Is it just me?

[Andy Patterson]

[Tom Sefton] “Went back to dip our toes in the premiere water for a project recently and had some major issues with import, export and performance. Tried the Adobe forums, the premiere forums on the Cow and got no answers. Adobe tech support was woeful – was even told that a 2TB library of rushes was too large and to reduce it down because premiere wouldn’t support it, or we could edit half the sequence in each project and join them together at the end. I’ve really not experienced good tech support for premiere pro.”

Are you on the OS X platform?

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tom Sefton] ” Adobe tech support was woeful – was even told that a 2TB library of rushes was too large and to reduce it down because premiere wouldn’t support it…”

????

That is woeful support. On my doc projects I don’t think I’ve ever had a project in PPro that referenced less than 4TB of media (most I’ve hit so far is 24TB).

[Andy Patterson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “In my experience the kind of thing you are talking about suggests system issues rather than grave malfunctioning of the application.”

I have found bugs on the Windows side but it seems there are more bugs with OS X. For some of the issues OS X was to blame not Premiere Pro.

[Tom Sefton]

The project was a series of short films for a public body which we filmed at 8K and 6K on the Red epic-w and epic dragon. We also had 2k proxy files from the camera which we started the edit with, whilst also mixing some footage on the timeline to get an idea of what we could reframe with the added resolution. We also had various music files and external audio to sync.

All the footage was stored on gtech studio xl raids that had plenty of space, and we were editing on Mac Pro 2013s – either 6 or 8 core with 32 or 64GB of ram and max GPU.

The first problem we encountered was a complete slowdown in performance when importing new assets – even jpeg or tiff files caused a beachball which lasted for 10 minutes. Each time the project was opened it took around 25 minutes to organise the media and assets, during which time performance was very sluggish and impossible to work with.

This was when tech support from Adobe suggested we reduce the size of the library which was impossible if we wanted to deliver from the 8K raw files. So if we wanted to carry on we had to work from only 2K proxies from the camera – not a huge problem to get the cut signed off but still – added a large layer of complexity to what should have been simple workflow as we had to use resolve to finish.

The major issue was that when we tried to export an assembly edit from the timeline to help us start vfx for some of the scenes, Adobe media encoder encountered hard crashes when exporting. Not just software hangs, entire system crashes that happened occasionally. This could have been the 8K raw files, but the crashes were occurring at random places during the export which meant we couldn’t narrow down the problem, and because the project wouldn’t import new assets without hours of beachballs due to its size, we couldn’t use Redcine x or resolve to create 4K final assets to work from.

So all in all we found it hard to move forwards and couldn’t believe that the advice from Adobe tech support was to edit short sequences separately, export and then relink on a longer timeline. Fcpx has handled projects 3-4 times as large as this in the past so we didn’t have the best introduction back to premiere. I’d never rule out using it again but it just hasnt been as easy or to be honest, as fun as it is working in fcpx.

That said, the ease of integration between after effects and audition for a 5.1 sound mix was fantastic and I doubt that we could have delivered some of the motion tracking and compositing scenes as quickly and efficiently with fcpx, but I’d love to be shown how! If we could optimise our systems to work faster and better with Adobe I would really appreciate the advice on how to do this – without going anywhere near a platform switch argument.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Simon Ubsdell]

Thanks for the very detailed reply.

It sounds as though Adobe tech support really let you down badly there, but name me an NLE that has good tech support these days!

Were you using any plug-ins? These frequently cause conflicts that are tricky to diagnose.

Overall your experience, while incredibly frustrating, sounds atypical.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

I’m talking about specific system installation issues/conflicts rather than the choice of OS.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Tom Sefton]

To be honest, the only plugins that were used for this project were lumetri- which is now part of adobe’s stock plugins, and then izotope RX6 in audition.

Yes – I can believe that tech support for everyone isn’t great, but in the past I’ve had such good experiences from fcpx that I’ve been spoilt. A couple of times I’ve had days and days shaved off a workflow from advice on here, and another time I’ve ended up speaking to someone from Apple.

I’m sure there are ways to optimise premiere and I’m happy to take advice on how we could improve our experiences.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tom Sefton] “To be honest, the only plugins that were used for this project were lumetri- which is now part of adobe’s stock plugins, and then izotope RX6 in audition.
“

Out of curiosity was Izotope used at all inside PPro itself? I’ve had major performance problems when using a lot of RX6 inside PPro, and when I contacted Izotope they basically said I shouldn’t do that. I should apply the filter(s), export the clip(s) as new media then cut that new media back into my timeline.

[Tom Sefton]

Interesting.

We only used it in audition from memory, but we used dynamic link to get the comp from premiere into audition and then exported a finished 5.1 wav from audition.

I’ll remember that though – thanks for the tip.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Tom Sefton] “we used dynamic link”

I asked Walter Soyka a while back what he thought dynamic link was good for and he said:

NAB demos?

I don’t use dynamic link much for anything other than text templates or relatively simple custom transitions. For moderate to heavy comps, or for a project that needs to be shared with others, I generally want real media files on disk to avoid any potential headaches.

Although that sounds cynical, I think it’s probably good advice in the long run. I wonder if part of your problem stems from this?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki