or anything, but if you ended up with Pro, I bet I could make some notes that would help out--6.0 would be a lot more dodgy, as I don't remember exactly what's changed.
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Date: 2006-01-19 08:02 am (UTC)Well, first off, which version of Premiere you choose will definitely make a difference. I'd suggest any of the Premiere Pro updates (think it works out to 7.0 and 7.5, but for all intents it's been renamed). It's been much more stable for me than 6.0 ever was.
The version I'm using now (Pro 1.0) has never given me trouble with importing WMVs--I can't recall if I ever tried with 6.0. It doesn't like all of the new WMV audio codecs (even though it will happily *export* to them), but video has never been an issue. I don't use WMVs as vidding source, but I have imported them for work-related projects.
Anyway, clips that work well with Premiere...AVIs would be the best choice. It will also work with MPGs (and mpeg-2), and WMVs, and MOVs. It does not like Xvid or Divx files. It may work fine with them for a while, but eventually they'll start corrupting.
What I would suggest as the best option, for high-quality source that comes from a DVD or from downloaded Xvid/Divx episodes does involve learning how to use one additional program. Which, at the start, was waaay scarier to me than Premiere ever was. ;D Not what you probably wanted to hear. :P You've probably seen Avisynth mentioned somewhere? It's a wonderful little piece of software, but in the end whether it's right for you does depend on your computer set up to some extent.
What kind of source do you want to use at this point? DVD, downloaded eps, WMVs? What kind of storage do you have your machine? Lots of room for HQ source or does it need to be space-sensitive? There are plenty of AVI codecs that work just great with Premiere and compress video to varying degrees--it's when you want to go "lossless" with your compression that you start needing lots of storage space. And that's certainly not how I started out vidding. Though I'm glad I can do that now. :)
As for learning Premiere--I think there are maybe 10 basic concepts that will give you more than enough toehold to start exploring. The biggest hurdle is just having someone point out how to do the simple things, so that the interface loses that first feeling of total mystery. ;) I don't have any really good intro tutorials on hand or anything, but if you ended up with Pro, I bet I could make some notes that would help out--6.0 would be a lot more dodgy, as I don't remember exactly what's changed.