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Premiere’s Achilles’ heel: Multicamera
Premiere CS5 has to have the worst multicamera implementation of any NLE out there. I was contemplating leaving Vegas for Premiere because of the lousy AVCHD engine in Vegas, but after doing a simple two camera multicam in Premiere for the past few days, I’m through with it. The way it works is just nonsense and incredibly inefficient. I got two streams from two Panasonic AVCCAM camcorders, and my system is pretty beefy, with an AMD 1090T @3.8 Ghz, 16 Gb of DD3 RAM, Western Digital Black drives, and an eVGA GTX465. And CUDA acceleration works great in Premiere for normal speed playback and GPU effects, but when you try multicamera everything goes downhill.
Let’s say I’m choosing camera angles in either Vegas or Edius. I went through a place in the timeline where I want to put a cut to the other camera. So I simply press K, then L and go back to the precise spot, and click on the right camera on the monitor. Piece of cake. But in Premiere, once I clicked on a different camera earlier and the red frame is on it, I can’t use JKL. I press the keys, but nothing happens. I have to press the space bar to stop it. Once that happens, if I’m lucky, the choice of camera will stay in the same camera. But many times it just moves to the other camera, for no good reason. Also, when I press stop and I press J to go back to find the right place, it doesn’t work. I have to press J many times until it starts playing backwards. And even with all the 358 CUDA cores, it plays backwards in slow motion, so you have to guess where to stop and then go back and forth with the left and right arrow.
Other bug: Let’s say you have two cameras, but there’s a minute or two when there’s only one. So you’re in the multicamera monitor and suddenly the second camera appears. Premiere decides on its own that it’s a good idea to switch to the camera angle that just appeared, right from the beginning.
So I would say, multicamera in Premiere is just plain bad.
And other than multicamera, there’s the other annoyances. The 3 way color corrector is terrible in its usability. To raise or lower the magnitude of each group you have to choose from a drop down list between shadows, midtones and highlights. It’s ridiculous. Vegas, Edius, FCP have far easier to use 3 way color corrector.
And how about wipe and iris transitions? Premiere doesn’t even have feather for them. Your only choice is to use the gradient wipe transition, for which you have to go into Photoshop and start drawing gradients until there’s one that produces the effect that you want, instead of simply adjusting transition parameters from more or less feather like in Vegas and Edius.
And finally, there’s the timecode problem. I set the timecode in my cameras to the current time and free run. That way, when I import the footage into Vegas or Edius, I can tell exactly what time it was in each part of the footage, which comes in very handy to align the footage for multicamera. Premiere, however, doesn’t show the timecode embedded in the file, and it doesn’t allow it to be changed (If I right lick on the file and go to Modify, in the submenu timecode is grayed out.)
So while the ability to use CUDA acceleration saves a lot of time in rendering, the poor usability of Premiere makes me frustrated and takes maybe even more time than the time I save with the CUDA processing.
I just wish all these NLE programmers would get together and create one NLE that just works.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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4 Replies
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If you’d like to make feature requests or report bugs, you can do so here.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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The last time I used multicam editing was in CS3 – when you selected one of the cameras, it would take audio along with the video – very inconvenient if you actually want to keep the audio intact from all cameras. Now I simply do a PIP arrangement of all cameras, play it, make my cuts and then paste a motion preset onto all clips to make them full frame again, moving the clips I don’t need to a transparent track. May take a bit longer than using multi-cam, but much more control.
Mike Cohen
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[Mike Cohen] “Now I simply do a PIP arrangement of all cameras, play it, make my cuts and then paste a motion preset onto all clips to make them full frame again, moving the clips I don’t need to a transparent track. May take a bit longer than using multi-cam, but much more control.”
Sounds incredibly convoluted. This was the main reason I switched to Edius and not looking back. Another big reason: Edius reads the embedded timecode in my AVCHD files; Premiere doesn’t. If I set Edius to multicamera mode, and I drag all the clips to the timeline, they even get distributed according to their timecode. Drag the files from one camera to one track, then the files from the other camera to a second track. Done. What took me two hours in Premiere took me less than a minute in Edius. That’s what a real NLE is supposed to be. And, it doesn’t force you to spend hundreds of dollars extra in cards with CUDA. It gives you real time, as much as Premiere, but using the CPU, and it works.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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Good! glad you found something to suit you, have fun editing.
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