Does anyone use PPro as a professional?

[George Sey]

The guy is not having much fun using PPro because he joined the action in the middle. It is like learning at the higher grade without the basic education, Maybe you need to start from PPro 1, and gradually work your way up. Also your system is a dead horse when it comes to editing these days especially the SCSI stuff. I will advise you to get a good system, Corei7, ASUS P5Q, 8gb Vista 64, maybe WIN XP in your case. Spend just a week ay Eddie’s site and you will see things our way.
I have been using Adobe Premiere since 1997 @ 16hrs a day having graduated from a Video and film college in Toronto. CS4 Production Premium is by far the greatest but 6.5 with Canopus is still my favorite and will be glad if Pinnacle Systems and Adobe get together again to produce a very good capture/output card with real time software support, than the junks available now. AVID screwed up Pinnacle Systems big time.

[Jiri Fiala]

To Matt Rickman: depends on who you call a professional.

That may be a guy that does wedding or corporate videography for a living (that would be the majority of Premiere user base).

Or your definition of a “pro” is a broadcast, TV and film editor. In this area, very few editors actually use Premiere, for a single fact – it`s unreliable with long form project and almost impossible to talk to pro audio mixing (you really can`t mix entire TV show or film in Premiere). There are very, very few exceptions of theatrical movies edited with Premiere, Dust of Glory being the example that is being repeated over and over again – but that was edited with great help of Cineform intermediate and is not excatly a narrative piece.

So, basically, not many TV/film kind of pros use Premiere.

[Jiri Fiala]

On a side note. Requiring 8 GB RAM (as Tim Kolb says) for editing app is ridiculous, and cannot be usead as an excuse for lazy code. Heck, I have edited a 20 minute episode of a biking show (admiteddly SD) on my 4 years old laptop with 1 GB RAM and Vista (!) with Avid MC3! I had another episode (same material, another edit) edited on a Premiere CS3 machine with 4 gigs of RAM, it was opening the project for 4 minutes (avid just popped open). Something similar can be said about FCP, which is not as efficient as Avid, but is really quicker than Premiere.

Nice thing about Premiere is a wide support of formats, but, as you may know, if something is featured on a product box doesn`t necessarilly mean it really works – an example would be the painful AVCHD support, unability of scene-splitting HDV (come on, 80 USD Pinnacle has that) and almost nonfunctional OMF/AAF support (very slightly better n CS4).

[George Sey]

The term Professional is always used out of context my the so called professionals. Yes People use Adobe Premiere as a Profession(For a living and if you do not know the software the resources are there for you to learn. After all you were not comfortable with your old program that is why you are trying Premiere. I do not know of anybody who use Premiere alone for film at least not for now in the US but overseas it is normal. However, After Effects is combined with Premiere for lots of composites. Lots of effects are done with Aefx and Premiere (Don’t tell the client that you used a $1000.00 program to accomplish the task as it will eat into your future profits). The bottomline is, if you are not smart or creative you will not know.
On Television today many commercials, Documentaries, Musical Videos, Church Videos and more are all done with Premiere.
With the quality of cameras(quality) coming out, your end product will not tell what software or program you used these days. So a Professional is somebody who uses a $500 software to do a job usually done with a $78,000 machine. Why do you think Avid stopped “Express” and drastically slashed the price of Media Composer.
In Production your source material(Video) is the broadcast quality and you just add your ideas to tell the story.

[Craig Schuler]

We run on Dells here (only vendor we can buy PC’s from) & just bought 4 new Dells with CS4 & were running them with XP w/2 GB RAM & they were crashing all the time, I couldn’t even get mine to capture from a DVCAM deck. Put Vista on mine & now at least it captures, have to run it more to see what else happens. The others seem to have more or less stabilized.

What is wrong with Vista on a Dell? Does it cause crashes just because of the OS?

[David Dobson]

I think it crashed because of the Motherboard chipset. I read somewhere that Intel got a pass on certification at the last minute and so there are a lot of machines that can’t run Vista that say they can. HP upgrade all their MBs to make them work and so Vista works on HP machines. Or so I recall. But 2GB of RAM is definitely not enough for CS4. 4GB is a minimum and 8 would be better – even in 32bit XP. I have two machines – both XP-SP3 AMD dualcore CPUs – one has 4GB and the other has 8GB and they are both reasonably stable – except for a CS3 project that got opened in cs4 – that project crashes a lot.

I have read that Vista and CS4 on the right machine works really well. I am satisfied with CS4 and XP for the time being. I’ll be waiting for Windows 7 before upgrading to 64bit (trying out the Beta now…and so far so good.)

[Craig Schuler]

Im not a big IT guy, know enough to be dangerous. We have 2MB RAM because our IT dept said XP wont use anything more than that. When my machine became so unstable I couldn’t even turn on my deck we decided to try installing Vista. It seems more stable but I have more tests to do.

I am having another problem on onr of the other machines (still with XP) when batch capturing it is missing a ton of clips & says it can’t find the in points or just that the batch capture failed. I have tried rewinding the tapes & that doesnt seem to work, even tried increasing the preroll to no avail. The only machine it’s being a big problem on has a different deck (Sony DSR-1500A) than the others (DSR-11) … I have tried all the settings for decks, specific for the 1500A, Sony Generic, Generic, Alternate, none seem to work better thatn the other. any ideas?

[David Dobson]

XP is able to use more of the RAM than 2GB – not sure how exactly – and in CS4 they have broken the various functions of the program into different sub programs each of which can access 2GB of RAM separately – so it dose pay to have more RAM than the 2GB even in the 32bit XP – though it may depend on your CPU as well (I have 64bit CPUs).

The deck issue I can ‘t help you with much. I’ve only ever used the DSR-11 and the HDV M25U Sony decks. And I don’t do batch captures anymore. However – if there are timecode drop outs on the tape you might try shortening the pre-roll rather than lengthening it. Back in my Avid days (and a few times on FCP projects using the DSR-11 and a time of day timecode shoot (damn them)) I had to change the IN-POINT manually so that the batch would work (if the deck rolls back over a timecode change then it will never find the clip in-point.) Then of course I would have to manually re-insert that edit.

[David Dobson]

Note: I’ve only ever used the DSR11 and M25U decks WITH PPro. I’ve used lots of other decks with Avid and have used FCP to run a digibeta deck – but none of those was FIREWIRE – they were RS-422 deck control and SDI or composite or analog inputs.) My PPro set up is very minimal – no special video capture cards, no hi-speed raid hard drives (just dockable SATAII Drives) and only Firewire for deck control.

[Eddie Lotter]

[David Dobson] “XP is able to use more of the RAM than 2GB – not sure how exactly”

See: FAQ:Can Premiere Pro use 3GB of RAM?

Cheers
Eddie