Premiere workflow from a production company viewpoint

[Buddy Brett ramker]

Hey Roddy,

Could you list the system specs on the iMacs that you are using? Are you transcoding the media or leaving it native? What logging workflow are you using in Prelude? Tagging metadata or creating subclips? How many users are accessing your SAN at once?

[Roddy Babb]

Buddy- Thanks for reaching out.

IMacs-
3.4ghz processors
24gb ram 1600 MHz DDr3
NVIDIA GeForce GRX 775M 2048MB (Cuda drivers loaded)

Using Prelude to simply change the name of the clips via a tag on of metadata, no transcoding. (from native canon AA0204 to BBC_100414_A_001)

at most 4 people accessing SAN at once.

If this is not the workflow we should be doing, that is fine, but need to know how to go about it.

my email is Roddy@bigbitetv.com if you would like to contact directly.

Thanks!

[Buddy Brett ramker]

It sounds like your computer should have plenty of power to process 1080 footage. I could see the ethernet possible creating a little bit of loading time. So with Prelude, the dynamic link is pretty cool, but it doesn’t hard rename your clips. Generally the Prelude workflow I use is to create subclips, and then export them in native format but tell Prelude to rename them to your subclip names. To be honest, Prelude should really be a function in Premiere, not a separate app. But that is how Adobe does it, an app for everything.

If you are a small boutique house, I would look at FCPX, especially since you have Macs. Don’t believe the stigma, its a powerful and more reliable app. The errors you are seeing sort of come with the unforgiving nature of Adobe’s apps. They are powerful, but you better be technical and pay attention to every move, other wise you will achieve inconsistent results.

Best of luck.

[Jake Abramson]

I’ve found with networked media (particularly on a windows server), that it will randomly go “media pending” or takes a few extra seconds to load up. No issues with local media and I don’t believe coming from another mac via network share.

[David Markey]

We often have problems when loading big projects or accessing folders in OSX with lots of files.

IME, part of the problem is Premiere ‘conforming’ the clips, which seems to happen when adding new media to a project or when opening a project that was created on another machine.. This takes some time, and your access to the media might be unreliable until it’s finished. Sometimes the fix is to just wait a bit.

Premiere also is just a bit shaky and glitchy at times. Closing the app and relaunching fixes most things. If it’s really unhappy, restart the whole machine, and if it’s REALLY unhappy, maybe restart your SAN.

The other issue we run into is that the Spotlight feature of OSX can take FOREVER to index files, and once it does, there can be a lag in refreshing the index. For instance, my graphics guy will export a file, but I won’t see it for several minutes sometimes. Sometimes I need to remount the volume to see the newly added file. Weird stuff like that. It could be our ProMax server, but I blame Mavericks/OSX. If this is the problem and you need Spotlight, you can disable it by typing some commands into Terminal.