Considering Premiere Pro – a few questions

[Tim Kolb]

Well…here goes…

HDV…in FCP I’d recommend editing HDV on an uncompressed timeline without the transcode to ProRes if you want to save some time…

HDV can be handled as HDV in PPro, or you could create a custom uncompressed project setting to handle it in the same way. An uncompressed timeline won’t keep re-compressing when you’re slicing up GOPs.

Not sure about RT acceleration…I’d doubt it’s as snappy as the PC, however PPro doesn’t have the blank “you have to render” screen on anything…it might be slow in an area that needs rendering as in drop frames through an unrendered effect, etc, but it won’t have the ‘render’ screen that you might be visualizing from FCP.

Stability issues…yes, indeed. This is always an interesting one as we’ve had users with issues resulting from using non-certified display card drivers, loading up games on their post machine, you name it. Overall, all the programs in CS3/4 need RAM…lots and lots of RAM. On the Mac, you just put some in and put some more in, and it works…on Windows XP, You can have any amount you want, but the OS only sees 2.5 GB… So a great way to make a program unstable is to run it on a machine where it’s RAM-starved. Many users notice that things improve markedly when they move to Vista 64 or to a Mac.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

Thanks for your response.

Stability issues…yes, indeed… Overall, all the programs in CS3/4 need RAM…lots and lots of RAM… Many users notice that things improve markedly when they move to Vista 64 or to a Mac.

This doesn’t sound promising. How much RAM does the program need? Is it possible to add enough RAM to make PPro as stable as FCP?

[Tim Kolb]

Yes, you can get enough RAM, just not in WXP…as I indicated, users on a Mac or on Vista 64 can add RAM to their contentment and go…CS4 has lots of RAM available so each app can get their full helping of RAM. i’d go with 8 GBs minimum with CS4.

FCP is pretty good, but I’ve seen FCP systems with quirks as well…if you tried to run FCP without enough RAM, it wouldn’t run very well either.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

HDV can be handled as HDV in PPro, or you could create a custom uncompressed project setting to handle it in the same way. An uncompressed timeline won’t keep re-compressing when you’re slicing up GOPs.

Is the only way to avoid rendering HDV footage in HDV in PPro to render it in uncomressed 8 or 10 bit before compressing it to H.264 for Blue Ray (or downsizing it and compressing it for MPEG-2 for SD DVD)?

FCP is pretty good, but I’ve seen FCP systems with quirks as well…if you tried to run FCP without enough RAM, it wouldn’t run very well either.

It seems like you are saying that PPro CS3/4 is as stable as FCP 6, so long as there is at least 8GB of RAM and it is used on a Mac (or a PC with Vista). Is this correct?

Thanks again.

[Tim Kolb]

I didn’t say to ‘render’ the footage to uncompressed in either case…

Use a timeline that is uncompressed…and edit the HDV directly on the timeline. Recompression isn’t needed before editing. In both FCP and CS4, you can export the sequence to the authoring app and not compress until that step.

Stability…anyone who says ‘X’ is as stable as ‘Y’ as a matter of fact is lying or delusional. I happen to use PPro and have used Premiere for 10 years…I do SD, HD, 2K…

I’ve not experienced anywhere near the issues with runnability that the production company I room with has had with FCP… However, all experience is anecdotal and if I was to somehow fashion my own experience into “FCP is a problem and PPro is Great”, I’d be talking as off-base as those who make the blanket statement that “FCP is rock solid and PPro is buggy.”

I’m saying that most of the issues that have a basis in fact with CS3/4 can be attributed to the apps running out of RAM on Windows XP… 8 GBs should be good, but as it always is with RAM and video, 16GBs would probably be better, but I’d guess that Apple’s apps would benefit and improve in performance with more RAM too…

4 GBs isn’t enough…my 2 GB laptop really can’t dynamic link at all… I feel that THAT is factual.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

I didn’t say to ‘render’ the footage to uncompressed in either case… Recompression isn’t needed before editing. In both FCP and CS4, you can export the sequence to the authoring app and not compress until that step.

I didn’t mean to misquote you, just trying to understand what you’re saying. To clarify, can I export my sequence to Compressor without rendering (into HDV or ProRes), and recompress the unrendered HDV footage directly into H.264 or SD MPEG-2 in this way? Is a similar workflow possible with Adobe? I thought the footage had to be rendered first, but would love to be wrong.

I’ve not experienced anywhere near the issues with runnability that the production company I room with has had with FCP… However, all experience is anecdotal and if I was to somehow fashion my own experience into “FCP is a problem and PPro is Great”, I’d be talking as off-base as those who make the blanket statement that “FCP is rock solid and PPro is buggy.”

Makes sense to me. Thanks again for your help.

[Alex Udell]

Just to interject briefly….

Premiere can cut HDV natively.

I assume the use of a uncompressed timeline is useful in that if you build any FX that have to be rendered for playback during editing, you won’t suffer a recompression artifacts.

However, the HDV footage itself doesn’t have have to be changed into anything prior to starting the editing process.

Tim, do I have that right?

Thanks,

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv

[Tim Kolb]

Yes, Alex, you are definitely correct.

My perception of Chris’s question was that he was looking for a way to avoid the GOP reconstruction recompression step that would result from a render/export of the timeline…

Native HDV being a fixed data rate, does have to recompress…

I did an article back before Pro Res existed here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kolb_tim/demystifying_hdv.php

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

Thanks for the link. From your article:

“FCP can ingest HDV natively and edit on an uncompressed timeline, avoiding any recompression issues as the timeline itself is not attempting to maintain an HDV data rate…. The output of the timeline would then involve going out HD-SDI to a conventional HD format (probably not a normal event video workflow) or transcoding back to HDV or to SD DVD or whatever.”

I’m a little lost here. Are you saying that there’s a way to both render HDV footage after adding effects and compress it into, for example H.264 for Blue Ray in just one step (with custom bitrate settings and everything); or that it must be rendered (recompressed) into one codec (e.g. HDV or ProRes) once effects are applied, then recompressed again into another (e.g. H.264)?

Is the main point of editing in an uncompressed timeline to minimize the image loss that eventual rendering in to HDV will do? If I render parts along the way to allow real time playback, will this require the traditional super fast RAID array for uncompressed HD to pull off?

Thanks for your patience.
-Chris

[Jiri Fiala]

From my experience, I would answer like this:

1) no, premiere doesn`t have any built-in intermediate codec like ProRes.
2) rendering times are similar. you won`t have to render anything on Premiere if you can live with choppy playback.
3) FCP is definitely more stable and robust than PPro. You get about the same level of (in)stability with PPro on either Mac or PC (I have both with CS4) – I thought I will get more stability and responsiveness on Mac, but that is not the case. FCP seems to run on 1 GB RAM at the same speed as Premiere CS4 with 3 gigs of RAM… CS4 is an incredible memory hog, due to componentization. It`s nice that some tasks are done in background, but this detachment of core functions from Premiere itself (pproheadless.exe, importprocess.exe etc.) means higher RAM consumption and is more prone to crashes. More programs mean more problems, it`s that simple.

Hope this helps.