Why SHOULDN’T I switch to Premiere Pro?

[Christopher Travis]

Thanks again Frank,

We should only need one stream, it’s a very simple edit we just need to do it as quick as possible and if I can avoid transcoding then this makes this seem like an ideal project to try out on PP.

For the record, if we were doing a more complicated edit need 2 or more streams, I could probably get RT playback by dropping the playback resolution right? Would this be less taxing on the HD?

[Christopher Travis]

I’ve been reading around the new Smoke release and it certainly does look interesting. I’ve signed up for the free trial in June so I’ll be dipping my toe in then. I’d like to get myself up to speed on it and maybe I’ll suggest installing it on one suite later in the year. It might save us from having to send certain jobs down the road to the big post house.

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Christopher Travis] “I could probably get RT playback by dropping the playback resolution right? Would this be less taxing on the HD?”

No, you still have to decode all the data in each DPX file before it can be subsampled and displayed on the screen at half-resolution. So the hard-drives will be getting hit either way.

I’m not so sure that 3x7200RPM drives will do the trick across the entire drive. Something to consider with DPX files is that the data-access pattern is not the same as it is for an uncompressed QuickTime file. In other words with individual files sequences, especially if you start editing them together, you are emulating more of a random-access pattern rater than sequential access pattern on the disk-drive. In other words, a QuickTime file that is 2GB in size is generally going to take up a 2GB contiguous chunk on a disk unless the file-system was badly fragmented. Thus accessing the file from disk will happen in a contiguous reading fashion. A DPX sequence on the other-hand will not necessarily be laid down in a contiguous fashion on disk. Thus reading one file and then the next file in the sequence may require you to “skip” around the disk, and as a result, the streaming performance of the disk is reduced to someone between the speed of a continuous read and a random read. In general, a random read on a 7200RPM drive will be slow. Even stripping together the drives does not alleviate the latency required to access a different part of the disk. So you may “get away” with a single stream, but I doubt you’ll get that performance across the entire disk. I would recommend 10K or 15K drives if you can swing the increased cost of the drives. You’ll get much better random-access performance, especially in the reduced amount of latency required to skip from one area of the disk to another.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Frank Gothmann]

Dropping the resolution doesn’t really help because the streams still need to be pulled unaltered from the drives. Dropping the resolution only helps if your CPU/GPU is taxed. You’d get dropped frames and stuttering if your drives can’t keep up but, frankly, I don’t know when this will happen with a three-drive setup and that’s something you’d have to consider with any workflow involving DPX, regardless of PP.

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“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

[Erik Lindahl]

The only point CS6 hasn’t addressed is a common work format. I was hoping for something in the lines of Adobe licensing ProRes or similar but we weren’t that lucky.

Hopefully CS6 handles ProRes like FCP7 on similar hardware and we’re all good sorting that issue out. CS5.5 handles ProRes and video output like a joke.

All native – really nice feature – but you need a “post production format” also.

[Lance Bachelder]

Have you tried FCPX yet? Only asking because your workflow actually sounds ideal for FCPX. You could even ad a Smoke finishing station when it ships and not have to upgrade any hardware as they’re re-designed it from the ground up to run on every Mac from iMac to MacBook Pro.

If you haven’t already – I’d download the 30 day trial of Premiere and see if you even like it before pulling the trigger.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Frank Gothmann]

[Lance Bachelder] “Have you tried FCPX yet? Only asking because your workflow actually sounds ideal for FCPX. You could even ad a Smoke finishing station when it ships and not have to upgrade any hardware as they’re re-designed it from the ground up to run on every Mac from iMac to MacBook Pro.”

Since he wrote that most of his stuff goes through AE at a certain point, some projects almost entirely done there, I don’t see how FCPX or Smoke would be ideal. Premiere would be the perfect companion NLE in such a scenario.

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“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

[Lance Bachelder]

Depends – the main purpose of the new Smoke is to completely eliminate the need for “Editors” to round trip. I’ve only spent about 15 min on the new version but I already like it more than Premiere/AE workflow, which I have used off and on since Premiere Pro 1.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Frank Gothmann]

I agree that it’s nice to stay inside one app but there are many other factors that come into play. Since they already use AE and presumably Photoshop (who doesn’t) I assume he has licenses so upgrading several seats will be much cheaper despite the clearly very competetive and great pricing for Smoke. Also, finding freelancers for AE is easy – no matter where you are and what your budget is. Finding someone for Smoke it a different story, also budget wise
AE is a powerhouse and Smoke, as great as it may be, doesn’t deminish that. And, last but not least, there are people who just don’t fancy the prospect of working on an iMac or a Laptop in the future; with with Adobe your have options.

——
“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

[Christopher Travis]

Simply put we need to get ourselves off FCP legacy as quickly as possible. I want more RT, less rendering, and more native editing, but I want to do this in the least disruptive way possible. PP works a lot like FCP which is good for me as that’s where my background is. We use a lot of freelancers and I don’t want to throw them all out and start from scratch building up a whole new address book of FCPX and smoke users. That is going to make an already tense transition a complete nightmare.

FCPX and the new smoke look fascinating but I can wait a year or two to see how they work for other people before I entrust my workflow to them. I don’t think we will be less competitive compared to shops that use them by switching to PP.