Premiere encoding

[John Pale]

For effects work, its totally feasible and valid to work in 10 bit uncompressed…but if you are editing complete shows, where you have hours and hours of tape footage to deal with, the speed and space requirements are enormous and costly.

Adobe has been given a gift here with Apple basically voluntarily withdrawing from the pro market. The wave of new Premiere converts are going to be expecting a comparable codec to work with.

Thanks for the Matrox suggestion. That might work for some projects in the interim…will have to test. Of course, unlike ProRes, which is 10 bit in all flavors, it is only 8

[Hector Berrebi]

[David Cherniack] “But for effects work”

🙂 ok… VFX is something different. I’d go for DPX and such, I find them more versital, and just as intensive on systems ..

Hector Berrebi
prePost Consulting

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Hector berrebi] “But if someone cuts their feature film in R3D native in premiere, then in my opinion, they’re either noobs, or they just don’t know better.”

Why exactly?

[Hector Berrebi]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “Why exactly?”

the offline stage of a feature film is long and editing-intensive.
people tend to shoot way over 10:1 ratios
thats at least 1000 minutes for a 90 minute film

being able to sift , sort, find ans select quickly is crucial for good work to be done. furthermore when you fine tune each and every cut on a 90+ minute timeline using trim tools, you need fast response (immediate response)

R3D files are generally very large (most people shoot in 4K+), RAW and compressed (a good wavelet compression, but still…) all these are intensive on your system. and even with the legendary Mercury engine, you’d need a monster system to be stable with such a project and timeline natively, and i’m not sure that even on the best of systems your timeline response in trimming would be satisfactory.
add to that storage requirements, its one thing to have your original R3Ds in a drive on a shelf, completely different thing to have them on a drive where you constantly have to read them and play them (in FULL frame rate and real time as you can’t afford less in narrative work). it would probably mean faster more expensive drives.

the point is. that it makes absolutely NO difference if you work offline/online.
offline editing in long projects can take months. and the better offline editors out there usually don’t own monster systems. in Avid or FCP you have a stable and easy workflow, that allows you to cut your project on a portable drive using a laptop and doing it anywhere you want (tarins, plains, a hut on a beach or a monastery in Tibet). Prores Proxy files are small look amazing, so do DNX36, and as they are optimized for their systems, they work FAST and stable.

and because of the amazing world of Metadata, conforming back the final sequence to R3D is simple (in most cases and if you know what you are doing) and can be done in a myriad of tools and techniques.

I have many R3D project stored in my studio, some of the quite large, I know how Premiere reacts to big RED folders with hundreds of files and its not what they’d show you in an ADOBE presentation.
believe me, i love Premiere, and the day that software/hardware will really allow native raw 4K work in FULL frame rate, with immediate, response and proper monitoring, i’d advocate for it. its just not quite there yet, at leas when it comes to long form, or narrative work.

sorry for the long answer… didn’t have time for a short one 🙂

hector

Hector Berrebi
prePost Consulting