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Associated Press switches to Premiere pro
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I should have read this first before posting. From the article:
“Adobe engineering also worked to make it possible to edit a growing file, a key requirement for editing a live story as it happens. Producers cannot always wait for a recording to finish before distributing the stories. The new system lets them make quick editorial decisions and edit a story while it is still being recorded, making it possible for AP teams to deliver final stories faster than ever. This helps AP fulfill demand for real-time access to news content spurred on by several factors, including the advent of 24-hour news channels.”
Also, there’s now “smart rendering” of certain formats (XDcam being one of them) that fit right in to this style of workflow. Cuts only, no effects.
This makes Pr a no brainer in this situation. Nice work.
Jeremy
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I’d say you’re right on the money, Jeremy. The broadcast station I worked at until 2009, agonized over the transition to HD and digital for years. Engineering was in charge of the project, and our chief engineer at the time didn’t want to hear anything from the guys who were in the trenches, using the tools they planned on buying. We were based on Photoshop, Combustion, and Edit* for several years, with workstations doing News, Promotions, Commercial Production, and a daily news magazine format show. With 3 Edit* stations, we were handling the workflow (I was Art Director/Senior Graphic Designer, and providing “pieces” for all of the above, from the on-air look, to elements.
Our NYC headquarters struck up a deal with AVID, with no input whatsoever from us (no surprise there in the big corporate world), and we were suddenly working on four AVID Newscutters, SD versions, with the promise (AVID loved to make expensive promises at the time) of an HD card that for 15 thousand bucks, would just drop in to the boxes we were using. This was the start of our trouble. The AVIDs came in, some minimal training was provided, and our workpace slowed by about 40 percent. We had brought a demo in of the Adobe Creative Suite (at the time, I believe, CS3), and our chief engineer refused to even look at it. Bear in mind, that by this time, we had standardized on Photoshop and After Effects for all of our graphics work, with Combustion still be used for tracking and keying where needed.
As the problems with the AVID systems (Unity, hardware, crashes, lost media, lots of downtime) escalated, we heard through the corporate grapevide that our owners were now “considering” going with Adobe products, and would we kindly set up a test edit station using Premiere Pro (by then CS4). We did, and the AVIDs quickly became capture stations to get media to our Premiere Pro workstations over the network.
Sorry about the long post, but I wanted to show you how convoluted the decision-making process can be when you’ve got a corporate engineering department, a local one, and then people who actually know what they’re working with. It’s a twisted path, and there are things that would never enter into the mind of the single decision-maker which get jumped on when there’s a corporate chain of command to mess it up.
In case anyone’s interested, here’s the PR from 2009 when the final jump was made to Adobe:
https://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200909/HearstTelevisionAdoptsAdobeVideoProductionSolutions.htmlJoe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Joseph W. Bourke] “Sorry about the long post, “
Are you kidding? This is awesome.
Thanks for writing it up.
Jeremy
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Joe, did you ever notice the decisions always seemed after the wine and dine (and private meetings) of NAB? Hmmm…..just sayin.
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Michael –
I was just the Art Director – I wasn’t invited to attend the NAB – just the Engineering Department. But I honestly think they would have made the wrong choices before or after the wine and dine. This was a corporate culture that hired management just barely capable of doing the job, so that they could mold them into good little corporate drones.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
I was brought in on a sunday to defend the decision to deploy FCP and xsan across promos and design at aljazeera english just before launch, I’d actually helped spec the systems for the promo suites, (I’ll have lots of macs with blackmagic and things please, and an 80TB Xsan while you’re at it)
but then there was a massive push to management by engineering to reverse the decision right before launch and force us all onto PCs running grass valley’s weird edius system feeding directly into their K2 storage system.I knew hardly anything about edius, I just knew I wanted FCP, so I started banging on about edius’s poor effects architecture, and the lack of qualified freelancers to drive it when we needed them, then when I was asking the demo guy about it, I realised that it didn’t have OMF export out for the audiopost suite (which it didn’t then) – grass valley were expecting everyone (including long form doco cutters) to lay A1 to A4 stems down onto the hdcam and let the audiopost guys sort it out, in a station with one audiopost suite, that was churning out 30 minut docos like they were going out of style – I leapt on it and a made a holy show about how it was unacceptable that a pro editing system couldn’t talk properly to audiopost – the head of engineering looked murderously annoyed, and our creative director was nearly clapping his hands as he was very keen that we stay mac based.
Engineering gave up after that – everyone else got lumped with edius and we stayed FCP – but they basically swore that we would never have proper access to the K2, and that we would never have dedicated decks – all that they would offer our four suites was a shared tieline to *one* of the decks in the machine room on the other side of the station – with a KVM switcher.
Not that Grass Valley would ever have induced engineering to blanket the station in their slightly weird editing system, we never heard rumours of junkets, financial inducements or anything awful like that. oh no.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Not that Grass Valley would ever have induced engineering to blanket the station in their slightly weird editing system, we never heard rumours of junkets, financial inducements or anything awful like that. oh no.”
But this sort of behaviour goes way back. When the small scandinavian satellite station I worked for moved from Camden to West Drayton there was a tender to build the station and the two main bidders were Ampex and Sony. Despite some blinding big issues that were raised beforehand the tender went to Ampex and over time it came back to bite people on the backside. The Ampex still store never worked properly and was soon replaced by a Quantel system. The Alex cap gens were soon replaced by Aston’s and eventually (only after I’d left) the ACE25’s were replaced by Sony 910’s.
I am sure there were no bribes – it was just a very sweet deal.
Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor -
Amen Dave! I actually used to have a sign in my office, just to piss off management – it read:
“Don’t ask me – I only know what I’m doing!”
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Dave and Joe,
I have seen a wide range of reactions. From management dictating what will happen to where the editors are really making the decision. My experience tells me that when both management and creatives are talking together and sharing their needs, the best decision gets made.
As the guy who many times gets the privilege of working with both management and creative, I find that working with both allows me the ability to show how an Adobe solution would work best in their environment (or not.)
Dennis
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I’m with you there, Dennis. The best tools are always chosen when there is a mutual trust between the technical people and those in the tranches.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com
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