Adobe Premiere Pro CC for Broadcasters

[Steve Brame]

“Premiere Pro has a ‘resolution independent playback engine.’ Essentially, this means you can throw anything on the timeline and expect it to play within reason.”

“In a well equipped system, I have found that I will never render anything…until I’m ready to output to whatever formats I need.”

Perhaps my system just isn’t as “well equipped” as it should be, but I’ve never experienced this with AVCHD media. True, a clip on it’s own plays back smoothly, but drop a 3rd party plug-in on it, Magic Bullet Looks for instance, a plug-in we use quite a bit, and we have to drop the playback res to 1/4 before it’ll even THINK about playing without lag.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID5 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * CS6.x Creative Cloud
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Walter Biscardi]

[Steve Brame] “Perhaps my system just isn’t as “well equipped” as it should be, but I’ve never experienced this with AVCHD media. “

AVCHD has always been the most problematic codec on our CS6 systems and the slowest. Hoping this is improved in CC.

[Steve Brame] “True, a clip on it’s own plays back smoothly, but drop a 3rd party plug-in on it, Magic Bullet Looks for instance, a plug-in we use quite a bit, “

Magic Bullet Looks slows down everything. That’s a massive plug-in in terms of what you need done to the image to play it back. You need dual nVidia cards to really get that plug-in to work in realtime. There are, however, many native plug-ins and even some of the Magic Bullet plug-ins that do work very well in realtime.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

Blog Twitter Facebook

[Steve Brame]

[walter biscardi] “You need dual nVidia cards to really get that plug-in to work in realtime.”

I’m wondering if replacing my 4000 with a GTX 690, greatly increasing the number of CUDA cores, would help.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID5 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * CS6.x Creative Cloud
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Steve Brame]

The inclusion of the ability to add SCC file support for captions directly in the timeline is a boon. We’ve been using a fairly simple and automated method to add subtitles using After Effects, but this would greatly enhance that workflow.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID5 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * CS6.x Creative Cloud
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Michael Hendrix]

Magic Bullet is a beast on any system. I wonder if people will start to shy away from MB in favor of Speedgrade in this next version.

I love Magic Bullet Looks but if someone hands off a project for color correction and I use Magic Bullet, they have to have that plugin to make any adjustments after CC.

Now, as long as everyone is on the newest version, which they will be because of the cloud, we can talk all day long.

Can’t wait….

[Walter Biscardi]

[Michael Hendrix] “I love Magic Bullet Looks but if someone hands off a project for color correction and I use Magic Bullet, they have to have that plugin to make any adjustments after CC. “

And that’s bad how? Just means they need to come back to you for more adjustments. 🙂

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

Blog Twitter Facebook

[Michael Hendrix]

True, but most of these guys give me a project rate which is fair for initial correction and a maybe one adjustment.

[Rupert Howe]

Magic Bullet and MB Looks are not GPU accelerated, nor are any third party plugins – so having a CUDA card won’t help. We’ve been using them in CS6 on a top spec Mac Pro (new 3.06 12 Core) with a Quadro 4000 and 48GB RAM and they still need rendering to playback in full res. I believe Adobe have opened up their engine for 3rd party developers to enable acceleration if they want to – but whether they do is up to them. Until then, you have to use the built in Premiere accelerated effects to get real time playback.

In Premiere CC, though, Adobe have included Speedgrade Lumetri looks built into the effects panel, which basically do what MB Looks does – give you a panel of presets that you can drop on. And they’re all GPU accelerated.

Talking more generally about CC for broadcasters…
We cut our first major show on Premiere CS6 – Great Bear Stakeout, which has already been on the BBC and is on Discovery in the US this weekend (the US 2 hour recut was done on Avid, though) – and pretty much everything we learnt that didn’t work has been fixed in CC, because Adobe liaised with us the whole way. Properly amazing support.

We’re now trialling HD factual formats and 4K natural history shows on CC, and so far the editors and support team have nothing to complain about. People like it more than FCP.

There are some gotchas to look out for in the workflow when using multiple native formats, sending to grade on another system. Great Bear Stakeout had about 10 different codecs/formats, 5 different frame rates, 25TB/800 hours of media on an XSAN, 2GB projects in three suites. It was a beast.

So as easy and tempting as it is to throw all those native cards and files into a project and just start cutting, it’s still very important to take the time to think about how you want to ingest and name the media and manage the project sharing. This will make a huge difference to media management in a shared environment, tracking that media in an archive, and avoiding problems with frame rates, interlacing, etc at the end. And stop you getting into a pickle when you share sequences back and forth – if you don’t have a master project, you’ll end up with a lot of duplicate clips.

For ingest in broadcast environments, it’s still hard to beat FCP log and transfer’s rewrapping of single clips from messy card structures to individual native Quicktime files, with its great naming convention tool. Quicktimes are not Premiere’s file of choice (it has to invoke a 32bit helper app), but they work very well and provide a lot of long term media management and workflow benefits. So I hope Prelude/AME will enable native rewrapping at some point, not just transcoding.

– – –
Rupert Howe
Production Workflow Lead
Support Partners (UK) Ltd at BBC Bristol Digital Village
https://support-partners.com/