3 big projects coming up, considering a switch to PP from FCP7. Any insights to a few general questions I have would be very much appreciated…

[Greg Jones]

I’m running Premiere Pro CC on a 2008 8 core MacPro. I upgraded the video card to a Mac Edition Nvidia gTX680 and it works great. I can do 7 or 8 layers of effects in real time. The switch from FCP7 to Premiere Pro was pretty seamless. They even have a FCP7 keyboard shortcut set. The performance is light years ahead of FCP7.

I’ve edited 1 60 minute doc and countless shorter videos. Can’t say I have anything negative to say. Adobe has pretty much fixed any issues I’ve had through updates.

Greg Jones
D7,Inc

[Iain Faulkner]

Hi Bryan,

I’m not working in 4k yet, but I made the move about two years ago, having realised that FCP7 was dead and that FCPX was an unworkable mix of genius and bonkers.

I find that after about 12 months of cursing new software, one rounds the curve and it becomes the solution of comfort!

The one thing I didn’t do was to reconfigure Premiere to match FCP’s keystrokes, as that seemed like clinging onto the past – you either learn the new product or you don’t.

I love Premiere. There’s virtually nothing you can’t throw at it, and CC seems much more stable than previous versions. (What I don’t like is the ‘send to after effects’ functionality – at first it seems amazingly useful and efficient, but I had a serious AE corruption that then, of course, corrupted the return to the Premiere timeline – wouldn’t have mattered if I’d duplicated the timeline first, of course, but I was working fast and…well, I didn’t. Also, not all effects from Premiere transfer over.)

You can always do the 1 month trial just to see how it fits.

I know I haven’t addressed any of your specific issues – all I can say is that it works well for us – you really have to have CC anyway to get AE and Photoshop, so it’s financially a no-brainer.

Good luck with your decision!

[Frank Tourv]

Tv station here, we have ran multiple shows with pp sp far – the first thing is that i hope you mean premiere cc and not cs6 – they are quite different, cc is immensly better.

Second – your graphics card is key here to run non-iframe codecs. If you have old nvidia cardS, your doomed. Get yourself a 2gb+ vram graphics card from nvidia/amd and you should be set.

In terms of long timeline, avid is still king but not by much. Premiere cc can handle long timelines, but dont start adding linked ae cc comps in theres and multi layers of graphics. With a strong supported graphics card, your gonna be just fine. Make sure you export your omf out of audition though(premiere – direct link to audition – audition makes the omf to protools) – omf and aaf exports out of premiere is not so good.

Im not so sure about the 4k – even the new macpro struggles, but i hear adobe is working on optimizing premiere for 4k footage and dual gpu support

[Gary Tobyn]

The one thing I would advise you to be aware of is that merged clips (from dual source video,and audio) do not work properly.

You can certainly merge them together fine but Adobe Premeiere seems incapable of marinating the links back to the original media properly.

Match frame will act erratically
Three point edits of just the audio do not work (I have had to edit in the video along with the audio onto a spare track and then delete the video I never wanted).
Ad most important of all EDL and XML exports are broken. The XML is gets I ported by the next person in the post production chain as just a single clip to a random piece of footage.
The only way around this I found was to use match frame (when it works) copy the time code then find the original non sync video clip and edit this into the timeline instead of the merged clip

A huge waste of time and in my eyes makes premiere practically useless for editing any film where you have dual source footage (which in my experience is every drama I have worked on).

If this is just me please let me know what I am doing wrong

Gary

[Bryan Roberts]

Thanks all! I’ve been trying it out on a project (television show) I’m cutting from home this week and it’s been just awesome so far.

Gary – I’m not quite following what you mean by merged clips? That sounds like maybe it’s a hiccup on your end, otherwise I’d assume it’d be a pretty well known flaw if XML was broken! … or perhaps not :/

EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com

[Gary Tobyn]

Merged clips is what pp calls it when you sync audio from a source other than your camera to your rushes.

The software clips a new virtual clip that is an amalgam of the two pieces of media.
In FCP7 or avid the new clip,that you create is still referencing the original files so that edl’s and XML files send the correct info for the grade/online etc.

Premiere seems to be incapable of this. I’m not alone in this problem having looked around on the forums and its not something you would find out about until you hand off to your grader/onliner and find the problem.

I don’t know what the work flow is for the projects you have but I wanted to warn you before you started on any big projects (like I did) and not be aware of it.

If you are using merged clips and have time try a test.
Export an XML of your timeline and see if you can import it into Resolve or fcp7.
You don’t have to reconnect the media. If it is what I and others have experienced you will see just one clip in the imported timeline instead of you cut.

The footage I was working with we’re Sony mxf’s maybe it’s a codec thing but all of your cuts should still exist in the imported timeline even if the footage cannot be interpreted.

If it doesn’t do it to you I would love to hear about it.

[Gerard Tay]

I would suggest working with multicam sequences if you are working with dual system sound audio. Multicam sequences can hold one or more streams of video and audio in place, and multicam has a further advantage of allowing you to utilize features such as batch syncing of video to audio clips with audio analysis. It’s like having PluralEyes built in. But beyond that, it allows you to “flatten” your multicam edits, which will revert your edits to that of a normal clip object to facilitate an XML workflow.

For the audio, you can export an OMF like you used to and that will work with ProTools.

When match framing from a multicam sequence, the first match frame will match frame to the multicam sequence in the source monitor. When you hit match frame a second time, it will match frame back to the original clip.

[Gerard Tay]

Hi Bryan,

I do use FCP7, sometimes Avid, but I enjoy cutting in Premiere. So far Premiere has been largely stable for me on larger projects, although it also seems to like more RAM especially when dealing with native formats. One of the funny things about switching to Premiere is that you can actually start working with slower drives since many native formats are heavily compressed and require less drive throughput than when using a ProRes intermediate. But of course, as always, the faster the machine the better, the faster the drives the better (helps with the rendering/exporting).

Getting a good fast/more modern GPU would help greatly as will the newer OS’s, since graphics drivers (especially the ATI ones) are released with OS updates.

[Bryan Roberts]

Thanks for the input – I went ahead and pulled the trigger on a GTX 780 and it’s a beast of a graphics card. Tons of CUDA cores, it just annihilates in Premiere. As of the 10.9.2 release of Mavericks, the GTX780 has been added so you can just buy the “PC” card since they don’t offer a mac version and you just don’t have the white boot screen. Otherwise it works perfectly and shows up in the system profiler perfectly. At $500, it’s quite a steal and just blows the Quadro 4000 out of the water for video editing.

So far I’m loving Premiere on this little test I’ve been going on so far (just a 30 minute show, but lots of high action, flashy car stuff, it’s a fun high energy edit).

How much ram are you running Gerard?

EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com

[Gerard Tay]

Hi Bryan,

At home I use my laptop for light edits. That has 8 GBs of RAM. Barely sufficient for long form, so I have AtMonitor running to monitor RAM usage and I purge RAM when it gets filled up. At work it depends on the facility, but I have edited R3D and various types of projects on beefed up machines (24GBs of RAM with good GPU) and those rock. Very impressed with the level of performance when working with some of these formats.