Why SHOULDN’T I switch to Premiere Pro?

[Steve Connor]

Chris, look around the Adobe forum here and on the Adobe site this will give you a better ideas of any problems people are finding with it. If you do a lot of AE work then it seems a very obvious move for you.

Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television

[Aindreas Gallagher]

maybe try contacting Walter Biscardi too – he pretty firmly road tested the beta CS6 suite recently – its going number two in his shop behind Avid for any stuff bar heavy duty long form broadcast I think.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Frank Gothmann]

There is a lot in Premiere CS5.5 that’s driving me up the wall and makes it hardly usable in my workflow. Pointing those things out now seems of not much since virtually all of these things seem adressed in CS6, at least on paper. If it does what is says it does it’s golden. So, my suggestion would be to hold out a few more weeks until CS6 is in the open.

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iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Christopher Travis]

Frank,

Could you tell me what those things are and in what way CS6 is supposed to be addressing them?

Also thanks Steve, just browsing the thread titles in the PP forum is good for getting an idea of peoples problems with it. I’d still appreciate any and all criticisms of the system, things that are definitely not user-error problems but problems with the package itself.

[Frank Gothmann]

Some of the main issues I have with CS5.5, adressed in CS6

– VideoIO is clunky, buggy. CS6 doesn’t just fix any bugs, it’s a different architecture for IO so you’re also not just limited to BM or AJA timelines.
– Audio handling and export was poor; stereo, mono or 5.1 only. No way to export stems or, say, 8-channel audio – all adressed.
– Poor trim-tools – addressed
– Interface make-over badly needed – adressed

I suggest you take a look at this series of videos. It’s like a one-by-one checklist of issues and most common wish lists that seem resolved/fulfilled.
https://www.video2brain.com/en/products-321.htm

On a general note, I tip my hat to Adobe. It’s a very, very substantial update that should put Premiere firmly on the map for a lot of FC users.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Andy Edwards]

How old is your hardware? You definitely want to have newer gear to deal with some of the current Adobe issues. Tons of ram, an NVIDIA gfx card will be a must. If you think bumping an old tower to Lion and stuffing CS5.5 into it will work flawlessly, well your in for some struggles.

If you are running Kona 3 cards in the Mac Pro’s, the current drivers are horrible!! Stuttering audio, and stuttering video playback is a real work stopper! Adobe and AJA know this and had to rewrite their entire I/O interface. CS6 hopefully addresses this problem.

If you archive or media manage your projects, be prepared for more drive space or LTO tapes. Adobe’s “project manager” is not space friendly. It takes the entire project, not always the “trimmed” version. I think CS6 might have better media managing, but have not read anything about it yet.

Over the past few months of moving 20 Mac Pro systems to CS5.5, the transition has not been easy. There have been days when going back to FCP just to get a project completed for air was needed. These are all growing and transition pains that might work better under CS6, but with today’s hardware and current build, it is not all clean and easy like the marketing material you read.

I really want this transition to work, but with the current AJA hardware issues, buggy interactions with Lion, you are in for a rough start. Clone your system drive and definitely load up CS5.5 and test your current workflow. See what works and then compare the changes made in CS6.

Any other specific questions fire away, happy to share what has or hasn’t worked.

Andy Edwards

[Paul Jay]

Indeed,

They addressed exactly the things needed.

Then you have FCP7 continuity, you can use your AJA or Blackmagic card.
True native codec support.

I think the CS6 is great.

But FCPX certainly has a future aswell.

[Alan Okey]

You should really check out Autodesk Smoke. A seat of Smoke would be a great tool for any agency to have, especially if you do any fast turnaround jobs. The integrated editing, effects and finishing tools are ideally suited for advertising work where you need to experiment and iterate rapidly, especially with a client present.

[Christopher Travis]

All of our 3 towers are less than 2 years old. 1 is on Snow Leopard, the other 2 are on Lion. We don’t have any capture/video cards at the moment, currently all mastering and playouts are done outside but if possible I’d like to bring this inside too so it’s useful to know there may be hiccups with that.

On a side note, we have about 30hours of DPX files coming our way next week and I’m hoping that one of these towers (12 core, 32Gb Ram) running PP will be able to edit these right away as long as I have a fast enough RAID array (I’m thinking 3x2TB,7200RPM internal, striped RAID 0). Can anyone tell me if I’m likely to be disappointed? I really REALLY don’t want to have to transcode that lot to Prores and work in FCP.

[Frank Gothmann]

Premiere handles DPX just fine, simple import without any rendering also on slower machines. About your internal raid w. 3 drives: 1 stream should be ok, not too sure about more. It’s not ideal. I am only using external Raid arrays with more drives.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement