Seems adobe have released everything BUT what we all need

[Tim Kolb]

[Steve Spaw] “This is just a few things that come to mind, I understand that many people here are hobbyists, but don’t speak about Pro issues just because they are not important to you. I am not trying to flame anyone here, but the tone of this thread bugged me.”

Actually there are one or two of us that have made a living, some might even say a name for ourselves in production, thank you.

However, I do feel your pain in the way of media management and subclip handling…though I’ve not had much problem with frame-accurate batch captures…but I always capture with handles I guess, so perhaps that’s why.

What I AM personally fed up with (and PPro isn’t alone here…) is the feeling that “product X doesn’t do what product Y does so it’s broken/f’d up/amateurish/unusable”…whatever.

I don’t think that PPro is ready for post house duty yet…it’s just a fact. We can ask these manufacturers for what we want, but if we don’t get it, we need to talk with our feet.

If the lack of keyframeable speed control is ruining your day, try Vegas…if media management is the key to your existence, Avid is the king in that regard. I’m hoping that PPro will improve on all these fronts, but anyone who thinks PPro v2 will come out looking like Edit/Avid/FCP all rolled up into one is kidding themselves.

I use PPro and it works well in our project studio, but I can see where a post house would have issues…big ones. Therefore, I don’t usually make that recommendation to a facility cutting serial television, etc. We have to start appreciating the fact that all these tools aren’t designed to be the answer for everyone (no matter what the brochure says…)

TimK,

Kolb Syverson Communications,
Creative Cow Host,
2004-2005 NAB Post Production Conference
Premiere Pro Technical Chair,
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Herb Sevush]

Aanarav –

Seeing that you are a certified PPRO expert and therefore have an investment in time, at the very least, in the market success of PPRO I’m willing to cut you some slack on your posting. But this line – “I have worked on plenty of NLEs and by far I have found PPRO is the “fastest” editor” – is a little on the rediculous side.

Unless the “plenty” of editors you worked on consists strictly of previous versions of Premiere it would be impossible to make this statement honestly.

You’ve totally ignored the previous posting by Michael Webb, but I would suggest that if you had a shoot where you had 1 camera with different mikes assigned to tracks 1 and 2, and where you needed to use 1 or 2 at various times, but not both together (this situation comes up all the time in documentary shoots) you would be hard pressed to find an NLE that is slower than your beloved speed demon.

Even in normal editing situations I don’t find PPRO to be any faster, or any slower than FCP, and both are much slower than Discreet Edit* – for speed of editing that’s like comparing a tricycle to a motorcycle.

This is not to say that I don’t like PPRO, I find many things about it quicker and better implemented than in FCP for example – but to make the claim you did simply invalidates anything else you say to anyone who knows anything.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Les Kaye]

[Herb Sevush] “This is not to say that I don’t like PPRO, I find many things about it quicker and better implemented than in FCP for example”

Herb,
This is in no way meant as a snide comment. I’m getting my hands into PPro, and would appreciate if you could elaborate on the PPro features you prefer and why. Anyone else here with experience on both systems are welcome to also respond. (And please no PC vs. Mac arguments).

[Ron Shook]

Oh, Herb & Michael,

[Herb Sevush] “You’ve totally ignored the previous posting by Michael Webb, but I would suggest that if you had a shoot where you had 1 camera with different mikes assigned to tracks 1 and 2, and where you needed to use 1 or 2 at various times, but not both together (this situation comes up all the time in documentary shoots) you would be hard pressed to find an NLE that is slower than your beloved speed demon.”

Say it ain’t so. I’ve seen a number of things about PPro that I wouldn’t be happy with until fixed but I could live with until they are, but this audio thing takes the cake. The situation is endemic to just about any shoot, and if it doesn’t get fixed PPro is off the table for me. I simply couldn’t live with it. Incredible!

Ron Shook

[Steve Spaw]

Hi Guys,
The Audio issue decribed is not as bad as it seems. PPro’s audio is very powerful, like a real audio app. Without going into a tutorial on this, I would suggest learing how to use a MONO SUBMIX TRACK. The routing in PPro is very strong for a Video app. If you have anymore questions I will answer them.

This issue has come up before, it is not one of the problems I have with PPro. Now the mandatory audio conform, that is another issue. 🙂

Thanks,
Steve

[Michael Webb]

as I understand the Mono sub mix track, it works on a track level and not a individual clip level. maybe i’m wrong .. but currently in Prem Pro how would you handle the following situation:

wireless mic recorded on track one and nat sound recorded on track two. while editing you need to switch back and forth between the two tracks and or mix and sweeten each of the two tracks seperatly at various points in the edit process.

Michael Webb
Training / Support
Apple Certified Technician Digital Video / Xsan for Video
Microsearch, Houston Texas
713-988-2818
————
Michael Webb
Editor/Videographer
Post Squared

[Herb Sevush]

Ron –

This has been my biggest problem with PPRO from the begining. The worst part about it is that 2 NAB’s ago I spoke to the main PPRO designer outside the Adobe booth and he didn’t even understand that it was a problem. I’m sure a more experianced PPRO editor, or maybe Larry Sherwood has a more elegant understanding or work around, but the design problem exists and I don’t know if Adobe intends to fix it.

The basic problem is that PPRO assumes that if you have digitized 2 tracks of audio from a tape source, then those 2 are a stereo pair, and drops them onto the timeline that way. Once on the timeline they are treated as a single stereo pair, i.e., you can’t delete or even change the levels on one track without doing the same thing to the other – you con’t have access to the individual tracks, just the single stereo track.

Now there are ways, in the bin, to break out the stereo to 2 mono tracks, but when you do this the sync relationship between the audio and video is destroyed. You can then re-sync them the same way that you would sync up film dailies, but this becomes a MAJOR pain in the ass when dealing with hundreds, let alone thousands of clips.

For me it is a total deal breaker and I won’t consider editing anything complicated on PPRO until this gets fixed. I don’t understand Steve Spaw’s Sub-Mix work around – but whatever it is, it is just that – a workaround to a problem that should not exist in a professional environment. I wrote to Adobe about this when PPRO first came out and of course that is like talking into a dead phone line – all you hear is yourself.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Les –

{This is a repeat of the response I gave you on the FCP forum awhile back, maybe you didn’t see it.)

I haven’t used PPRO much in the last 9 months so I maybe forgetting / overlooking some things, but off-hand. In general PPRO is leaner and meaner. Less menu’s, less buttons, more consistency in commands – at the price of less functionality. Now to Specifics.

Logging and Capture – PPRO is much better about capturing thru time code breaks. This is a major plus as far as I’m concerned.

CG – FCP’s internal CG is incredibly primitive. Even if you get third party plug-ins that enhance the basic CG it still pails when compared to PPRO. While NOT in the inscriber category, especially for making a series of stills, PPRO CG allows you to create any sort of graphic you want with your video as a background if desired. You have to go into one of the external software solutions; i.e. motion, livetype, graffiti, to do anything like that and these programs all require rendering.

Data Management – While any Mac application makes it very difficult to keep an organized file structure PPRO is no Edit*. Both programs basically stink at keeping things organized and helping you delete and/or store job information easily. PPRO has the limitation of 1 job open at any time, whereas FCP is unlimited. Both programs allow for unlimited timelines open within a job. My recollection is that PPRO’s Bins are more limited than in FCP, but off-hand I can’t be more specific. Here, as in other places I would say that FCP is more confusing but more versatile.

Editing – PPRO is terrible in handling a matrix of audio tracks. If you use 2 tracks on a tape to record different audio, rather than as 2 stereo tracks or 2 redundant mono tracks, PPRO has no reasonable way to deal with this and still keep the audio in sync with the video. This is ridiculous but true. Also PPRO has nothing like FCP’s new multi-cam feature that is, as you should know by now, very dear to my heart. The rendering function in both system’s are very stupid, not nearly as sophisticated as edit*’s when it comes to understanding when something truly needs to be re-rendered. FCP has the incredible bug of destroying all renders if you mute a video track – this bug has been around for so long they no longer even try to fix it. At least PPRO doesn’t have anything as heinous as this. But FCP has many more way’s to doing any of the basic editing tasks and seems much more flexible. In addition it’s time-code overlay window, which I always use, is much better than the hidden properties menu needed to find time code info in PPRO. All in all I find FCP much easier to cut with but much harder to learn.

Output – PPRO has the ability to burn DVDs from the timeline; unfortunately this feature rarely works, at least in my case. It’s export to tape module is a pain in the ass but then again so is the FCP edit-to-tape function. Since I’ve only done Firewire input and output with both systems I can’t give firsthand info here, but from what I know I think that PPRO, with the right third party software controllers, is much more capable of handling RS 422 control. This is an area to look closely into when thinking about either system. As far as File export and import, both are about the same – PPRO is AAF, FCP is XML, ability to transfer timelines between each and Avid is possible with third party software (I believe, not sure here.) Both export the full gamut of MPEG’s and Codecs, FCP handles both DVCPRO-HD and HDV natively, I think PPRO handles HDV with 3rd party software and DVCPRO-HD not at all.

Real-Time – If you want real-time then get PPRO with Axio, otherwise there is no such thing on either system, except for draft resolutions. There is nothing like Axio in the FCP world.

My 2 cents – PPRO 2 is coming; perhaps they will address much of what keeps them behind FCP – who knows. They basically started with a clean slate and with the design idea of copying FCP’s workflow and functionality and doing it better. So far I think they are still way behind, but they might have an easier growth path without the legacy of workarounds that abound in FCP. And with Axio they really have something that FCP can’t touch.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Marisu Fronc]

Herb –

Without breaking the link you can basically “copy” left channel to right or vice versa – that’s the workaround I’ve been using (still a major pain in the ass, but you keep the relationship between the audio and the video – your “stereo pair” just becomes two channels of identical mono info). I agree, this is NOT fun when you get into the hundred’s of clips – even more so as you have to “redo” it in each project you import the clip into (and I re-use stuff a LOT), still I wouldn’t count it as anywhere NEAR the worst of my frustrations with Premiere (many of which, I’m sure, are specific to the kind of work I’m doing and probably aren’t problems for the majority of users).

For your purposes I’d probably duplicate each clip and designate one as “right” and one as “left” – apply the filter to copy the appropriate channel and take it from there. Again, this isn’t elegant, and is most certainly a workaround, however it’s a pretty basic one.

slainte,
marisu

[Ron Shook]

Marisu,

[marisu fronc] “For your purposes I’d probably duplicate each clip and designate one as “right” and one as “left” – apply the filter to copy the appropriate channel and take it from there. Again, this isn’t elegant, and is most certainly a workaround, however it’s a pretty basic one.”

So you have two identical clips where one is stereo mono from the left channel and the other from the right channel. What is the procedure to “take it from there,” so that you have a single video track with two stereo audio tracks that are locked and loaded and synced so that you can treat them as a single clip, manipulate any combination of the 3 tracks without losing sync, and does this workaround mean that you have significantly degraded the functionality of PPro in terms of its real-time feature set when you use this combo clip for basic editing procedures? I don’t need the long story here, just what the workflow is and how its results affect functionality. I’m looking to see whether there is a workflow that would allow me to function with this problem by throwing more cheap disk space at it, i.e., capture complete tapes or portions of tapes, fix the audio on the long clips for later chopping into sub-clips and editing?

I hope that communicates a little. (g)

Ron Shook