Thinking of switching to Premiere?

[Alex Udell]

I like your well thought out and expressed argument. 🙂

If you have any additional insights on the meaning of life, I’m sure we’ll all stop what we’re doing to listen.

🙂

Have a nice day.

Alex

[Eric Monroe]

…….and there you have it friends.

We have all had our share of frustrations with PPro/Adobe……and countless other softwares out there to be totally honest……but really?!? You could at least share with the rest of the Cow community “WHY” you feel that way.

I must say, when CS5 first hit the scene a few months back, I was less than pleased…….ok….I was downright upset. Now that it has been out for a bit, and I have given it a whirl on several different platforms, and machines…..it is actually bringing me back around. (i admit I have eaten some crow in the last few weeks)

A friend of mine just got prod. premium, and installed it on a PC that he built himself for about 800 bucks. Last night, we hooked up my Hitachi G-raid drives via eSata and loaded a qty. of 4 AVCHD clips each 35-38 min. in duration……setup the multicam, and it cut through it like butter. Needless to say I was pretty shocked/impressed.

Specs as follows:

AMD Phenom II 2.8 ghz six-core proc.
4 gb of 1333mhz ddr3 ram
5 year old Nvidia 8800 graph card

I went all Mac and FCP last fall……and I love it, but I also shoot live stage productions 2+ hours in duration using AVCHD cameras……being able to edit natively is causing me to take another look at CS5. AVCHD to Prores transcoding times into FCP are using up my valuable work time. Not to mention FCP doesnt handle native .PSD files nearly as well as PPRO.

I have used Adobe religiously from CS2 – CS4 only last fall did i venture away……however I am doing an abrupt 180 as of what I saw last evening on my friends machine. Looks like going back to my roots is in order.

cheers all.

[Alex Udell]

Hey Eric….

without getting too crazy….

Could you not set up a Bootcamp partition on your Mac, throw a proper cross platform compatible NVIDIA gfx card in there and get a similar result?

[Guy Ross]

Background:
Apple had touted OpenCL as early as 2007, but hasn’t really done anything with it.
So when i saw the cs5/fcp shootouts and read about Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) I was hooked.

After Effects is one of my favorite programs in the world, so why not give Premiere a try?

My asst is a big adobe fan, so we used his 2008 Mac Pro with 6GB RAM and an nVidia GTX285.

Preliminary test:
Preliminary tests were amazing.
Canon 5D 1080p footage played back smoothly with no transcode.

Actual test:
Trying to actually cut on it was a different story.

MPE constantly stutters and stops.

AIF files play random content, if anything at all

MPE marks yellow (RT playback) very complex After Effects nested clips, which it obviously cant render in real time.

Premiere crashed 14 times in 5 days

It takes ages to load, and even longer to quit.

The UI is cumbersome:

no easy way to view keyboard shortcuts (although the FCP compatible preset is pretty good)

Constantly having to turn tracks on and off for edit operations is weird

Accessing clip parameters (audio level, effect parameters) requires too many clicks

[Alex Udell]

Thanks.
Your feedback is much appreciated.

Alex

[Kevin Monahan]

Hey Guy,
Thanks for your feedback. It’s really appreciated. The first thing I would suggest is that you upgrade to Premiere Pro 5.0.2. It may solve many of your issues.

You have a supported video card, so if you have performance issues (sputtering/stopping), make sure that Mercury Engine Playback is enabled. Go to Project > Project Settings > General and enable it in the pull-down menu. You might want to try lowering the display quality for the Source and Program monitors, as well.

Hope that helps.

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects>Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

[Eric Monroe]

Hey Alex,

I do all of my editing in FCP on a macbook pro, hooked up to a 40″ samsung HDTV via mini-display out to HDMI. So its like having a desktop cuz it just sits off to the side most of the time. LOL So an upgrade in the graph card dept. is not gonna happen :o) I went with the laptop in June of 2009 because I had never even played on a mac up to that point….and the original reason was just to buy it and familiarize myself with mac osx (figured i could make myself more well rounded) At that time all of my work was filmed on SD cameras (DVX100B) so I didnt need crazy amounts of power. So I bought a new mac mini like 3 months ago when the new ones were released slapped 8gb of RAM into it and have been cruising right along all summer now in FCP on my macbook and my mini. Well a few months ago I also bought 3 new Panasonic HS700 AVCHD cameras. (UGGG) Cameras shoot BEAUTIFULLY…..but as everyone knows, and I quickly found out it is a nightmare to edit AVCHD. So once again Mac & FCP saved me by being able to “log and transfer” to the new Prores LT format. My mini and macbook will both edit 3 cameras of 1920×1080 Prores LT at full playback quality and full-frame rate. Only problem is down-converting on final export with the machines I have take about 6-7 hours. Which is just too long to wait when you have 19 3-camera productions on the board waiting to be edited. So that is what brought me back to looking at CS5. It will not run on my mini smoothly….I have done tons of tests with the same exact footage, on the same machine, same drives etc. and FCP runs it great and PPro runs it choppy. Obviously PPRO requires more resources than FCP.

Soooo……rather than spending 3-4 grand on a mac pro (which believe me i want) After seeing the results of my friends AMD 6-core I am going to take the PC that I have, upgrade the board, proc, and RAM setup a gigabit network, then take the .mov files that I render out of FCP across the network to the PC and let it do my final export / down-convert to sd dvd on the 6-core proc. Not the “perfect” workflow but it will work for right now till funds for 2 Mac pros become available.

Cheers :o)

Eric