Premiere CC and export to ProRes

[Chris Borjis]

I’m on the Mac version of cc (october update) and never had
any pro res export issues.

When we were running CS6 and had a sequence with multiple stacked
titles or still graphics I had problems with it quiting/closing before export finished
but a reboot always fixed that.

Can you give more details about your system, o/s version
and the graphic files themselves…are they bigger than 4000 pixels
are they RGB or CMYK?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Erik Lundberg] “Our mastering format has been ProRes 422(HQ) for a rather long time now, and we’d really stick to it if we could. The export from Pr CC has proved to be a lottery at best though.”

We’ve been mastering our shows and projects to ProRes almost two years now. Only had an issue last year with a weird red frame appearing which was fixed within the month by Adobe. We don’t bother with HQ, never did with FCP either, just ProRes.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Erik Lundberg]

NOOooo!!… I really wanted this to be a “stupid- just tick the NNN box and you’re good to go”- problem and not a “never seen by Biscardi”-problem…

We’re using the master files both for archiving and as a starting point for our transcoding cluster to make the final deliveries. Sometimes we deliver ProRes 422 HQ for broadcast.

UPDATED: Downloaded Adobes own ProRes settings (https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/thankyou.jsp?ftpID=5411&fileID=5030) to “compare notes” with my own. Noticed one difference with those- a little tick box named “Optimize stills”. What does this do? On the preset I’m using this box is ticked, on Adobes pre-fab presets, they’re not. Hm. Suspicious. One would imagine that Optimizing is good, but is it something to be avoided? What are your export settings?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Found this: https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS81733643-B4A6-45c5-ABD7-D5A90EB388FC.html

Optimize Stills or Expand Stills Select this option to use still images efficiently in exported video files. For example, if a still image has a duration of 2 seconds in a project set to 30 fps, Adobe Premiere Pro creates one 2‑second frame instead of 60 frames at 1/30 of a second each. Selecting this option can save disk space for sequences and clips containing still images. Deselect this option only if the exported video file exhibits playback problems when displaying the still images.

Sounds like a REALLY bad idea together with ProRes…

Erik Lundberg

Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

[Erik Lundberg]

Systems are Mac Pro 2010 with 10.8.5 (we had this in 10.7 as well). We’ve done exports both on quad core machines and 12-core. RAM is 32 GB for the quads and 64 GB on the 12-cores. We’ve had the issue both in CS6 and now in CC (all the way through to the october update). Graphics card both with Nvidia 4000 Mac and/or with factory shipped baseline ATI cards.

My first thought when one of our editors showed me the issue was raster size of stills (coming from FCP6 with its twitchy phobia of large rasters). But the issue persists even with files scaled/cropped to 1280×720. Always RGB, haven’t tried to feed it CMYK to see if that fixes the issue (I’d say not).

The problem is trigged by these circumstances:

1. Using Premieres built in Titling Tool. Use title with a solid (either made in the titler or just using slug/colour clip) background. No issues with video background.

or

2. Using a still image on the timeline. BUT NOT when animating with position/scale keyframes. So everything is fine as long as you keyframe PTZ in the still, but when you hold that position/size (for example zoom into a still and then hold), the export fails to make a functioning ProRes file.

AND

using ProRes. Same timeline, same content exports nicely in other codecs. We work and export in 720p50 w/ 48/16 audio. Never use Previews in exports (oh yes, we’ve tried that box too just to see if it made any difference).

A working (but not a good solution in the long run) is to right click the offending clips, and ‘Replace with After Effects composition’. For stills, this is all that is needed, for titles, the title needs to be rebuilt in AE (since these are replaced by black slugs). When exporting, everything works fine.

Failed exports does not render in any error message or other hint that it has failed.

Everything tells me that this issue is tied to the Premiere/AME export engine handling consequent frames with the same content in conjunction with ProRes- and if the AE comps are rendered directly with the AE engine when exporting it would fit into this logic (if not, I can’t say why the fix is working). I’m not familiar enough with the (under the hood) file handling in Premiere (not as familiar as 8-9 years of managing FCP can give you, or 3 years of SphereOUS prior to that).

Erik Lundberg

Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

[Gerard Tay]

Are you able to render to Prores within Premiere?

[Erik Lundberg]

[Gerard Tay] “Are you able to render to Prores within Premiere?”

Yes. The issue is tied to when exporting ProRes using Premiere (either when taking a Pr sequence and clicking ‘Export’ in the Export Media dialogue, or when sending off to AME with a click on the ‘Queue’ button). AND the above applies. When the caveats are honored (by chance or design) the ProRes exports are doing just fine. Otherwize they’re most likely not.

Erik Lundberg

Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

[Gerard Tay]

Strange. Premiere should be able to smart render off the ProRes preview files.

[Erik Lundberg]

We don’t use ProRes for previews (and never for exports). And even if we would, this problem would have surfaced. Optimize stills (a function that coming from FCP seems really odd not being greyed out when you make certain codec choices) and ProRes are not good friends. A fool proof solution from Adobe would be to always leave this function off when we’re not dealing with temporal compressed codecs. A newbie problem- now that we found it, it’ll never happen again. Next time we’ll make new mistakes.

Erik Lundberg

Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden