Considering Premiere Pro – questions

[Jon Barrie]

Quick answers.
1. No
2. Yes
3. Yes

If you do much AE work then PPro’s integration can’t be matched.
FCP needs its own Codec because it can’t read new camera codecs natively and probably never will. Which means everything needs to be a QT mov file. Thus ProRes.
There are positives and negatives on all sides. Adobe has many options that suit certain projects using multi-apps projects better. Adobe is cross platform, FCP aint, and the files it makes that are not ProRes (ie AppleHDV) can only be read on a Mac with FCP installed.

I use FCP and PPr. Most of my work is streamlined when I am working in PPro. Now that PPro can import FCP XML I think I’ll be doing all finishing with Full Adobe Suite.

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Jeff Pulera]

I’m a Premiere Pro CS3 user, having my own production company, and have been using Matrox hardware acceleration for several years. Currently using the Matrox RT.X2, which provides realtime editing in CS3 (CS4 drivers soon), manaing NO rendering for SD or HD. If speed is important and you are considering Premiere, I’d look at Matrox as part of the package.

Jeff Pulera
Digital Vision

[Dennis Radeke]

1 – No. It doesn’t need to as Jon mentioned. Adobe tries to handle all media in their native (read not converted) format. That being said, Premiere Pro can read and playback both ProRes and DNxHD files once you load those free codecs onto your system. It’s really the best of both worlds.
2 – Yes, but Adobe has more work to do. The GPU acceleration of CS4 is more around After Effects and Photoshop. Premiere Pro does have 3 GPU accelerated effects on the Windows side.
3 – Yes and in fact it has an old (FCP 3) version of the shortcuts built in. Plus you can make your own…

[Chris Davis]

Many thanks to the three of you.

Relieved to know that ProRes clips go right into Premiere Pro (so long as FCP is installed on the computer). Sounds like there is indeed much more real time capability with effects on Premiere than FCP, I suppose due to the use of the graphics card.

I read a couple reviews on the Matrox RT.X2, but I need to look at it more to understand exactly what it does.

[Jon Barrie]

Just to clarify, ProRes is a codec that can be read on PC’s too. It can’t be written to ProRes from a PC. (Download decoder from apple.com)

Matrox is not a Graphics Card. It’s a RT Hardware Card that does ingest,output and handles dedicated effects, renders in RT directly doing the calculations itself away from the CPU or GPU.

– Jon

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Alex Udell]

Just to note as well…

Matrox RT.X2 is PC only…

I have heard of ppl installing in a Mac and running under Bootcamp successfully, but it will not run under the Mac OS.

You can think of the Matrox line similar to the AJA and Black Magic in terms of them enabling I/O of non fire wire (or file based) based tape sources…

However, Matrox also supplies a lot of additional filters that leverage the CPU and graphics hardware (as well as some hardware on the Matrox itself) to perform many useful effects in real time or offer highly accelerated rendering.

We have have 9 Matrox systems here on a SAN and enjoy them a lot.

Alex

[Darren Edwards]

Re Q3: there are several nice editing keyboards out there for
Premiere. We get ours (pic missing an ‘Adobe Premiere’ badge in top
right corner of keyboard. Maybe it’s added post-factory.) …

From Siren Technology, who also bundle in a shuttle controller …

Shuttle is fully configurable.

They’re configured out of the box for PPro 1.5/CS2, so will require
reprogramming for CS3 onwards, although you’ll find that both
units will also work in After Effects with barely any reconfiguration.

D.

x-gf.com