Avid possibly?

[David Mcgavran]

Do you have an email where I can respond?

Thanks

Dave

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David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
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[Brian Cooney]

you can email bcooney@coca-cola.com

Head of Post Production, Coca-Cola Studios Atlanta, GA. Telly Award Winning Editor and Motion Gfx Artist.

[Peter Price]

Hey Brian,

Just wanted to chime in on my experiences so far. I have a facility running Avid Media Composer 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro CC on all of our Macs. We have one new Mac Pro, several fully loaded iMacs 27 inch, and the rest are the old Mac Pro towers.
I have run into very similar instability issues with Premiere Pro and new Mac Pro both in 10.9.2 and 10.9.3. I know that in 10.9.3, exporting pretty much got broken. But after reading exhaustive forum postings about 10.9.3, and it breaking GPU intensive tasks such as exporting, we actually had to revert to working in FCP 7 till some of these bugs fleshed out. However…we are running fairly stable on the latest version of iMacs and also on the old Mac Pros.
Also…are you running any video hardware on your workstations? I know we have run into some flacky Thunderbolt stuff with our Video I/O, but when we turned it off and used just computer monitors, we have experienced exception stability using PPro.
We still have ever intention of using PPro and love the software, but it seems with the new GPU architecture of the latest Mac Pro…we are not purchasing any new Mac Pro machines until these bugs get resolved and they do seem to be surrounded around these Mac Pro versions…

Lastly…it is true that all NLE’s have there fair share of bugs, however Avid Media Composer does run fairly well and stable, with little to no crashes. However there a TON of features that I feel are much more intuitive and accessible in PPRo. Avid feels a bit dated in it’s implementation modern features and overall UI feel. But at the end of the day if the software feels better to you, that will be the right tool. Most of our users that were on FCP 7 don’t care for Avid or the learning curve, so they have gravitated towards Adobe.

Hopefully some of these Adobe folks you are talking to can help you through some of the challenges, as this new slew of Adobe updates are pretty rad!

[Brian Cooney]

Thanks so much Peter for your feedback. Very helpful. Yes I think I’m going to hold tight and hope that the folks responding from Adobe can help with some of these issues, but as you said, not sure what they can do presently with the new Mac pros. We are using a a few thunderbolt I/o devices . I’ll check into that. The folks at Adobe have been reaching out and the thing I keep hearing from everyone is to switch from gpu to CPU settivngs within PPro and media encoder. I’ve tried this within 10.9.3 without success but maybe now having reverted to 10.9.2 it will help. Although I hate doing that in principle with all the horsepower the Mac pros have. I’m going to get on the phone with these guys today aGain and see what we can come up with. Too bad the new Mac pros didn’t come with Cuda capability. Maybe difference video cards besides the AMDs would go a long way.

Brian

Head of Post Production, Coca-Cola Studios Atlanta, GA. Telly Award Winning Editor and Motion Gfx Artist.

[Brian Cooney]

On a side note… Why would apple create a beast of a machine designed specifically for FCPX, ( heard it runs solid on the new macros) and still hold to the prosumer feel of FCPX? This jogs my brain. Simple things like you don’t have freedom over panel layout. There’s one option to have viewers play on a dual screen, but everything else is confined to it’s inflexible layout. I always felt apple had the best stock fx and I think this is the case with FCPX as well, but as I told another colleague, by training up and comings on FCPX is to rob them of the opportunity of learning the fundamentals of video editing. Knowledge of codecs, video architecture, it all seems bi-passed by a consumer friendly “garage band-ish” over simplification of the craft.

Head of Post Production, Coca-Cola Studios Atlanta, GA. Telly Award Winning Editor and Motion Gfx Artist.

[Alex Udell]

I went thru this a lot in my mind. Why would Apple do the things that they do?

My guess is that there is some philosophy behind the design that may be way ahead of the curve in terms of being based on working on devices that aren’t desktops. The interaction assumptions may be based on the idea that you may be working with touch based interaction as opposed to mouse and keyboard.

Why would they jettison all the hardware and infrastructure? They may be thinking that a lot more processing will happen in the cloud or at least WAN.

All these things they won’t ever divulge on a road map because their corporate culture doesn’t allow it.

And in the short term the pro video market was a tiny niche for profit with a high cost for support.

Basically they have along term view that says it will be cheaper to recover customers in the long term rather than migrate and support them over the transition….

What we know as Pro video today is already changing blindly fast and won’t look remotely the same in 10 years.

That’s my best speculation any way (with no inside knowledge).

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[David Gaudio]

I honestly think that the apparent road that DaVinci Resolve is on might be the way to go for the future; kind of what Walter Murch talked about years ago when I saw him at a LACPUG meeting: the more everything gets geared towards just one app, integrating all the powerful features from various other ones, the better off we’ll be. I’m very curious to see just how far BMD takes the editing features of Resolve and will download ver 11 just as soon as it becomes available. If they start adding on audio features (and it already seems more powerful than FCP X in that department based on the video demo I watched) that will be a further indication of their intentions.

[Tim Kolb]

I think we’re heading rapidly toward the post-professional era for a large slice of the viewed content market.

Apple is just way ahead of the curve again. I’d guess that how FCPX runs on an iPad is a far more important issue than how it runs on the new MacPros.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tim Kolb] “I think we’re heading rapidly toward the post-professional era for a large slice of the viewed content market.”

Aren’t we already in the middle of it? Something like 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube alone every minute.

Even with that though I don’t see a significant drop in demand for professionally created content.

[Tim Kolb]

Apple typically doesn’t seem to care that an existing market is still viable if they can position for the next trend and leave it behind…they’ve certainly demonstrated this tendency many times.

FCPX isn’t for us 20+ year pros…it’s for our children to use on their tablets. If it works for some of us pros along the way, they won’t turn it away, but the technical support structure and application pricing is clearly targeted at a non-professional user.

It may be great on the new MacPros, but I really believe that isn’t the host system that Apple sees as the sweet spot, from a long-view sales perspective.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor