From FCP to PP – Questions from an editor ready for the jump!

[Shane Ross]

[Adam White] “I’ve yet to see what comes with CS6 in terms of effects/filters. I was well underwhelmed with what CS5 offered out of the box. All the standard filters felt very basic/generic/limiting. Has this been addressed with CS6 in some way?”

Nope. The standard ones are just as cheesy as the ones in CS5. And there are VERY few third party solutions. I can count the free ones I found on one finger. Paid ones with one hand…although I hear some After Effects plugins work. But I don’t have them. I’m flush with FCP plugins…and there are HUNDREDS to choose from. There aren’t that many in Premiere land…the demand has been low, until lately.

I haven’t tested collaborative editing. I do know that if you move your media to another location, you need to connect the media one-at-a-time. There is no “relative path” reconnection in PPro. The media management is worse than FCP…and that was pretty poor to begin with. But, you can always be the first to try the collaborative thing, and iron out the details and be the leader on that front. Unless someone else already is and is holding back.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Kevin Monahan]

[Adam White] “Sometimes we have a need for multiple editors to work on the same project. In FCP7 we simply create a project file for each editor.”

You can import Premiere Pro project files into one “master” project. You can pull in others sequences that way.

[Adam White] “I’ve yet to see what comes with CS6 in terms of effects/filters. I was well underwhelmed with what CS5 offered out of the box. All the standard filters felt very basic/generic/limiting.”

I agree we can do more with standard effects (we don’t call them filters, BTW), and transitions. Please make a feature request for the specific effects you’d like to see in the standard installation of Premiere Pro: https://www.adobe.com/go/wish

[Adam White] “If not where do I need to be looking for a good range of free or purchased plug-ins to supplement the filter palette. I know the linking with After Effects is great, but for us it is always preferable to keep this kind of activity all in the same application.”

Free plug-ins and presets can be found all around the community, you do have to hang out where Premiere Pro users lurk. Namely, our forums: https://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere?view=overview

There are plenty of plug-ins you can buy. Here are a few:

ABSoft
Boris FX
CoreMelt
Digieffects
Digital Anarchy
Digital Film Tools
Film Impact
Frischluft
GenArts
Granite Bay Software
ISP
NewBlueFX
Pixélan
ProDAD
Red Giant Software
RE:Vision Effects, Inc.
StageTools
Synthetic Aperture
Tiffen

Let us know which plug-in foundries you’d like to see added to the list.

FYI, certain foundries that were popular with FCP users cannot create plug-ins for Premiere Pro easily. They are reliant upon Quartz Composer technology which can’t create plug-ins for Windows users. We didn’t see many good effects (both standard and 3rd party) in FCP until Quartz Composer came along.

You should be able to edit with media stored on a SAN. We don’t have any file lockout capabilities built in to Premiere Pro yet. Make a request for that, as well.

Thanks!

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

Tweets by kev_mon

[Jon Hiseman]

[FCP legacy has always been great for us in that it is actually very quick and simple to create visual effects, do simple overlays/compositing on the fly, all in as part of the main editorial process. This is often a requirement for the kind of work we do.]

This is the most interesting issue for me. Premiere Pro is very poor at doing even simple composites. In FCP I was able to identify 8+ areas on a clip, isolate them, re-grade them and blend them into a convincing whole in 30 mins. Impossible in PPro. The system was so simple; duplicate the clip above the original / sandwich a gradient in between, change the blend mode of the top clip and regrade it. The gradient had simple controls to isolate a portion of the clip. The killer part was that these could be stacked. I have had 15 of these sets of 3 tracks stacked in no time at all.

After Effects is an awesome piece of software but its slow at that level and, working between 3 locations, I have had endless problems with the round trip using Dynamic Link. Even with CS6 it does not work because of the fundamental path relationship with the file hierarchy.
Pro Tools solved this problem in the mid 90s burying a unique long identifying number in every region(clip). With thousands of regions, they never go missing for long, however you abuse the file system – and a clip thats been inadvertently moved will be automatically found in the background while you work. Adobe know about the PT solution because I spoke with an Adobe demonstrator at a recent CS6 Demo. He says it was being looked into and hopefully would be incorporated in ‘some future upgrade.’ Not good enough I’m afraid. If Adobe are certain that the round trip is the way forward, it has to be bulletproof – at the very least, by 10am next Tuesday morning.

I used to be Jon Hiseman but I’m feeling better now.

[Bret Williams]

At least you can copy and paste Keyframes! 🙂

[Alex Udell]

[Adam White] “Collaborative Editing;
Sometimes we have a need for multiple editors to work on the same project. In FCP7 we simply create a project file for each editor. All of the referenced media is in one shared location for all of the projects. At the end of the process, all of the editors’ sequences are pulled together into one, final master project.”

This has been discussed a lot recently. I’ve used PPro in a workgroup in an assembly line fashion on a SAN and it’s worked well. But there is a fundamental difference in the way PPro handles merging projects that you should be aware.

See this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/3/925208

Not a show stopper, but something to consider in planning your workflow.

Alex

[Ryan Patch]

My $.02 –

As Alex pointed out, there is a problem with the way that Premiere handles multiple versions of the same media in a project that mucks up collaborative editing. As he said, when used assembly-line style, this isn’t a problem (everyone makes one part of the project, unique timelines / media are all imported at the end. Everyone’s happy). However, if people are constantly “checking out” and returning timelines with media from the same project, re-importing these timelines creates duplicates, which is a problem. Again, assembly-line style is the way to go here.

I would like to talk briefly about another small workflow thing you need to be aware of. Premiere creates waveform .pek files (the visualization of the waveforms) and .cfa files from every media file you import. You can specify where these are created. I find it most convenient for these to be placed “next to the source media” (an available option) so that then I take a project media offline, I don’t have all of the conformed sound files hanging around. However, the location of these conformed media files is written into the project, not the actual media file. This means that (at least in 5.5) if you had user 1 import a file on their computer, it would conform it. However, even if that conformed media file is placed next to the original file, when user B imports this file, Premiere will re-conform this file and place another conformed media file next to it.

Now, I will say that CS6 changed something about the way .cfa files work. However, I don’t know what. It was not in any of the documentation. This may be different, but I am not sure. Also, if you just need to nuke all .cfa files on your drive, it’s not a big deal, Premiere will re-generate all of them in the background – but it’s annoying as hell.

To get around this problem, my shop wound up just ONLY “ingesting” files once (through a couple of assistant editors). Then, when editors needed the files, they would pull them by importing projects, not the individual files. This worked fine, but it’s not ideal.

The lack of premiere effects has led me to make heavy use of AE, which is more powerful than FCP. I have had no complaints here – I love this workflow.

Lastly, I must jump in and say that Premiere DOES have relative path relinking… it’s just finicky sometimes. I’d say it works like 70% of the time, but is a nightmare if you are working with Canon or Zoom files that have identical names. Adobe knows this is a problem and is working on it, though.

[Kevin Monahan]

[Jon Hiseman] “duplicate the clip above the original / sandwich a gradient in between, change the blend mode of the top clip and regrade it. The gradient had simple controls to isolate a portion of the clip. The killer part was that these could be stacked. I have had 15 of these sets of 3 tracks stacked in no time at all.”

Hi John,
Forgive me if I’m missing something, but you can use travel matte effects, gradients, and blend modes in Premiere Pro very easily.

Unlike FCP, blend modes run in real time. In FCP, you always had to render anything with the blending mode changed.

Let us know exactly what you would like to see in a future version of Premiere Pro here: https://www.adobe.com/go/wish

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

Tweets by kev_mon

[Jon Hiseman]

[Kevin Monahan] “Forgive me if I’m missing something, but you can use travel matte effects, gradients, and blend modes in Premiere Pro very easily. “
I appreciate that all the facilities are there in theory, but please point me in the direction of the tutorial that allows me to grade 8 different parts of a clip with a minimum of key stokes and keyframe them over time without resorting to the dreaded round trip. I’ve done it in AE but its really hard work.
Of course this is becoming a bigger issue. It seems to me that there is a response to requests(which is very welcome) but not the implications of the requests. Like many folk, I wanted Alt drag to duplicate. You gave it to us for clips but its fundamental to Mac that it works for everything. So, delighted with the Clip duplicate, I immediately tried to duplicate a transition to another clip in the same way – not possible. I don’t think I should have to put a request in for this. Somebody is just not joining up the dots. Sorry to sound so negative and I am really pleased with the improved feel of CS6 but…..

I used to be Jon Hiseman but I’m feeling better now.

[Gus Evangelista]

I find FCP cumbersome compared to PPro when it comes to compositing. Not sure what you meant with “stack 15 of these”, gradients? Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe I’m used to how PPro sorta acts like Photoshop and AE.

In PPro, can isolate sections using multi-point mattes or make use of the Illustrator-like Title tool and create shapes, gradients, etc. I go to Ps and Ae only if I have to.

And yes, I too would love alt-drag for duplication of anything! 🙂

[Adam White]

Thanks all for taking the time to respond – this kind of first hand experience is invaluable to me right now and it all really helps.

The effect shortcomings, as I thought, but I guess there are some OK ones to buy. As Shane said, its irritating to start from scratch as I have so many great ones for FCP. Oh well. Im glad to hear the linking with AE works well, maybe this is the most sensible way forward; I’ll have to test it out.

I gotta say, this stuff about collaborative editing is really sounding like a major headache. To clarify, does PP actually make duplicates of the files themselves, on the hard drive/san for each copy of a project, or does it just give you duplicates of the same files within the project browser? Both are a problem, but doubling up on the actual source files themselves would be worse.