9 video streams onscreen -- problem?

D

David W. Richardson

Chapelgrove Films
Hi folks.

I'm preparing to do a feature project that will need 9 separate videos composited together and played onscreen at the same time.

Remember the opening to the old 'Brady Bunch' TV show? They had 9 squares on the screen in a checkerboard pattern, each with a different person in it. Well, that's the same thing I'm going for -- using 9 different DV video clips.

Another example would be the movie 'Time Code' -- except they only used 4 videos.

Complicating matters is that each video clip will be approximately 1 hour long -- no breaks (also like 'Time Code').

So having to pull 9 clips into Premiere 6.0, put them on 9 video tracks, plus have an extra track with a bitmap providing the 'desktop' on which the other clips will be composited -- I suspect this is going to be a challenge. Oh, and there will only be one audio track -- the 9 video inputs will be without audio. (We're mixing the audio from the 9 people down into a single track during recording.)

So 10 video tracks -- 9 with DV video, 1 with a bitmap -- and 1 audio track. And I need it all to run smoothly.

I've done a single video track composited with a bitmap. And I've done greenscreening with two video tracks. But never more than that.

My question is -- is this going to require a mega editing machine to handle it all? I've done tons of editing using 2 or even 3 video tracks using a PC with Premiere 6.0 and 512MB of RAM. I've been planning to goose the RAM up, but are there other resource problems I'm likely to run into that I'm not thinking about?

Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

David
 
The other resource problem that I can think of is disk I/O. I'm not sure if your drives will have the throughput to do nine simultaneous streams. Won't know without trying, though.
 
I actually can se it being more feasable with using premiere 6.x as apposed to Pro. Pro takes up a lot more resources. I have done 4/5 tracks in prmeire pro witha pentium 4 2.0ghz 512 ram and 7,200rpm hard drive and it was a little hard to deal with. I think you will probably run into problems especailly if you have a lot fo audio tracks. You would think you could disable a video track and work with one a a time but this doesnt seem to really help either from my experinces. BEst best would be to find a way where you can edit one track at a time and either put blank bmps to replace the other video tracks tempararoly or if you want ot line up cuts then just lay down markers where there is a cut on the other tracks and jsut work at it one a time and just combine everything at the end. Hopefully it wont give you a problem rendering everything out later when you finally combine all the tracks.
 
Hey guys -- thanks for the advice!

Good idea, EGProductions. I'll do a couple of clips, then export to an AVI file, and use that file to add the next couple of clips. That should work. Thanks!
 
I did a 9 field split screen (8 video streams and 1 graphic) and it worked fine although this was a short duration project (ie a TVC). There was 12 layers in the Timeline to make up the screen.

My machine is much higher spec'd than yours though. (At the time I used PPRO 1.5)

The only problem I had was previewing because each and every change had to be rendered so it took careful mangement and planning to avoid this . I nested sequences to make it work best.

There was no problem final rendering it so
 
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