General Premiere Problems of a Final cut Crossgrader

[Chris Tompkins]

APP has a known problem with Animation codec and alpha – don’t use it.
Use Prores4444 w/ alpha instead when you need alpha channel.

Edit you camera files raw, in their native format, this is what APP is designed to do. It will create/render preview files while editing.

Export final edit to create your master and deliverables.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Karim Daire]

Hi Chris,

thanks for your reply.
I tried again but I remember I user Prores444 before and changed back to Animationcodec because Premiere messes this up just the same. I found the fix but its just plain ridiculous. If I use alpha footage and the video layer below changes from content to none the layer above (even if fully opaque) switches to blue.. not matter which codec I use.

Since I am working with Premiere I am missing Final Cuts reliability. Am i the only one who always stumbles across bugs like this?
Also for the export/render times. When I work like you propose (native Video codec mixed with prores422/444 Animations/Titles I get ridiculous rendert times on export.

Thats why I wonder if I know that I will master to Prores422 isn’t it a more useful workflow to use a ProRes422 for my preview files and then use these preview files to render on Export. I mean, why should I use DSLR preview files rendered in premiere to export to ProRes from Premiere… that seems redundant to me.
If I render on my timeline an get WYSIWG+fast final exports in the end, that would be exactly the FCP workflow. It kills me to have unreliable export times if I got a deadline, especially if premiere then renders bluescreens it doesn’t display in my timeline before. I don’t know how many hours I have wasted with this and I just don’t find a working fix.

Since many say that Premiere is a worthy replacement of FCP7 I start to wonder what I am doing wrong here to get these unacceptable results from the program.
Render times are massively slower than in my previous workflows on the same machine?!

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Ryan Holmes]

What type of video card do you have? I’m running an Nvidia Quadro card and export times are radically reduced compared to FCP7.

I’ve also had the blue alpha channel problem and don’t yet know of a fix for it. I’m hoping CS6 address it.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Karim Daire]

Hi Ryan,

I am working on a Macbookpro17″ with a radeon 6750m and for video playback with a Matrox MXO2. But actually I am working without videocard.

Of course when talking about “slow renders” I compare results on exactly the same machine and I never had problems working on a Macbook with Final Cut. Premiere takes breaks when working on large projects with a lot of footage. preview often freezes and I get totally unreliable playback at times. I also regularly get problems with lost render files or corrupt render files that need to be deleted and rerendered.

I am a little stumped since the general feedback on premiere was so good lately and it looks like many professionals changed to Premiere if not back to Avid.

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Darren Kelly]

Honestly guys. FCP is so 2008.

There is no comparison between the two. Premiere Pro is simply faster, more realtime, more compatibility – etc.

A Macbook Air was never designed to do any heavy lifting. It’s a glorified iPad. Check for mail, surf the web, check your pictures in the field.

You need the right tools for the job, which right now happens to be Premiere CS6 on a Windows 7 machine, with the correct memory amount, correct video card, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

DBK

[Ryan Holmes]

Darren ~ I don’t think I’d go that far. FCP7 is still an extremely capable NLE. Slower in comparison to PP or MC – yes, but it’ll still get the job done.

Karim ~ You’re MacBook Pro should still get the job done. However, because your video card is ATI you won’t get the great benefits of the Mercury Playback Engine that harnesses the power of CUDA technology from Nvidia. CS6 should start to change this as Darren alludes to since they will begin integrating more Open CL code to harness the power of ATI cards (since that’s all that Macbook Pro’s ship with currently). Also impacting your playback will be where you store your media – is it on a network attached RAID, a firewire drive, a USB drive, an internal hard drive, etc. Also what type of media – SD, HD, ProRes, Uncompressed, etc. Further how many filters, FX, etc are you applying in the timeline.

Realtime playback is great and PP is making leaps and bounds in that area, but there are limits. There are always limits! If you have an older machine (i.e before 2010) that can impact things. The very nature of being on a laptop instead of a desktop is a limitation as laptops don’t have the same muscle as a desktop (memory, processing cores, GPU, etc.). I haven’t gotten my hands on CS6 yet, so I can’t speak to whether or not that would help your situation. However, running ATI video cards (as your Macbook Pro is) certainly impacts your ability for smooth realtime playback.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Mike Molenda]

Give the CS6 demo (released officially today) a shot. The 6750M card in your MacBook is now supported for hardware acceleration, so you should see an uptick in render speeds and fewer clips should need to render at all.

FCP should be running at about its performance ceiling on your system. For Premiere, you’re certainly above the minimum system requirements, but still fairly close to the ground floor. If you’re looking for vastly increased performance, you might consider a hardware upgrade as well.

Sorry you’re running into so many bugs. I had the exact opposite experience switching to Premiere. Towards the end of using FCP full time, I could count on having at least one freeze or crash just about every session or two. Using Premiere for the same kind of work I get lock ups far less frequently, if at all.

I had the blue-tint alpha problem myself on a project I finished earlier this year. I remember that baking the bottom layers into the composition and rendering to ProRes cleared that right up.

[Wil Renczes]

The blue alpha tint thing sounds like a bug – most likely a BGRA image is being composited as ARGB (or vice versa), so the alpha & blue channels are being swapped. It’s probably specific to the clip with the Animation codec + alpha, I’d expect that it would bake in the blue tint into whatever it’s layered over.

If you can share one of those Anim + alpha clips somewhere, we can check it out.

Cheers

[Karim Daire]

Hi Wil,

I guess you are right… I worked around the bug. You can fill the videolayer below the alphaclip and everything renders fine. As soon as there are gaps below it renders in a blue tint.
Its a general bug in CS5 and CS5.5, at least I get it with Animation and ProRes4444 Codec the same way and its a fully opaque clip which just has alpha in transitions at the beginning and end. When Footage is below it renders fine.
You should be able to reproduce this bug, I know other people who had the same problems, even on Windows Machines.

Lets see if they fixed it with CS6 then!

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Alex Udell]

Hey Karim….

Your concerns about export times have been echo previously on the forum.

In general, your underlying concept is that material rendered during edit should be essentially “stitched together” for export. I understand this is what is familiar to you. What makes this possible is quicktime.

As the Ppro sequence is not based on Quicktime, it does not stitch renders together in the same way if at all.

So that has a lot to do with why exports take longer.

Not what you want to hear, but hopefully explains why it happens….

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX