Premiere Pro Versus Final Cut Pro

[Tim Kolb]

[dickij] “I thought that the advantages of Dynamic link with After Effects and the other tie-ins would mean that PPro would be a better choice than FCP. However, I just had to post this

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=3&postid=862782

as my PPro would not connect to my SONY Z1 over Firwire, so perhpas FCP does HDV more painlessly!? Any tips?”

My Z1 works fine with PPro…it’s not a software issue.

FCP has no ability at this time to deal with any of the special frame modes in HDV cameras…CineFrame in Sony, 24F in Canon, 24p in the JVC…only Aspect/Prospect HD on PPro and I believe Edius handles all modes and framerates available on HDV at this point.

NAB may change that…for Apple’s sake, it probably needs to…

TimK,

Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Larry Sherwood]

Is anyone doing long-form, feature or doco, projects on PPro. I have heard of some problems in PPro projects that:

A. Have loads of source material
B. Use nests in their main timeline because of the need to “sync dailies” on the system

I have heard that there are still some “memory” issues with long projects.

Any comments from users who are doing these on PPro 2.0 ?

Thanx
LS

Larry Sherwood
Sherwood Post Production
Austin, Texas
512 219-8721
larry@sherwoodpost.com

[Dave Kulawick]

Thanks for asking Larry. But I must admit I’d have thought you’d be the guy who knew. I know people have finished features on PPro, but I, like you, am looking for someone who’s done the cutting and taken the project from 15+ hours down to 48 minutes; what’s the media handling like, how does the binning help/hinder finding stuff, how many versions of a given scene, act, or entire version can I have open simultaneously, etc. etc. All the long-form doc issues that edit* handles so easily.

dbk

[J/d Video]

Just finished a project with 17 hrs of footage, cut down to 24 min and will start a 48 min ver. soon. Didn’t have any problems with memory or the system slowing down.I did’nt like the way the bins were set up, but I realy did like the reveal in project function.I loaded the footage by tape # in order and had printed shot list of each tape, that was a lot quicker for finding the shot that I needed .
John

[Dex Craig]

Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful responses. I really do appreciate the extraordinarily civil tone this thread has taken!

I already am very familiar with Premiere Pro; I’ve just finished a 91 minute feature (edited from 21 hours of tape) in standard definition using Premiere Pro 1.5.1. The issue we ran into is that my partner does not want to use Microsoft products, so he’s a Mac man (though he prefers Linux, but the tools aren’t there within our budget for compositing and other effects).

(To answer Larry’s question about how well Premiere handled a feature, I’m quite pleased. We had some file organizational issues, but those were ours, not the softwares. I never had difficulty with Premiere handling the enormous amount of video, except when loading the project. The progress bar would zip across until it was about 9/10 of the way done, then stop and give no indication that the computer was even alive sometimes for as much as 5 minutes. Once the project was loaded, though, it ran very nicely. Oh, and we used an off-the-shelf HP machine with no specific video card. It’s a P4 with a gig of ram, but nothing special.)

So, for our complex, effects-laden sci-fi action adventure, we edited on Premiere and did much of the FX work in AE on the PC, but much of it was also done in AE on the Mac. Moving the AVIs from the PC to the Mac and getting AE to know what to do with them was a major work flow snag.

Given that my partner won’t move to a windows machine, I’m contemplating moving to FCP for the next project we do to improve the workflow. We’re planning on working in HDV, so I’m expecting that I’ll need to upgrade my hardware, regardless of which software package I use.

Everyone’s responses here have been very helpful. I’ll be playing with FCP (since my partner bought it on a lark the other day) and seeing if it’s something I can jump into easily.

And if anyone is interested, I’ll be happy to post my observations about the two packages once I feel I have enough basis to compare them.

Thanks, again!
– Dex
http://www.pandemoniummovie.com

[Larry Sherwood]

Glad to hear positive experiences with long form on PPro, but a key part of my question was whether or not any of you had nested timelines in your final version that were created because of the need to sync dailies on the system. I would still like to hear expereinces with nested timelines in a long form project.

Thanx to all who replied

LS

Larry Sherwood
Sherwood Post Production
Austin, Texas
512 219-8721
larry@sherwoodpost.com

[David Cherniack]

Hey, Larry,

Though we’ve talked about it I may as well mention my experiences for the community.

Running Axio with 3GB of ram and PPro 2 with a large project with 2 levels of subtimelines and a DV project with a few thousand clips.

Because of the well known memory management problems with PPro 1.5 Matrox provided a system tray icon to track memory useage. At a certain point of growth in my project as soon as 1.5 reached about 85% of available memory the program would crash. In point of fact, I had to stop editing because it would only take a few edits to reach the dreaded 85%.

I had high hopes that Adobe, having heard from numerous large project users about the problem (one only need to go on Adobe’s PPro forum) would have fixed memory management in version 2. Unfortunately cross app integration seems to have taken a higher priority and they only put together a partial fix. Memory gets consumed but it also is freed up – some of it, but not all of it. Consequently the 85% crash limit is reached, but just not as quickly. Saving the project, rendering, audio conforming, all consume more memory than they give back. I have to restart PPro 3-6 times a day to avoid crashing. It really is quite frustrating. I don’t know how Adobe can claim to serve a professional market with such a glaring defficiency.

That’s my exprerience. As good as Axio is, the Premiere Pro architecture wasn’t spec’ed to support large projects….at least in my experience.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Lance Bachelder]

Cutting a feature right now in 2.0 with no problems. The same show was a disaster in 1.5, radical improvements in 2.0 – we thought we’d have to divide the show into several reels but have been cutting the entire 90 min. timeline with no problems at all.

We will be re-capturing the HDCAM masters soon via Cineform Prospect/Xena on a HP 9300 – I’ll post the results.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California
Cow Forum Host- Magic Bullet

[David Cherniack]

BTW, if you really want some horror stories with large documentary projects you should check with Marisu. I believe she sometimes has to work with 10,000 or so clips. Maybe she and others haven’t seen this sub-thread and it should be started as a new thread.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Joe Edwards]

If you render a TL and nest it into another you’ll have to render again, for some reason. I’m not fond of this!

One workaround is to render out the finshed TLs w/o recompression and throw those movies into a TL to export out.

-j