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Can Premiere Pro CS6 handle very large projects?
Hi,
I’ve pretty much edited on Avid for two decades, and I’m about to embark on a very large project that comprises a total running time of about 15 hours and involves maybe 25,000-50,000 clips and lots of multicam.
I’m starting to be really tired of Avid because of the requirement for transcoding and the abysmal multicam workflow, and the fact that it seems to get slower and slower, despite my machine being a monster.
I’m incredibly impressed with Premiere Pro CS6, and I want to drop everything and switch. It honestly feels like Media Composer 9.0 from the future.
BUT, I have a huge reservation. In the past, I’ve seen Premiere Pro fall apart on large projects. In my research, I’ve also found people talking about their project files suddenly becoming unrecoverable, or bloating to 3 GB etc.
I find it an enormous fallacy that Premiere Pro saves EVERYTHING in a single file. Both Avid and FCP7 have the ability to split a project into several physical files, like bins in Avid, so that you never really have the whole project open. This is why Avid can handle projects of unlimited size. If you tried to have every bin of a major project open at the same time in Avid, it would crash too.
How afraid should I be? I’m going to be editing this project for almost two years, and it’s positively huge. I’m truly afraid of this basic flaw of putting everything in the same file, and it doesn’t seem like it’s possible to have multiple projects open at the same time so you can drag between them. That way you could partition your project and still have access to everything.
I’m also struggling to come up with a realistic way to stress test Premiere Pro CS6. I’ve tried importing a few hundred DSLR clips, add them to a timeline, put everything in a bin, and then copy the bin a few hundred times. By my estimates, that put about 20,000 clips into the database with a bit of editing as well, but there has to be a million things this doesn’t take into account. At this rate, it takes about 6-7 seconds to save.
I have some questions for those of you who have done long-form in PP CS6:
1.) What’s the size of your largest project-files?
2.) How many clips do you typically have in an entire project?
3.) How long does it typically take you to save and load a major project?
4.) How often have you had to recover a project by importing it into a new project?
5.) Is there ANY way to not have absolutely everything loaded at the same time, and avoid keeping everything in the same file?
Thanks a million!
Per
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1 Reply
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Hello Per,
I’m currently editing a feature on PPro CS6. I have posted some issues here: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/3/937165
Still dealing with them. Tom Daigon has helped me with some trouble shooting and basic maintenance
To answer your questions:
1.) What’s the size of your largest project-files?
52.1 MB (All the dailies are logged with over 100 bins)
2.) How many clips do you typically have in an entire project?
4,000 (all video and audio)
3.) How long does it typically take you to save and load a major project?
Less than 1 minute
4.) How often have you had to recover a project by importing it into a new project?
Never
5.) Is there ANY way to not have absolutely everything loaded at the same time, and avoid keeping everything in the same file?
You can import sequences into new projects – which “consolidates” clips used in the seq. Not sure if that will help you.
Read my post (link above) to know more about my system specs and issues I’m currently experiencing. Perhaps it will be helpful. The actually editing (working in the timeline: trimming, etc) is working outstandingly – but opening bins, creating new sequences, etc sometimes makes the system hang for minutes.
Hope this helps.
Matteo
Motion Picture Editor
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