Premiere Pro CS6 “Make reference movie” equivalent to Final Cut Pro 7?

[Walter Soyka]

[Jay Soriano] “Does CS6 or the upcoming Premiere CC have the equivalent option of, “make reference movie”?”

Nope. That’s an old QuickTime feature — seems only 32-bit QuickTime apps have it. FCPX can’t make reference movies, either.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Steve Brame]

There is the Advanced Frameserver, but I don’t think it was ever ported to Mac.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/929070#929108

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[John Heagy]

Quicktime reference is super useful and without things will happen much slower for us.

There’s nothing preventing an app from calling 32bit Quicktime. QT ref is little more than a .txt file. No real penalty in calling on a 32 bit API to create a .txt file.

Avid 6.5, and I’d assume 7.0, still export QT ref.

John

[Jay Soriano]

Thanks for the responses. Been searching around the net but couldn’t find an answer. Would it make sense to open my Premiere project into FCP7 then export as a “make reference movie”?

[Erik Lindahl]

This is one of the key features we’re loosing with FCP7. Technically I guess a QT REF file is similar to an XML-file, just that QT Player can actually play these files on the fly.

We’ve use these a lot through the years. This and proper batch- and background exporting is lacking in PrPro CS6.

[David Mcgavran]

Being one of the engineers that has to deal with the changes in QuickTime… Those people who want ref movie export need to sit with me and have a beer so we can talk through it 🙂 What does it mean to have a reference movie pointing to mixed media codecs like .r3d, h.264, .arri, .mxf etc… Ref movies only work if you have a standard QuickTime based format for your timeline. Could we implement that in that 1 case? Yes we probably could but QuickTime 32 bit is overly deprecated by apple and ref movie isn’t really a feature in the 64 bits api’s so it is kind of a dead tech. (again happy to discuss this in depth and at length preferably with a beer in hand.) Our solution is to focus on smart rendering. So as example in Premiere Pro CC if you have pro res imports (dnxhd, dv, op1a etc), prores preview files and pro res exports we will do frame copies for every frame that doesn’t need to render. This drastically reduces render times.

Thoughts?

Dave

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David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
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[Steve Brame]

Sounds like it would be easier to just port the Frameserver to Mac.

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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
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creative illusions Productions

[Jay Soriano]

Just didn’t want to make DV Kitchen obsolete. Will continue using FCP 7 when I export to DV Kitchen.

[John Heagy]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the response!

[David McGavran] “What does it mean to have a reference movie pointing to mixed media codecs like .r3d, h.264, .arri, .mxf etc… Ref movies only work if you have a standard QuickTime based format for your timeline.”

Correct, and that’s what we do. There’s never time, as the deadline approaches, to render so we take it at the beginning and transcode everything to ProRes.

[David McGavran] “QuickTime 32 bit is overly deprecated by apple and ref movie isn’t really a feature in the 64 bits api’s so it is kind of a dead tech.”

Yes, but AVFoundation does open Ref.mov and without any Windows alternative I don’t see 32bit QT going away anytime soon.

[David McGavran] “Our solution is to focus on smart rendering.”

… where QT Ref would fit in nicely.

As far as being useful, I would equate the usefulness to symbolic links in Unix/Linux. It allows us to present media to processes like transcoding and syncing “virtually” keeping the originals protected while saving time and disk space.

Like symbolic links it is an advanced user tool and will cause havoc in anything short of a buttoned down shared environment. All our ingests are done using Ref.mov to support growing files, in the case of B4M, or VTR emulation, including insert edits, using our own app. EVS uses ref.mov for growing files as well. Again an advanced tool for advanced users. FCP7 is the only app that creates self contained recordings in our current workflow.

Like I mentioned, of all the QT APIs, QT ref is the easiest/lightest to call given the output is essentially a .txt file. Most any app that opens .mov will open ref.mov as the only difference is the wrapper doesn’t point to itself. So the use case for the future is pretty solid, it’s just Ref.mov creation that’s in peril.

Thanks
John Heagy

[Walter Biscardi]

[John Heagy] “Correct, and that’s what we do. There’s never time, as the deadline approaches, to render so we take it at the beginning and transcode everything to ProRes.”

Just an FYI, we started out doing this since we switched from FCP to Premiere Pro a year ago and about 2 months in we made the switch to full native workflow, render at the end. Especially coming from 11 years on FCP and a Quicktime workflow.

it’s a MUCH faster to go native all the way until the end, especially if you have a CUDA enabled machine, although even our regular iMacs can render pretty darn quickly with CS6. We never convert anything anymore unless we have to for format conversion purposes. Just an FYI as one FCP switcher to another.

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

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