Premiere Pro 6 System Set Up

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Where are you located? How many CS6 editors? What systems are they using? What sort of problems are they experiencing?

The first thing to do is to document the issues – what happens, on what system, is it repeatable, etc. If the issues are similar across various systems, it’d probably be easier to deal with. If it’s a mixed bag – someone will have to catalog / document the issues and attack them one by one.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Walter Biscardi]

So many things to consider here. First off, read my “Cautionary Tale for the FCP Switcher” before you make the jump to Avid. We did that first and it put us 12 days behind schedule on a broadcast episodic series because the native AMA functionality does not work as it should. I still have two copies of Avid Symphony installed in our shop, but they are now there for other clients who bring work already started on Avid.

https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/a-cautionary-tale-for-the-fcp-switcher

Next, have your editors had any training at all in PPro? In many ways PPro is a continuation of FCP. In other ways, it works completely differently. If you try to make it work just like FCP you’ll be frustrated. If you understand that it has its own way of working and adapt your workflow to the strengths of the tool, you’ll have a happier crew. Cannot recommend “An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro” by Richard Harrington, Robbie Carmen and Jeff Greenberg enough. That book is in all of our edit suites as we are coming from 11 years on FCP to CS6. You can also download to kindle / ipad

https://www.amazon.com/Editors-Guide-Adobe-Premiere-Pro/dp/0321773012

If all your editors are doing is “learning as we go” they are in for a world of hurt and frustration. My editors were frustrated at first too, but as they got the book and they really started diving in, now they don’t want to use anything else. PPro is NOT perfect by any means, still designed too much by an engineer and not enough input from day to day editors, but that is changing rapidly.

The big questions are how are your systems configured and how is your media storage configured? We have discovered in our facility that when we have the Adobe Premiere Pro interface on dual screens, we drop frames constantly. That was frustrated for everyone for about two months before I stumbled upon the solution by accident by re-setting the interface to a single screen and the dropped frames went away. Even our 12 Core Mac Pro with lots of RAM, dual nVidia cards drops frames if we have the interface on two screens.

So can you give us some insight on how you’re configured, what you’re working on (commercials, short form, long form, etc…) and we might be able to help. Also feel free to contact me off forum. We currently have 7 machines configured on our SAN for Premiere Pro editing, 6 Macs and 1 Dell Windows machine.

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

“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.

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[Erik Speer]

Hey guys,

Thanks so much for the helpful responses. I thought I’d throw the carrot out there to see if anyone could help before getting into too many details since it’s a long, fairly complicated story but here goes:

The company I work for produces half hour shows for broadcast on the Sportsman Channel and Fox Sports Nets. This past year we produced 23 half hour series, 13 episodes each plus promos, commercials, special projects and DVDs for retail sales. We have offices in Minnesota and Montana but in February we were told that the entire TV operations would be consolidated and moved to Peoria, IL to take advantage of tax incentives offered by the Film office there. Our facility in MT was Avid and MN FCP 7. We had made the decision that we would not be able to continue with FCP in it’s newest state and we are thinking Avid is too expensive as we would have to dump our 100 TB Rorke Aurora Raid system and start over. We now have editors set up in a new temporary facility in Peoria, all on stand alone systems for the time being. Those on systems that were moved to Peoria are still using FCP 7 but our new systems have only PP6. I am still in MN and will not be moving to Peoria and am on FCP 7. That’s what makes it kind of difficult. I’m not there to help them work through these issues and I don’t know first hand what the issues are. We need to make a decision soon weather we’ll be Avid or Premiere Pro but it’s a big deal as we’ll have 20 systems set up all connected to a SAN and archive system. Here are the specs for the newest machines that are running CS6:
Apple Mac Pro Workstation (12-Core) Apple Mac Pro Workstation (Westmere) CTOMac Pro Two 2.66GHz Six-Core Intel Xeon,
24GB (6X4GB) RAM,
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s,
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB Graphics Card,
One 18x SuperDrive, OS X LionNote

The main issues they are having are with audio. We are working on projects with about 2-3 TB of footage, mostly XDCam but some HDV, Go Pro and the like mixed in. Some of these projects were started in 5.5 and moved to 6. After completion of the show they need to create a Pro Res QuickTime with 4 channels of audio for network delivery. The are telling me they are missing audio clips in the transition, lose render files every time they open a project and can’t ever get a clean QuickTime on export. Bits and pieces of the audio are missing randomly.

I’m convinced all of this is fairly easy to fix and it must be some system optimization we have wrong but Adobe Tech support has been useless, it seems like they are only familiar with people doing home videos or small projects and if I can’t get the editors happy and comfortable with the software it’s going to be bad. We are already missing deadlines because of this.

I should also mention that once we get into the new facility all systems will be connected to the SAN, have some kind of asset management platform and have AJA boards for deck on monitor output/input.

Thanks in advance for any help and feel free to contact me directly if it’s easier at: erik.speer@imoutdoors.com

Erik

[Walter Biscardi]

[Erik Speer] “The main issues they are having are with audio. We are working on projects with about 2-3 TB of footage, mostly XDCam but some HDV, Go Pro and the like mixed in. Some of these projects were started in 5.5 and moved to 6. After completion of the show they need to create a Pro Res QuickTime with 4 channels of audio for network delivery. The are telling me they are missing audio clips in the transition, lose render files every time they open a project and can’t ever get a clean QuickTime on export. Bits and pieces of the audio are missing randomly.”

CS 5.5 could not do the multi channel output like CS6. CS6 also added new types of audio tracks to make working with audio a bit easier. You can output 16 channel ProRes Quicktimes now with CS6 if you have the mixer set up correctly in a MultiTrack Timeline.

Have no idea what’s making them “lose” audio files during export, that we’ve not seen. We’re doing half hour episodics and ProRes files are no problem to export.

Do all of the shows have this issue or just those that started in 5.5 and then migrated?

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

“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.

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[Ken Conrad]

Hey Walter,

I have been searching the internet today trying to figure out how to make multi channel Prores exports in PPcs6.. and i came across this post where you mentioned it and i can’t figure out how to do it… can you expand on that please 🙂

thanks much
ken