2011 macs and Premiere Pro

[Todd Kopriva]

People seem pleased with the MacPro towers with the Quadro 4000 card added in.

If you are set on getting a MacBook Pro instead of a tower, then just realize that such a computer isn’t going to have good performance with any NLE. I use my MacBook Pro a lot, but I do my heavy rendering and such using my Mac tower or my HP computer running Windows.

You’ll find useful information here:
“FAQ: What computer and components should I buy for Premiere Pro?”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Todd Kopriva]

> Also is it possible to purchase the Production Premium package, install AE and Photoshop on one computer and install Ppro on another computer and use the same license?

Yes. The single-user retail license allows you to have the software on two computers—just not in use simultaneously. The typical example is for your workstation for primary work and laptop for mobile work Read the end-user license agreement (section 2.5).

> Does Adobe ship installers for both MAC and PC under one purchase?

No.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Robert Brown]

Hi Ewan, I’ll just give you some info on what I did and maybe it’s useful to you. I’m in the same boat regarding FCP. At the end of last year I bought a new 12 core Mac Pro. I got it with the ATI 5870. After this whole FCPX debacle I started to take a look at PPro. I have been an AE user for a long time. I wanted to do a test of the Mercury engine, so I just recently bought an Nvidia GTX 285 on Ebay. You can still get those New for around $370 and it’s a very well reviewed card and holds it’s on in comparison to the Quaddros.

I think something like this, or even an 8 core, is a very good way to go as of course I can still use FCP,
and have CS5.5 all on the same system. And also I use bootcamp and so put Win7 64 on my system drive.
I also have a Kona 3. All of the hardware I have works great in both OS’s. Probably the main benefit to the
OSX side is by having FCP installed, you can use Pro Res even in Premiere. Plus I personally like OSX a bit more because of things like Quickview but they are very comparable.

As for my impression of PPro, what a lot of us are hoping is that it picks up where FCP left off. In many ways it is superior to FCP. Using Canon 5D footage is so easy you can’t understand why FCP chokes so bad on it. It has extremely good scaling and deals with multiple rez files much better than FCP, and you can get a lot of real time performance with effects and color correction etc.

One thing worth looking into is Colorista if you haven’t, and it works very well in PPro. One instance of the plugin has a single secondary CC, but you just add more instances of the plugin for addition secondaries of you need, and they are all accelerated by Mercury and so it’s real time. It’s a pretty powerful CC tool.

Also PPro will do things like drop in lower 3rd files in Animation codec in realtime even on top of layers with scaling and color correction.

Some of the editing in PPro is not quite what FCP has, but they keep encouraging comments and suggestions and so hopefully v6 will get there. But a lot of PPro performance-wise blows FCP out of the water.

[Todd Kopriva]

> but they keep encouraging comments and suggestions and so hopefully v6 will get there.

We are definitely acting on a lot of the feature requests that we’re getting. We appreciate those.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Robert Brown]

Workin on Sunday, nice! Have things been busier over there?

[Todd Kopriva]

> Have things been busier over there?

You have no idea. You’d think that something had happened recently to increase traffic to Premiere Pro forums and such. 😉

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Keith Moreau]

Hi Ewan

I switched about a year ago to Premiere Pro CS 5 and now 5.5. I have an older Mac Pro 2008 with 24GB of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4000 card. It’s a dream to be able to natively edit video without transcoding. Premiere Pro is almost exactly like FCP interface, and they make it even easier by added a FCP keyboard shortcut preset, which I use plus with my own custom additions.

On a Mac, I think it has it’s quirks, but if you have a lot of Prores material or old FCP projects and such, I think it might be a pain to convert over to a PC. Recently, there has been a lot of complaining about the lack of performance of Premiere Pro on the Mac vs the PC. (Including me). It’s hard to tell for me if the PC version is ‘snapper’, but I recently did an experiment where I created a ‘Boot Camp’ partition on my Mac 2008 with Windows 7 and Premiere Pro (that was painful but educational). For those that don’t know, Boot Camp is an Apple Mac feature that allows you to basically use your Mac as a PC and run Windows on it. A lot of people do this, less so more recently with the advent of good virtualization software like VMWare Fusion and Parallels, but you are getting the best performance out of your Mac acting like a Windows PC with Boot Camp. I was able to get Premiere Pro for the Mac Pro PC running, and I had Media Managed a Premiere Pro project moved over to a NTFS partition just so I could compare the performance of the Windows version vs Mac on the same exact hardware. Premiere Pro recognized the Quadro 4000 and allowed me to use Mercury Playback Engine GPU optimization with it, which was nice.

The result? Well the well known ‘laggy drag of clips on the timeline’ bug that you may have seen here and on the Adobe PPro forums does not exist on Windows, just the Mac version. Overall I would say that the responsiveness was slightly snappier, maybe 5% to 10%. It was not a large project, so I don’t know if the Windows version would suffer from what I’ve experienced as a project gets more complex, but I have a feeling when Adobe solves the laggy timeline problem this might also go away on the Mac.

However, there is no way I could convert over to PC at this time, I realized when trying to work with my small sample project. I have tons of legacy FCP 7 projects I’d need to still use (if even just to export the XML to PPro) , I have have tons of plugins I use with Premiere Pro Mac, there seem to be some flavors of Prores that I was using in my project that Premiere Pro windows didn’t recognize, in fact it seemed that a lot of the Quicktime stuff was just unavailable on the Windows version, which, if you have a lot of Quicktime Prores or other files, it might be a pain to have to figure out. I currently have several RAID 5 multi-TB eSATA drives, working with a card that isn’t supported on Windows, and formatted in HFS + which is supported in Windows only by 3rd party software (MacDrive and others which I have used on occasion).

The slightly snapper response of the Windows Premiere Pro wasn’t astoundingly different, it was less than I thought, considering the reports to the contrary. Maybe if I had a 2011 whiz-bang PC I’d notice more of a difference, but I was also comparing that to my Mac OS experience on the same hardware, so I think it was a fair comparison.

So there would be a huge investment for me to do the the switchover. Plus I have all kinds of software that runs on the Mac, all kinds of Apple projects and software. All kinds of non-video editing stuff as well that I use my Mac for. So while it was interesting to see what the experience could be like, I also realized that I had to stay with my Mac.

If all I did on my system was editing, and I didn’t have a decade of FCP projects and media, I might reconsider, but for now I’m staying with the Mac and I hope they come out soon with a new Mac Pro with Thunderbolt, and I hope Adobe takes all these comments about Mac vs PC performance and other feature requests to heart. They are going to be getting a TON of Mac OS Premiere Pro users coming their way.

-Keith

[Tom Daigon]

Nicely done Keith. I applaud your comparative experiment with the Mac and PC. I can only say your general attitude and investment in your system echoes my experience as well. I feel blessed at this point in time to have an early Mac Pro 2008 since I have not experienced any “drag lag” with the short things I have worked on. Based on my experience with Adobe so far, I have the utmost confidence that crucial issues will be addressed. And I’m sure having a lot of fun sliding up the learning curve. 😉

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Ewan Lim]

Thanks for your input Keith!

I only have 5 years of legacy FCP projects in my own system at home. 3 of which are still in the “progress” of being finalized and closed by the client.

I’ve heard of some issues with the updates of the Mac OS and Nvidia cards which was resolved with updates. My next question would be if the Lion OS has any current issues with the Nvidia graphics cards although I haven’t heard of any lately. Purchasing a new Windows 7 might be a cost issue for me so I would have to stay with the Mac OS.

I’m also concerned with the fact that I have to purchase a new MacPro and then replace the AMD radeon graphics card with a Nvidia Quadro FX 4800. Will it cause any further problems? Considering that if I purchase a new Macpro (2011), it will come with the Lion OS and I’m not sure if there will be any issues or not.

@Todd:
It is great to see a VERY quick response from an Adobe rep.! Makes me glad. I wish that every other company was this responsive.

Yes. The single-user retail license allows you to have the software on two computers—just not in use simultaneously. The typical example is for your workstation for primary work and laptop for mobile work Read the end-user license agreement (section 2.5).

So basically, I can’t run AE on one PC/Mac while running Ppro on another? Since they share the same license.

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I wish that I could just purchase a Macbook Pro and still be able to fully utilize Ppro and AE’s abilities but it would be a problem since they use AMD graphics cards and not Nvidia and I’m not sure if replacing it would even be an option as it will void the warranty and all. I used to be one of those travel, shoot and edit on the go type of guys.

Or should i just grow some balls and purchase a PC?

Another issue is that I would like to advise my employers on considering purchasing an Adobe Production Premium package as we are using FCS3 and it is EOL. They just recently purchased it a few months back and might/will not be too keen on replacing it just yet. They will probably wait till FCS3 is not usable and jump onto whatever is good at that point of time. Our graphics team will be using AE for graphics (duh) such as lower thirds, opening titles and etc, so I believe that using Premiere Pro would be a time saving solution as it will cut down on time spent on rendering out and make our workflow faster. Plus, I could always make immediate fixes to the graphics if there is a need to, instead of going back to the graphics and having them to render out and etc etc etc… *takes a gun and shoots himself*

If Avid had a workflow as seamless as this then I would definitely suggest that. (I started on Avid but who really didn’t start on Avid or actually hasn’t used it before)

So I need to make a decision on my next Mac purchase (or rather upgrade since my old one is barely living) and also on what to inform my employers.

Ewan
Avid, FCS3, Premiere Pro, After Effects

[Keith Moreau]

Ewan

You won’t get Nvidia CUDA support with a Macbook Pro as the graphics card, though excellent on the high end models, is AMD (ATI) Radeon and isn’t CUDA capable. That means you won’t get real time effects processing using CUDA, which is an advantage with Premiere Pro. That being said, you can edit simpler projects, if you have a fast 4 processor Macbook Pro with the RAM maxed out (you can get up to 16GB) and if you have a SSD hard drive, and also have your media on an external FW800 or better yet, when they come out Thunderbolt hard drives, you might get by.

However, Lion JUST came out last week. On all hardware and software, there WILL BE PROBLEMS. Pro video producers will not typically upgrade an OS for a while if they have a choice. I took about a year before I upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6, and Premiere Pro forced me to do that because though 10.5 was doing just fine as an editing platform PPro CS5 needed 10.6. Your dilemma would be that any Mac released on or after Lion will probably only support Lion, you can’t usually go back.

However, I do believe that hardware released before Lion could still run on 10.6. This means the MacBook Pros and Mac Pros.

However… for major editing work, I think you’ll do best with something like a Mac Pro. You can add all the RAM you can afford and PPro and After Effects loves and needs RAM. I have 24GB and sometimes I feel I could use more. And you can add an Nvidia CUDA capable card.

Right now Adobe is offering a 50% off PPro and Production Premium ‘crossgrade,’ you might convince your employers that you could save a lot of time and hard drive space by not having to transcode all your footage to Prores (if you have DSLR or AVCHD you have to now in FCP 7).

Before getting a new Mac Pro you should see if you can still load it with 10.6, then Premiere Pro and the Nvidia cards should work well. Or be very, very sure that Premiere Pro and any graphics card work well with Lion. And you can save some money by not getting the 4800 but getting the 4000 instead which I think is the best bang for the buck, I had a 4800 but returned it for the 4000 and haven’t noticed much less performance. I think RAM and speedy hard drives might be more important than 4000 vs 4800.

To find out more about the Mac hardware, here’s a good website:

https://macperformanceguide.com/

Good Luck.