Are there books (Idiots Guide, whatever) for PD9?

The documentation presumes too much. There are paradigms that I can't tease out of the User's Guide.

For instance, I have a 3 camera shot of a music video. I want to cross fade at various times. Without knowing better, I am now:

splitting each clip where I want a crossfade

Modify with PiP, setting opacity for "fade to" clip to 100% on clip on one track, 0% on the other

select a transition (eg, blur) and apply it across the clip border on each track.

adust the transition borders to get something like I want

This seems awkward and cumbersome. The PiP dialog transition tab has a Fade In and Fade Out checkbox, but they don't seem to do anything, and I can't find them described anywhere ("Fade In" search in Help returned nothing).

It seems I would just want to change the opacity using keyframes, and not even split the clips, but that procedure is not spelled out in language that a newbie easily absorbs.

Also (and this was bad, since I bought PD9 64 bit app mainly for its advertised speed), I decided to just render the the thing and see what I had (the 3 tracks are all HD, so I was using "rough mode", or whatever, and wanted to see what i was producing). I set it for MPEG2, and let 'er rip. This is a 7 minute video. It went to 24%, and then just hung. For hours. Premiere Elements would render a similar video in 45 minutes on this machine. I also have frequent application hangs just clicking too fast between different tracks.

btw: machine is 64 bit Win 7, 6GB, 2.8 GHz, Athlon Quad Phantom.

Any suggestions here? Better ways to attack the problem? Avoid the hangs? Faster rendering?

Chuck Puckett
"I don't want to steal the show. I only want to borrow it for a while."
www.puckettpublishing.com
www.chuckpuckettsongaweek.com Chuck Puckett
"I don't want to steal the show. I only want to borrow it for a while"
http://www.puckettpublishing.com
http://www.chuckpuckettsongaweek.com