Premiere Pro 6 to 5.5 frame grab comparison

[Dermot Shane]

DNxHD only works with standard HD frame sizes, and a lot of my work for custom displays requires arbitrary rasters

Walter… i use DNx wrapped Qt’s at all sorts of raster sizes, no probs when using an Avid DS, so it may be the implementation in PP that’s the issue? The codec does not care what you feed it when used in DS.

d

[Hector Berrebi]

i like premiere, its a nice addition to any good set of chosen tools.
but in my opinion its far from being a main cutter.

its hard for me to believe that any improvement Adobe brings to PP6 can really bring it to a sufficient level, I’d be glad to be proved otherwise.

timeline control, trim tools, advanced editing options and controls, unifying codec, markers, interface, clarity, media management, smart user settings, elegant bins, shared environments… i could go on

it would practically take a rewrite.

a good video app is not necessarily a good editing app
Avid is an amazing editing app and mediocre video tool
FCP7 was really close to be both… that’s why everybody loved it so much.

premiere seems to overlook the core art and craft of cutting, and structuring story out of segments. instead focusing on a myriad of new features and flashy gizmos.
if you work long form narrative an use PP, you’re either a bad editor, or very badly informed.

and yet, Premiere is so cool to showcase and make nifty videos about,
that so many people today actually see it as a valid replacement.

take a look at Lightworks… no big loud marketing department, but a decent cutter, and its free, and open source… and even historic 🙂

all that said,
i use PP5.5 constantly in my workflows, there are things that it does best. i love Adobe as a company.. and i look forward to the next CS and the improvements it will bring.

hector

Hector Berrebi
prePost Consulting

[Richard Cardonna]

Adobe is working on a program called prelude. don’t know if it will be part of cs6 but it seems to be a preeditor to premier. aparently it includes new editing tools. maybe this is adobes way to address it’s lack of standard cutting tools. who knows it might become a tab in some future cs whatever.

[Walter Soyka]

[dermot shane] “Walter… i use DNx wrapped Qt’s at all sorts of raster sizes, no probs when using an Avid DS, so it may be the implementation in PP that’s the issue? The codec does not care what you feed it when used in DS.”

Thanks for the response, Dermot.

How do you deliver custom-raster DNxHD? I just rendered some 3240×1080 media out of AE and PrP in QT-wrapped DNxHD. It reimports beautifully in the Adobe apps at the correct size and AR, but if I open it in QuickTime Player (and presumably other QuickTime-based apps), it opens at 1920×1080. Telestream Episode thought the file was 1920×1080, and MediaInfo Mac reports VC-3 at 1920×1080.

Off-topic aside: I’m a DS-L lurker, and Sylvain got me very curious to see what NAB brings.

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

[Erik Lindahl]

To remedy the lack of a proper post-workflow Adobe could go with sheer video.

https://www.bitjazz.com/en/products/sheervideo/

It’s a solution I was hoping Apple would adopt but instead came ProRes (not bad but Sheer Video is lossless).

The notion “mostly working native is best” is I think the opposite of higher end post workflows. On the editing side maybe native is good at times but as soon as you enter grading and finnishing you need a DI format. Working in H264, AVC-I or any other super destructive codec opens up a world of issues. Adobe needs something similar to ProRes and / or better.

Further more Adobe touts its Mercury Engine and it probably is awesome with the correct hardware. It’s a bit sad to use PrPro however with a non-nvidia machine running ProRes footage. Even FCPX looks like a solid alternative here.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Sheer video would be awesome, but then you have yet another proprietary codec floating around out there.

Plus, that website hasn’t been updated since last decade. 😉

It’s not that ProRes doesn’t work with Premiere, it does. The problem is QuickTime and the 32bit architecture.

Avid can rewrap ProRes to MXF and “avoid” QuickTime.

I agree with you about working native. It’s great for certain jobs, but is not practical for all jobs.

I think Adobe should license an existing codec like DNxHD or ProRes. Probably not cheap, but it would keep things less fragmented than they already are, in my opinion.

Jeremy

[Erik Lindahl]

One can put blame on QuickTime being 32-bit but the fact is ProRes works really bad in Premier Pro and the fact also remains, Premier Pro lacks a proper editing codec. Is Adobes solution to work uncompressed all the time? What wrapper is recommended then as QT’s 32-bit architecture apparently is at fault when it comes to ProRes?

A common workflow is Editing (PrPro) > Effects (After Effects, Mocha, Photoshop, Nuke) > Grading (DaVinci) > finishing (PrPro). IMO Adobe has a golden opportunity of making PrPro the king of both small-form editing and finishing as they have a very competent FX-package in After Effects and PrPro seems capable of being a solid editor. A solid format for this is however required which they don’t have.

How does Apple solve the QuickTime 32-bit problem in FCPX? Why does a 32-bit application like FCP7 handle ProRes so much better than PrPro and actually FCPX? Why does the viewer and canvas look so horribly poor in CS5.5? (don’t give be the “should be viewed on reference monitor” cause that is true in some cases but that doesn’t mean the on-screen view looks like garbage). Talking about reference monitors… Why does CS5.5 handle this so much worse than FCP7 on the same system?

It’s sad Apple isn’t more “into” the pro-video area anymore. They really can create wonderful solutions when they put their mind to it. I hope CS6 solves a lot of these issues but I won’t hold my breath for too long. PrPro has had something like 10 years to catch up and given it has some awesome features in it, the above issues make it really hard to work with for a lot of people I think.

[Bernhard G.]

Hello,

FCP-X does not use Quicktime, it uses A/V Foundation, the new media framework.
(Not to mistake Quicktime the player app and container format with Quicktime, the framework.)

FCP7 was a Quicktime native app, as Media100 is by the way
(and is also fast; but since we can expect the EOL of Quicktime framework … )

PP needs to use the Quicktime framework as a translator that decompresses the
images and passes them to the Mercury Engine.

Other formats are directly translated my the Mercury Engine.

Best regards,
Bernhard

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Erik Lindahl] ” Is Adobes solution to work uncompressed all the time? What wrapper is recommended then as QT’s 32-bit architecture apparently is at fault when it comes to ProRes?”

Adobe’s solution is to work with whatever you want.

With QuickTime, in this sense, we are talking about much more than a simple .mov wrapper. We are talking about the QuickTime API or engine that is used to read/encode/decode/write in qt aware applications like NLEs for the Mac.

All of that code and architecture is 32bit. PPro is 64bit. Do they have to hamstring a 32bit code into their 64bit architecture.

Fcp7 is optimized around ProRes, and it also 32bit. I don’t find that ProRes looks like garbage in cs5.5.

How does FCPX get around it? They don’t use QuickTime APIs either, but rather AVFoundation to handle media types. I don’t think AVFoundation APIs are widely available or practical quite yet. So all of this is on Apple.

[Erik Lindahl] “Talking about reference monitors… Why does CS5.5 handle this so much worse than FCP7 on the same system?”

Different methods. FCP has its own monitoring architecture, as does Premiere. Monitoring in Premiere has been a long standing issue, and hopefully cs6 will address some of this.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Woops, sorry. Bernhard beat me to it.