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PremPro & AE. not a happy bunny
Hey, my first time posting here – nice to meet you all. I have followed CCs tutorial many a time 🙂
SO…having just graduated in journalism, I decided to splash out on a macbook pro (i7, 4gb RAM on the ATI GPU). I have always been a windows user and figured since much of the field I am trying to get into is mac-centric, I should go for it. I know photoshop like the back of my hand and thanks to creative cow, was just starting to get the hang of AE and premiere pro. So while I was at it, I splashed out on a Full HD camcorder and instead of just getting indesign and photoshop, went for the full creative suite so I could get to know video editing a little better. You can see where I am going with this right?
All of my editing before was done an a lesser pc but all with SD footage. All I thought was, ‘mmm quad core, 4gb ram…anything is possible’.
Alas, it isn’t. My first issue was to get my blasted mac to actually show my footage (shot 1080p/50 AVCHD). Clipwrap seems to be doing a decent job at that.
But, of course, I am now struggling with playback/preview. Premiere is jittery. AE is just plain unusable. I know you are going to tell me for hd video editing I need raid setups, external firewire storage etc. I’ll work on all that (I have spent more than all my money at this stage, only to be disappointed). In the meantime, is there anything I can do to make thinks more workable? I’m not doing an epic project. couple of weddings etc.
I have done the following:
ordered another 4gb RAM (duh)
In premiere,changed playback level to 1/4 (as low as I can go)
In AE, disabled multithread, disabled OpenGL, messed about with RAM preview/cache settings till I am blue in the face.I have not even dared to render something yet. I fear I may die of old age first. But just in terms of editing, is there anything more I can do to make these two programs…usable??
SO MANY THANKS!!! Sorry for rant
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5 Replies
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Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news you already seem to be aware of…
What is possibly happening here is that you are using AVCHD material which is a lot of work even for an i7 laptop CPU to decompress, and 4Gig of RAM is not much really, especially for HD work. Running off of one drive that is not solid state is going to have some serious bottle neck issues with read write speeds, hence a dedicated RAID 0 or 5 with very high MB/sec rates.
One option you may have here is convert the material into another format that would be less taxing on the MB/sec read rate you are needing for the AVCHD such as Avid DNxHD or Use P2 format.
Of course this now means you need to take the time to convert all your material in order to edit with it properly. Alternatively you could go out and get a FW800 drive to help with the System running off the main hard drive, running the applications, managing RAM, managing indexing, reading the media and hoping to play it all back, before you add any effects, compositing etc.
Another thing about workflow is that I would edit everything in PPro before attempting to get into AE. HD is a taxing hardware eater, hence why SD production is not dead. I am still making most productions in SD and HD has been around for quite some time now…
– JB
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
Thanks Jon!!!
I’ll look into this, Will Premiere work with these two codecs. A quick google seems to show DNxHD as being a free codec from Avid? P2…is this Panasonic? Which is going to give me the least loss of quality, Scratch that. Which is going to work better?
Yes I know I FW drive (or thunderbolt at some stage) or two are in my future.
I will probably have to drop to SD, but given that I have made the investment in full hd (and much of work will be shown on a 130 in screen), I’d like to attempt to strike a balance between quality and ability to edit.
Thanks again
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To follow up on this, I have just tried my footage on an identical mac using FCP and it runs without a hitch. I know Adobe is all about nvidia (which I dont have) and I need more ram (which I don’t have) but is PPro really that more hardware hungry than FCP?? Ot could it still be my configuration?
The difference between the two is night and day…having just forked out £2000 on non refundable software, I can’t afford FCP – I feel cheated.
Any more tips/advice to get PPro/AE stable would be appreciated.
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Hi Sean,
I can see why you are getting better results with FCP.
FCP does not use the AVCHD format. It converts it to ProRes format which an apple only codec and FCP uses it very well. It basically is an easier to decompress codec and therefore runs on the system much better.
I would like to know how that converted MOV file made from FCP works with PPro and After Effects on your system. I can guarantee itVs will work way better than the AVCHD media. 🙂
I was going to suggest you convert to ProRes, but means you MUST have FCP installed. So that’s why I suggested the other formats which are free and work just as well.
You can convert to P2 format via the Media Encoder. Once you install Avid’s codec then you can convert from Media Encoder too.
I must say that FCP Vs PPro using the same media is not able to be judged under the same conditions as everything in FCP must become a MOV file. Ever tried to work with an MP4 file in FCP natively! It has to render it before it can playback at all.
Test the FCP generated clip in PPro and AE and let us know how that goes for you.
– JB
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
Thanks Jon.
Not sure I fully understand.
Just to clarify, my .mts files are not recognised on my mac at all (including the media encoder), so I am using clipwrap to do the initial conversion. Clipwrap allows me to choose rewrap (does not alter) or the avid codec. I will try the avid codec tonight and let you know how I get on. And I suppose the other route is .mts>rewrap>media encoder>p2?
Just curious, if I install FCP (a friends copy) without activating, will I get access to these codec? Will they make my life easier?
I’m guessing thanks to Apple being Apple, there is no codec package?
Cheers
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