-
Why Premiere is a Toy
Why I think Premiere is a TOY.
Yes I know how many of you I’m going to infuriate but whatever. Please feel free to crap on me and correct me if I’m wrong on some points as myself and the assistant editor were trained in Premiere two days before Shooting started. Things may have been missed with such a tight time frame.
I had to use Premiere for the first time ever to do dailies for a movie and I must say unimpressed doesn’t even come close to what I feel about it.
First, I do think there are many marvellous features that Avid needs to have or incorporate into Media Composer and it’s pretty nice to work with but,
Why do I think it’s a toy, well.
1- What’s the point of being able to slip the Audio by samples when it jumps to the closest frame as soon as clips are merged.
2- Why is there no way to slip the Audio and why can’t it use the merged clips like Avid does to make the Multi-Cams.
With the super tight QC’s now we need sub frame sync accuracy. Especially for Netflix and iTunes Deliverables. The Audio editor/mixers aren’t very happy about this either.
So everything I did is passed to the assistant editor and then he passes it onto the editor who will only work at home.
After about Day-08 Media wouldn’t re-link every time the editor quit Premiere for the night and restarted it the next morning. Hell the auto search even stopped working so it was left open all the time. Two days after shooting was over it lost link to all of the media right in the middle of editing. Again the Search function didn’t work so we had to manually find a clip then have it re-link to as many as it could and then the next and so on. Now it will randomly lose sync to clips during editing which is ridiculous. I looked at the editors Media folder structure and it’s very neat, clean and organized so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Something else that became a problem is how the exported projects from the assistant editor wouldn’t open properly by the editor. So we would send say Day-09 and when it was imported by the editor it would be looking for bins from Day-01 as an example. This started happening everyday and so I had to test the assistant editors exports every time before we sent them off to the editor. I know this wasn’t the assistant editors fault because I’ve never worked with such a clean and organized assistant editor ever in the past.
There’s several more that I have not covered here but I think I’ve berated Premiere enough and these are the most problematic ones that I found no work around for.
I joined the COW as well and in the first week I’ve seen more basic, simple, unforgivable bugs in Premiere than I have in Avid in the last year or two. Like say how awesome it must be to have a new Cache Featute in Preferences delete all of your working Media.
So that’s why I think it’s a TOY now go ahead and send out a hit on me.
-
8 Replies
-
Aahh finally someone felt the pain I had two years ago holding some Director slash turned into an Editors hands.
I won’t add to this but will sit back and see how everyone responds.
Myself I can’t call it a toy and I use MC, FCPX and PPr daily.
However, all the issues you faced I’ve had to deal with two years ago and I couldn’t bother to express it here. -
Ok so calling it a TOY is rather cruel which I shouldn’t have done.
It is however not going to be fully movie ready until at least Sub Frame Audio Slipping stays with the Merged and MultiCam Clips like Perf Slipping does in Avid.I handled all the transcoding, syncing, H.264 Viewers (dailies), archiving and I’m also technical support for our small facility. It’s a bit of a drag at times trying to resolve these ridiculous issues and keep on top of the dailies. Luckily the assistant editor is extremely thorough, organized and experienced even if he was also new to Premiere. The editor unfortunately moved from FCP-7 to Premiere but is also an extremely good editor so that helped a lot.
Having said that, my next goal is to make a list of all the things that I can post on Avids Forum. Premiere has many really nice features that Avid really needs to implement. It’s time for them to turn there noses down and look at what everyone else is doing. As much as I despise FCP X there’s features in it that Avid could really take a look at as well.
-
[Brent Marginet] “myself and the assistant editor were trained in Premiere two days before Shooting started”
Just like with FCPX, the learning curve with Premiere is steep if you’re used to Avid or FCP 7. So you decided to learn “trial by fire” style and therefore a mountain of frustrations come with the territory.
In order to fairly judge the program you’re going to need to abandon the comparisons with Avid. It’s kind of an apples and oranges situation since Avid has such a richly developed media management engine and the software itself is finely tuned to film and television production.
Adobe Premiere 2017.1.1
Windows 10 Pro
Samsung SSD 850 EVO system
Samsung SSD 850 EVO Adobe cache
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
OWC Thunderbay 12t x 2 in Raid10 configuration (thru Storage Spaces and Disk Management) -
[greg janza] “So you decided to learn “trial by fire” style and therefore a mountain of frustrations come with the territory.”
We didn’t decide to learn Premiere “trial by fire” the production found an editor 6 days before the start of production who would only use Premiere. They also had to fly in an assistant editor in from another Province and he arrived 3 days before the start of Production so what choice did we have.I’m only making comparisons because Premiere has been around since 1991 and Pro since 2003 and if they still haven’t fixed the link problems then theres something seriously wrong here. Like what 10,000 years ago when FCP 7 came out it’s links to media were far more stable than the current version of Premiere is.
Now putting that aside lets go on to syncing. Very easy and nice to do in Premiere except for the fact that they still haven’t allowed for subframe alignment that sticks when clips are merged. Hell even DaVinci Resolve doesn’t seem to do this and as far as I and the Audio Engineers are concerned this is a must in todays world of editing.
[greg janza] “Avid has such a richly developed media management engine and the software itself is finely tuned to film and television production.”
And so what then Premiere is only aimed at making home videos for your family. I think Pro says it all and that means fix or add these long overdue features.
-
One last thing that really drove me crazy was that when exporting merged clips through Media Encoder for the Daily viewers was the lack of audio control. The Daily Viewers need to have a Mono Mix Down of all the Audio but when I used the Merged Clips only Audio Track One would show up in these exports.
I posted this both on the Adobe Forum and here and no one had any answers so I found a work around.
I find the way Premiere handles Audio rather cumbersome.
You should not be stuck to one particular audio setup and you should be able to change it on the fly any time you want to.
Loading in a new Sequence Preset then Copying and Pasting from one Timeline to another is ridiculous.I made a Sync Sequence that I would duplicate for each new Audio and Video Clip I was going to sync.
It’s Audio output was set to a mono mix down.
I would then drop the Audio and Video for each clip into this sequence, sync it, trim the excess Audio or Video off, remove the empty timeline in front of the synced media and finally Merge it. Now the plus is that I was able to export the 1280×720 H.264’s with a mono mix down of the Audio by exporting these Sequences but the minus is that I had to keep both the Merged Clips and there associated Timelines. This also meant extra time naming both of them even if I did copy and paste the names and keeping them in separate Bins.Yeah I know I’m being a big baby.
I do however want to point many of these things out because in many ways I really like Premiere and I want to see it improve.
I’m also hoping to make more use of it because some of the latest Avid issues really make me want to find an alternative. -
[Brent Marginet] “I find the way Premiere handles Audio rather cumbersome.”
It’s one of the hardest things to get used to since no other NLE operates in this way. Premiere forces you to prep your audio before editing.
[Brent Marginet] “in many ways I really like Premiere and I want to see it improve.
I’m also hoping to make more use of it because some of the latest Avid issues really make me want to find an alternative.”Once you work out a viable workflow for your needs, you’ll have no need to return to Avid.
Adobe Premiere 2017.1.1
Windows 10 Pro
Samsung SSD 850 EVO system
Samsung SSD 850 EVO Adobe cache
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
OWC Thunderbay 12t x 2 in Raid10 configuration (thru Storage Spaces and Disk Management) -
Hi Brent.
I agree that there are a lot of things that Pro should work on. I have to make a hundreds more keyboard actions a day, than I did with Avid. And with Avid, I could hit the trim button on an audio track, play the audio until I heard my out point, and the trim was set automatically. A great tool.
In Premiere Pro audio, I have to modify every audio clip manually, even when I set up audio prefs ! Crazy.
I think that the Premiere Pro software folks should spend a season in an edit bay doing network projects to really understand what we need, like borders on a pic in pic section. With Avid, you can very easily add borders of all sorts after altering picture size. Pro can’t without adding a lot more work.
But Pro has the export in cue mode which is GREAT and deals seamlessly with mixed video sources. Avid cannot, at least as of 12 months ago.
And Avid never fixed extremely long QuickTime exports at H264, the title tool is a mess, and their help line crew is a -10 in their ability to actually help.
Avid and Premiere Pro both have great tools with a lot that can be improved, and I wish the two systems could do a melding of the best virtues of each.
Good luck with your projects, and yes it is great to have a skilled asst. editor
-
I get your point but to be fair: there are no perfect editing suites, just different degrees of frustration so you have to pick and chose the issues you want to get used to.
Regarding yours, here are 2 suggestions:
1) Have you tried switching back to the frame raster and pulling the beginning of the audio clip to a full frame before you merge? That way the waveform should stay in place.
2) For your dailies, I believe you could put a Stereo Expander effect in the master channel, drop Stereo Expand to 0 and switch the output to mono in the render panel no matter what the sequence settings are.
Hope those help.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up