General Premiere Problems of a Final cut Crossgrader

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

The idea is that, instead of converting all your footage to ProRes at the beginning of the project, then editing it and stitching it all together, PP edits the footage natively, and then renders it all to your deliverable format at the end.

It’s actually faster in total time spent, since you don’t have to convert any footage that you don’t ultimately use.

And you should avoid using the “use previews” option when rendering unless your previews are set to uncompressed. Since PP can’t “stitch things together” when you select “use previews” you’re having premiere use the preview files as a source to render from, which causes you to incur an additional generation loss.

In short, Premiere just works differently. (not better or worse, just differently.)

As for the blue bug, I’ve run into footage turning blue myself, though no alphas were involved. I’ve found that when things go wonky when rendering I switch programs. If I’ve been rendering in Adobe Media Encoder, I switch to exporting directly inside Premiere and vice versa. The two rendering engines are different code, and so far every bug I’ve come across in one hasn’t been present in the other.

I’ve no idea if it’ll work for you, (and you said you managed to work around the bug anyway) but if you’re curious you might try rendering in what ever program you weren’t using before.

[Karim Daire]

Hi John-Michael,

thanks for your reply.
Someone else already wrote about the stitching thing that QT handles differently than Premiere. This information is new to me but explains a lot.

I don’t care if something is done differently as long as its more effective. I do not convert Material to ProRes before editing… I used to do that in FCP with DSLR Footage and worked a lot faster than now having the humungous render times on export with Premiere.
Its a lot more comfortable with Premiere but as far as I can see it I kind of “get the bill at the end”.

So there is absolutely no reliable way of rendering while editing and then having quick export times for delivery? I mean exactly the final part is where deadlines and last minute corrections tend to get annoying. If Premiere has this big minus, that is a huge impact and I wonder why i never read about that.

I thought I could use my preview settings on Pro-Res or uncompressed to guarantee maximal quality, render on my timeline and then use these preview files when rendering my final master.

But as far as I understand you it doesn’t matter because Premiere renders it all again after all. In my book this is a time killer deluxe. Why not just convert the footage before? If i batch convert my footage I am still faster in FCP than having to watch render bars for minutes every time I want to get my material out of Premiere?

I don’t understand how this is differently and not worse.
I heard that basically its a waste to use Adobe software (AE and Premiere) on a MAC. Is it true that performance is better on Windows machines?
I am tired of Apple anyways and if I change to CS6 I might consider changing back to windows for that. Any hints?

Thanks for all your help in this thread. The creative cow community rocks! 🙂

Karim

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

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Karim Daire] “If Premiere has this big minus, that is a huge impact and I wonder why i never read about that.”

You’ve never read it from all the people who don’t consider it a minus. If you would like to get the word out, you’re welcome to. I feel like there should be a forum just for FCP to PP switchers.

[Karim Daire] “I mean exactly the final part is where deadlines and last minute corrections tend to get annoying.”

I deal with this by rendering an uncompressed master of my video, and I insert any changes into the master and render again. On my computer, a powerhouse PC, renders are offen faster then real time, possibly quite a bit faster.

Don’t forget that your computer is providing you the low end of what Premiere can do. CS6 can take advantage of the GPU in your laptop, so I’d download a trial and give that a spin. You may find things a little or even a lot faster. (it depends on the kinda editing you’re doing. The GPU doesn’t do any encoding or decoding. Also, you can really bog down a render if it has non GPU affects in it.)

However, if you really want to fly you need a tower.

[Karim Daire] “I heard that basically its a waste to use Adobe software (AE and Premiere) on a MAC. Is it true that performance is better on Windows machines?”

I wouldn’t call it a waste, but yes, performance is indeed better on windows. Couple of reasons for that:

Better and higher end hardware selection,

Better access to the GPU by programs, especially OpenGL (which is used by AE. This is why games run better on windows.)

And possibly, although good coders could work around this, the fact that Premiere took a hiatus from OSX.

[Chris Erlon]

I’ve been working on a long form documentary project in FCP; it’s pretty big, about 1.5 TB of 1080 footage so far in ProRes 422. My system is a MacPro 2×2.8 quad core w/12 gig RAM, 3 TB Raid, Kona 3 for monitoring. There are a number of sequences, and the master sequence is about 90 minutes; but I only have two tracks of video max at one time, and FCP has had virtually no performance issues because of the size. The basic dialog edit is pretty set; it’s mostly cuts at this point, but I’ve thrown a few crossfades and moves in there. I’m at the point of adding more B-Roll, more transitions, and compositions from After Effects, so it seemed like a perfect time to switch to Premiere (CS5.5).

The export/import process went very smoothly, with only a couple of clip settings not translating properly. But Premiere just can’t seem to handle the project. Any time it hits anything more than a single track and a straight cut, it chokes, stops, hangs, crashes, etc. I tried a little color correction, but the waveforms and viewer don’t update in real time. I have nine of the twelve gig of RAM allocated toward Adobe, but everything is just running S-L-O-W-L-Y, even when APP is the only program open. Before I bale and go back to FCP, I thought I’d check to see if any of you have ideas about what might be causing the performance probelm. It’s running so much slower than FCP that I think I must be doing something wrong, but I’m running out of preferences to fiddle with.

Thanks for your help.

Chris