More gasoline on the fire

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “To be clear, I am not accusing Herb, or any one person of lying.

I want Pr to work so badly. The most frustrating part of Pr to me is that it looks and feels just like FCP7, right up until it doesn’t, and then things get weird.

So if I am going to switch, and CS6 is the reason, it’s not there so I might as well continue working on Macs and hobble until my foot falls off and I need a prosthetic.

The same problems had on Macs will be the same problems on Windows, they will just happen faster and they will be ray traced.”

Just curious, what issues do you have with Premiere? I have my own quarrels with stuff that still needs fixing in it but my workflow is probably very different from yours..
Would you ever consider trying something like Edius via bootcamp? If not, why?

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Frank Gothmann] “Just curious, what issues do you have with Premiere?”

Editing is good. Dynamic link is good. Pure edit functionality, is overall pretty decent for our needs. There are some weird UI things, but it’s all possible and doable, even including long export times, and Adobe has stellar customer awareness, and it’s apparent they are listening. I can make my way around most UI oddities.

Media management is bad, multiple user environment is bad, conform is bad, basically many of the non sexy, yet really really important parts of editing is tough in premiere, especially at the end of the project, or if you need to move out of native, or you have projects coming back from archive. It just needs more work in order for me to trust it.

Prelude seems like it would be a good answer, but it seems to lose track of original media when you transcode, I would also like that communication to go the other way (from Pr to Pl) to help with conform and transcode. I would love Pl to become a really kick butt confirm tool and perhaps project database. It seems rather primed for it, but it’s new so one step at a time.

Speedgrade isn’t there yet, although it is also new so it gets a pass. I am highly interested in it. There’s no SDI available on OSX, and windows requires a very expensive Nvidia daughter card.

If I’m talking about replacing fcs3, though, I have to replace everything, and the Speedgrade workflow and non SDI monitoring is a stopper at the moment.

So, it’s close, but it’s not compelling enough to buy 4 windows computers and blast my way to stressor oblivion. I’ll stay here for a while. The longer I wait, the better tools will get. Development takes time.

[Frank Gothmann] “Would you ever consider trying something like Edius via bootcamp? If not, why?”

Sure, why not? Can you translate fcp7 projects to it, does it work with metaSAN, use standard capture/output cards, and allow interchange out? How about conform? Can it handle or manage multiple frame rates and frame sizes and consolidate to a unified format for use elsewhere? What is this format? Can it handle ProRes .mov for editing?

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Media management is bad, multiple user environment is bad, conform is bad, basically many of the non sexy, yet really really important parts of editing is tough in premiere, especially at the end of the project, or if you need to move out of native, or you have projects coming back from archive. It just needs more work in order for me to trust it.”

Yep, the foundations are there and it’s all doable, but some stuff needs additional work to really run smooth. 6.5 might be the one, though I believe the times where there is only one NLE for every job are over.

[Jeremy Garchow] “[Frank Gothmann] “Would you ever consider trying something like Edius via bootcamp? If not, why?”

Sure, why not? Can you translate fcp7 projects to it, does it work with metaSAN, use standard capture/output cards, and allow interchange out? How about conform? Can it handle or manage multiple frame rates and frame sizes and consolidate to a unified format for use elsewhere? What is this format? Can it handle ProRes .mov for editing?”

It imports FCP xml just like PP does. Yes, works with metaSan. Doesn’t use standard io cards, but their own cards are affordable and io and timeline interaction is smooth and solid as can be plus you can have multiple cards in the same system withut issues. Works with everything native, including Prores, mixed frame rates and sizes no problem. It handles it all, better than even PP. Render and export times are the fastest I have seen with any given NLE. Does AAF or EDL out, you can conform to any codec you have on your system. Preferred one is HQX, their own intermediate codec. An additional Mac/PC QT version of HQX will come out within the next couple of weeks (it currently uses avi or mxf wrapper). That’ll be a big one for me because unlike DnxHD it does SD up to 4k and it’s free unlike Cineform.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Frank Gothmann] “Yep, the foundations are there and it’s all doable”

Some of it is doable, but is it the best way? Flattened movie + EDLs do not seem like 21st century technology, but what do I know?

I do agree about the foundations, though. I’ve said this before, but there’s a really good transportation system that seems to be permeated throughout the CS Suite, it’s just a matter of connecting all of those disparate lines and being to able to go straight across town, instead of having to go all the way around the outskirts of the city just to get several blocks away. I’m sure they are working on it, Adobe has proven that.

[Frank Gothmann] “It imports FCP xml just like PP does…. “

What’s the project structure like? Multiple projects open at once? Can I copy/paste from one to another?

I read about their codec before, it sounds really interesting. Can’t wait to see what they do with it, as I am also interested in MXF as a wrapper.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I read about their codec before, it sounds really interesting. Can’t wait to see what they do with it, as I am also interested in MXF as a wrapper.”

I have had the opportunity to work a bit with HQX’s predecessor (Canopus HQ), and I was very impressed. I’m looking forward to pushing HQX through my pipeline — I’ll be curious to see if they can dodge the dreaded gamma shift.

HQX supports an alpha channel, and you know how happy that makes me!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Oliver Peters]

I honestly don’t get the need to be “all-OSX”. I, too, prefer it as an OS, but at the last facility I worked at (and helped manage), we had a mix of everything. This was in the late 90s and early 00s, but at that time, the NLEs were a mix of Mac (Media Composer & Xpress) and PC (Symphony), audio was Mac (NED Post Pro) and the graphics department was mostly HP, with one Mac and one SGI (Avid Illusion). The reason the graphics folks were on HP was that they did a lot of 3D animation and it also gave them far better performance on Photoshop and After Effects.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com