Premiere Pro 6 to 5.5 frame grab comparison

[Walter Soyka]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Correct me because I may well be totally wrong here, but while premiere might be able to read and playback the media with DNX and prores installed and living elsewhere on the system, premiere cannot output any of these formats correct? Isn’t a client likely to be taken aback being given uncompressed as the clean master for a fifteen minute corporate thing? Isn’t that just a gigantic unplayable brick? “

If you have DNxHD installed on your system, Premiere Pro can export Quicktime-wrapped DNxHD.

Personally, I’m using Cineform for my intermediates and mastering, as DNxHD only works with standard HD frame sizes, and a lot of my work for custom displays requires arbitrary rasters. This would probably not be the problem for most folks here that it is for me.

That said, count my voices among those asking Adobe to provide a mastering codec instead of relying on third parties.

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Correct me because I may well be totally wrong here, but while premiere might be able to read and playback the media with DNX and prores installed and living elsewhere on the system, premiere cannot output any of these formats correct? Isn’t a client likely to be taken aback being given uncompressed as the clean master for a fifteen minute corporate thing? Isn’t that just a gigantic unplayable brick? “

Adobe is extremely codec agnostic (save the Avid DNxHD MXF container). Adobe Media Encoder is completely awesome. It can output almost any file format, including AVC-I MXFs, or any QT codec you want. So, it’s up to you, and you aren’t locked to just QT, but you can use QT if you want.

Premiere works differently than FCP in that there’s no “smart rendering”.

At the end of your project, you can export your timeline to the format of your choice using AME (Media Encoder). It does not work like FCP works, though, in that every frame has to be recompressed upon export. You have the option to use what is called the “Preview files” in the export, but those will just get recompressed as well (so a compression of a compression). For maximum qualilty, Adobe recommends not using the preview files, although with a robust codec like ProRes, you probably own’t notice the generation loss. From what I can understand, “Smart Rendering” is a QT specific thing (think reference files) and PPro doesn’t tap in to that functionality as there’s no such thing a reference file when you deliver an XDcam/P2/whatever compliant file.

You can set your “preview” files (or what is known as timeline render files in FCP) to whatever you want. By default, Premiere uses a 4:2:2 MPEG2 format, but that is adjustable. In my testing, I change it to ProRes.

Premiere does work differently and does not work exactly like FCP, but that’s OK.

Jeremy

[Dennis Radeke]

[Bernhard Grininger] “the availability of field recorders determines the choice of NLE;”

True to a point. Remember, Premiere Pro can play Pro-Res no problem and can encode it at a cost of $50 for compressor from the Apple App store.

Avid DNxHD is a different story, but you can use AME as a batch, background transcoding solution to convert media to something that PRemiere Pro can use. yes, I know that’s not optimal at all, but it is at least one possible answer.

With many cameras having an HDMI output, you can capture via a hardware i/o, uncompressed or any other manner of codec that the io card supports.

All that said, the most important thing I can convey is that Adobe does recognize that while Native editing is best in most situations, a DI codec is important and we are looking into solutions and opportunities for the future.

Much more I’d like to say, but will leave off this missive here.

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Walter Soyka]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “just one more: do you think adobe consider the lack of a high quality playback and delivery codec in PPro an issue?”

Let me twist your thinking on this a little, Aindreas.

Obviously I don’t speak for Adobe, but from my experience with Adobe over the last couple years, if enough of Adobe’s customers consider something to be an issue, Adobe considers it to be an issue.

Now that doesn’t mean we always get everything we want, and the things we do get don’t always come as fast as we might like — but Adobe does carefully consider user requests, and they really care about how their products fit in with their users’ work.

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

[Frank Gothmann]

Just to add my two cents: count me in on the desire to see an Adobe developed DI codec. I have also supplied my general “wish list” to Adobe in the past.
UI looks great, btw. Very pleased with the bits I have seen. Hope it works smooth with IO hardware and there is the ability to export audio stems.

[Richard Herd]

[Dennis Radeke] “we are looking into solutions and opportunities for the future.

Much more I’d like to say, but will leave off this missive here.
“

Is that a road map?

[Aindreas Gallagher]

thanks Jeremy – that was a very informative answer, I take it as a piece with your other thinking on offlines and project mobility.

If this works out its great though -I guess we’re all going to have to learn Avid anyway – (I’m better than I was), but if PPro can step in for a lot of FCP suites, that would suit me to the ground. I spend half my life going back and forth between FCP and AE as it is. My FCP timeline invariable ends up with stacked iteration AE renders on top. Premiere mopping up the non-core LA Avid editing market would be just the ticket.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “thanks Jeremy – that was a very informative answer, I take it as a piece with your other thinking on offlines and project mobility.”

Thanks, and as always, sorry for the over conversational and borderline illegible language and typos. Sometimes I type too fast and post.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I spend half my life going back and forth between FCP and AE as it is. “

I do a lot of work in AE, too. I am not a motion graphic designer, but I do most of my text and what I would call “repair” work in AE (covering up logos, painting, tracking, a touch of roto) to keep things legal for broadcast. The link between PPro and AE I find to be really really great. It is one of the most useful features for me. We also work with a lot of AE motion graphic designers and do our fair share of green screen/keying. Using PPro to tee up a highly organized project/timeline to a motion graphics designer is great. I always get many thanks when I hand over a project+media to designers I lay it out (very basically) so the designer can get to work right away, and Premiere allows the fast editing capability I need to send over to AE and create a project there.

I use Automatic Duck to do this from FCP to AE, but the return was always more “painful” and not as efficient. The way dynamic link works, the AE project is like any other clip or piece of media in your timeline, and you simply step in to AE to make adjustments. It’s pretty sweet, I must say.

I just hope Nvidia/CUDA support on OSX comes along. I hear the Quadro 4000 makes a huge difference, but I can’t quite switch to CUDA yet as I am still using Color extensively (which likes ATI).

If Speedgrade proves to be something, I would hop on a CUDA card.

And of course, better capture card performance. Time will tell!

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

But Dennis it doesn’t play ProRes very well. My 2006 MacPro and FCP 7 will playback more realtime layers of ProRes than my iMac 2011 running CS5. In fact, I’m lucky if it doesn’t drop frames playing ProRes. Whereas FCP 7 on either machine can play 5 or six layers of PNP ProRes. I’ve tried with both BlackMagic and Matrox cards/drivers.

[Bret Williams]

I think I’d like to also see some real 3D in AE. Or an Adobe 3D app that works like AE or something. Perhaps just extrusions of texts and objects. So we don’t have to patch together a bunch of flat layers to make a box. Or use 3rd party expensive plugins or the shatter workaround just to make 3D text that doesn’t actually interact with the other layers. I’ve figured this was the next step for AE since about 2002 and AE 5. Not CS 5. AE 5. I’m old.