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Have Questions About Adobe Premiere Pro. Need Advice from experienced users please.
As a Final Cut 7.0 user it’s now time to come to the realization I need to change editing platforms.
Avid is now offering the Symphony editing platform for 999.00. As a prior Avid Xpress Pro user I know the stability of Avid. And now with Symphony’s offer, it’s captivating considering you have second color correction – in real time – right in the timeline without having to move the file to another application.But let me be clear “I love Adobe”. I use all their products in my old Production Premium CS4, except Premiere Pro.
The two reasons I never used Premiere Pro:
No codec to match their engine codec. In other words, Avid has DNxHD and Apple has ProRes. This makes the editing platform very stable. Does Adobe have their own (I think they call it) – transwrap – codec now?
I understand that Adobe is the “Native King” for all platforms but my online research shows major instability problems with ALL editors when you go this native route – especially long form media such as documentaries. I also learned that color correcting, composting or adding effects to native formats from the camera – especially compressed footage such as avchd is absolutely horrible. Is this true for Adobe? I know it’s possible to transcode to Apple ProRes in Adobe Media Composer, but will this give me more flexibility and stability in Premiere Pro?
I produce commercials, documentaries and event filming.
After seeing the new cloud offering I am very interested, but my experience with Adobe Premiere 10 years ago was a nightmare in college. I know things have changed, but I want to confirm with users of Adobe Premiere Pro about stability.
Thanks for your time.
Your response will be appreciated – hope to hear from someone soon.
Travis
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4 Replies
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Hi….
Regarding codec:
As of CS6 you have the choice to work native or to transcode to a codec of your choosing. Adobe’s Prelude component for file based ingest should make this workflow much easier. You could choose DNXHD, or ProRes (on the Mac), and I’ve seen Karl Soule from Adobe mention that ppl like XDcam. The point is that now you can easily get to lightweight non folder structured media pretty easily, and also create proxy workflows as well.
As an editor, because of it’s native capabilities, Ppro doesn’t care. The issue before what that there really was no easy workflow to create alternate media sets. Now there will be. Another downside to native is that the media itself doesn’t lend it well to media consolidation for project archive. Working from a transcoded, non-structured, non GOP format media set should alleviate this as well.
Like you said, with the Creative cloud, nothing is really barring you from giving it a try. Should you find that the PPro component is not to your liking, so be it. I think you will like the tie ins to the rest of the suite and PPro is continues to improve as an editor, with trimming (among many other things) being hugely improved in this release.
PPro does offer secondary CC in its 3way color corrector as well. An now with Adjustment layers you can get similar functionality to applying gap fx in Avid.
A fundamental difference from Avid and really anything else at this point, is that Avid still relies on an intermediary database for managing assets. Ppro and FCP basically rely on path to file technology. As long as you keep your project media tidy….no problem. But it’s much more “up to you” to do that.
I can’t speak for reliability on the shipping version of 6 as no one can. Here’s what I will tell you:
I loved CS3 for short form, but it was a ram hog and made long form under a then 32bit environment difficult.
I wasn’t crazy about CS4 particularly in my experiences using it under Vista.
CS5 and 5.5 have been really good to me under Windows 7 64 and Mac OSX because ram is no longer an issue and the feature sets have been great.
So I hope this give you some insight….
With trials of everything available…and the price of entry barrier continuing to lower….there’s no reason to test stuff out and see what works for ya. You may find that some tool combos or pipelines are better then others depending simply on the type of project you are working on.
At this point….it couldn’t get much easier to find out.
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX -
Jacob Rosenberg, CTO and Director at Bandito Brothers, gave a wonderful seminar at NAB last month describing their process on ‘Act of Valor’. They actually cut the film on Avid, then transferred the project to Premiere Pro because of it’s ability to better represent color space using native files than either Avid or FCP could with their respective transcodes, therefore enabling a better experience and result in grading.
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Thanks for your time and communicating your experience Alex. Your a good man!
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I edit ProRes in Premiere all the time, since up to this point I have still been doing my grading in Color. If you have the ProRes codecs installed on your machine (which you should, given that you’re running FCP7), Premiere will edit them.
Premiere will also handle DNxHD in a Quicktime wrapper. You can get the codec from Avid as a free download: https://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Compatibility/en350875 or by installing a trial version of Media Composer.
I’ve found that using an intermediate codec like ProRes is less of a hog on your system resources than many native codecs, therefore it will give you snappier real time playback. Especially once you start mixing camera formats and adding effects.
And to correct Alex: Traditionally Avid relied entirely on its own internal media management. Now you have the option of using the Avid Media Access (AMA) feature to directly link media on your disk to your bins, with or without transcoding, just like FCP and PPro and all the rest. From what I’ve seen, AMA works pretty well, but I’ve got limited experience with MC so I can’t really speak too definitively on the subject.
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