[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

I already had a few instances when I had HD on my hands and obviously, since it was meant for PAL broadcasting, I took advatage of the bigger frame do do zooms and pans. I was just curious of how they do this where work on film is concerned.

My las question was about the compatibility or lack of it when sending and EDL generated say in FCP to Premiere Pro or Avid.

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

Thanks Reggie,

Lots of valuable information in there. In my case though I will be doing the HD online based on DVCAM copies that were made on set. One of the firs issues I met is that the copies are losing one frame of video from time to time. I didn’t have the opportunity to check if the loss happens at equal intervals or if it is random. Downconversion from HDCAM was performed through a Miranda unit attached to the Sony F900 camera. I would like to know if you have any idea on that.

I am also interested into the telecine process. One particular instance was a music video (it wasn’t a project I worked on) that was edited in Avid and that featured lots of inframe pan and zooms. The thing is that, as far as I know, along with the edit the guys back at the lab also reproduced the pans and zooms made in Avid. I wonder how they did it.

Second, what about EDL interoperability between say, Avid & Premiere Pro, or, as it in my case ofline on FCP and online in PPro?

Thanks
CB

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

“I’m still pondering some of your issues. I’ve not seen the behaviors you’re describing myself and I need to ask around a bit…”

Well many thanks. Anyway. Getting to the bottom of this would be an interesting / useful thing for everyone I guess.

Thanks
CB

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

Just to avoid “giving the software a bad name”, perhaps one admin could rename this thread. Give it a more peaceful name as… Premiere Issues or… Premiere Issues & HD. Premiere & his friends or something. 😀

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

The preset settings provided by the blackmagic design plugin that comes with the HD card ar as follows.

HD1080
10 bit RGB
Interlaced 50i 59.94i 60i
PsF 23.976 24p 25p 29.97p 30p
10 bit YUB
Interlaced – same framerate options
PsF – same framerate options
HD720
10bit RGB
59.94p
60p
10bitYUV
23.976p
24p
25p
29.97p
30p
50p
59.94p
60p
8 bit yuv – same framerate options
NTSC
PAL

Now that I came to this, I have never looked over the HD720 setting I’m wondering what’s the color space got to do with framerates anyway? IN other words why is 10bit RGB more limited framrate wise than the 10 bit YUV? Curious…

My system. As far as I know it:

2xAMD Opteron 246 @ 1.99ghz

3.39 RAM

2x250gb work drives (used for SD projects, AfterEffects stuff etc.)

1 Raid10 Array 2.8 TB (used only for HD footage)

HD Drive speeds:

Average framerates for HD footage 8bit YUV 4:2:2 is 93fps/read 71fps/write and for 10 bit 4:2:2 60fps/read 53fps/write.

In MPBS: 370/sec – read 280/sec – write. Speed tests were performed now with the disks filled at 75% of their capacity.

This is all I can come up with at this time. I’ll try to come up with more details.

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

HDcam…did you capture uncompressed?

Well.. “uncompressed”. Project settings were. 4:2:2 8bit 25psf

About the drives. When I had the first project things seemed pretty normal. However, since about three weeks or so I have many times when the HDD’s are working like mad, but when loading a clip into the source monitor there is not so much hard drive activity. I double click a clip or double clip a click if you wish :), and it just takes about 5 – 10 second to load it into the monitor.
Another thing. Sometimes, when I try to grab a clip’s head to shorten it or make it longer, Premiere just hangs for about 10 to 30 seconds. This is only seolvde by a restart.
And another one. Trying to fade in/out clips using the opacity controls doesn’t have any result at all. The clip plays out just as it is.

I didn’t try yet to work with shorter clips and smaller HD projects.

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

“I wasn’t implying that you weren’t doing it right. I guess I typically want to preview the entire frame before I leave the color corrector, so I guess that’s why I’ve never run into this… I haven’t had a chance to see If I can reproduce this bug myself yet.”

Ok. Sorry. It looks like I’m a bit too trigger happy. 🙂

I don’t know if it can be called a bug, but rather a well, design flaw.

“Out of curiousity, what exactly crashes PPro for you?…the Media Encoder?”

Ok. So here’s the thing.
FOr SD projects I use exclusivelly Avid Xpress Pro. However, the guys here wanted badly to have and HD suite up and running so in march they assembled the dual Opteron 4gb’s of RAM, 3TB Raid10 Array, GeForce Fx6800.
We also have a BlackMagic Design HD pro card hooked up to a 24 inch Philips monitor. The hard drives ussually run at a mean speed of 300 – 400 mb/second with a theoretical speed of 1gb/s.

I don’t have the time now to give all the details but I will try to name a few things. Our first HD project was a music video originated on a
Sony 750. First problem (which it seems was not Premiere based) was that once we had less that 30% free space on the HD drive, the drives would slow down and the immediate result was that I got lost frames. As a note, I captured the footage throug the HD SDI in on the BM card, from a Sony Cinealta. (We had a Sony HDW500 for demo purposes but now it’s gone *SIGH*). That’s why with HD projects I’m forced to capture whole tapes and I cannot select material in order to avoid wearing the Cinealta’s head.
So anyway. The first thing I did was that I emptied the drives, and instead of capturing in 10 bit I captured in 8 bit just to be on the safe side. Capturing worked fine and playback also. Now I will list the things that worked and those that didn’t and related issues.

1. Loading clips into monitor sometimes takes about 10 seconds.
2. For some reason, after an hour of two of editing, Premiere would not playback (timeline or footage in the monitor). This is solved by saving the project and restarting Premiere. Sometimes it becomse annoying as this “playback issue” can repeat several times in a row with some pauses.
3. Instant crashes to desktop. Rare, but happened a few times.
4. Color correction is doable but totally impractical. Numerous (no reason whatsoever) crashes when applying the color corrector filter to individual clips, modifying, slow renders and slow response. etc. etc.
5. After a while, when the project grows bigger and bigger, loading times for the project rocketed to 5 mins even 15 mins in one instance. Another note. I ussually like to keep my projects well organized so chaotic placement of media & such is out of the question.
5a. Working with the actual project also became a pain in the neck as scrubing through the timeline became really slow.
6. Long render times for color corrected clips.
7. Odd transition behavior. For instance, no matter how long I made a transition it rendered as a sudden pass from black to the incoming footage. Vewy confusing if you ask me.

What went well.

1. With all issues, the final project was delivered. Downconversion to Beta SP through the BM card went smooth. No probs.
2. One of the features I like most in PPro is the ability to zoom in not only in the timeline but also in the left monitor where I load my footage.
3. Track monitoring is a bit akward as opposed to Avid but sometimes the classical “adobe eye icon” thingie proved to be more flexible.
4. Palettes have their ups and downs. Intergaface management still seems to limitated in Premiere.

I will try to bring into discussion more specific issues, with more details.

Thanks
CB

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

Ok. This topic was not about venting of anything of the sort. At one particular moment I just got frustrated by the lack of some features in Premiere & other PPro related issues.

“LMAO…that would be a glitch wouldn’t it? I guess I never left the corrector with the split screen turned on so I never ran into it…
”

You may want to try a subtler form of irony. 😛

Now, perhaps I had misinterpreted the word “preview” as english is not my mother tongue but as far as I know this is what “preview” means:

An advance showing, as of a movie or art exhibition, to which a selected audience is invited before public presentation begins.
An advance viewing or exhibition, especially the presentation of several scenes advertising a forthcoming movie; a trailer.
An introductory or preliminary message, sample, or overview; a foretaste.

Seriously now. Since the switch is called split screen PREVIEW, I would certainly not expect Premiere to render half a screen, but to nicely make a split screen preview and then when I hit RETURN render the hole damned frame. Who needs a half corrected frame? I certainly wouldn’t. So, as far as I am concerned that can be at least labeled as a terminology / interface glitch. I recently had to perform some color corrections for a music video. I don’t know how many clips there were but “a lot of them” is a good estimate. Now, go figure, it actually happened to me to forget the SPLIT SCREEN PREVIEW option ON for some of them. I detected my error in time, and then again I find this render half a frame surprise to be moronic to say the least.

” People would rather vent on forums than invest the time to actually read the manuals.”

Crashes, imense rendering times & such have absolutelly nothing to do with reading manuals and are pretty good reasons to “vent on forums” as you like to say.

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

Okay okay. No reason to take it so personal. It’s just that I sometimes use a more…say colorful scheme when posting. 😛

I do admit that ussually, it’s not the software that matters and that this is also a problem of who to what software is used.
Latellyt I had to handle two HD projects using Premiere. I kept saying ot myself that I’ll be writting a detailed post about these two projects and working with Premiere but I didn’t have the time to. Bottom line, with absolutelly no intent of hurting anybody’s feelings, Premiere had a crush for crashes so to speak. As I said, I will try to bring some further details, not only to avoid acuses but also to exchange some oppinions. I strongly believe that the first and most important thing is to get the job done, as efficient and ergonomic as possible.

About what I consider a glitch in the Color Corrector…

There is a switch called SPLIT SCREEN PREVIEW or something. What really amused me was the fact that, when hitting render, Premiere graciously renders just half of the image. Neat. Now, if I hit render in most of the cases I want a final render, not a split screen one. Second. When rendering, Premiere also has a fancy for rendering not only SPLIT SCREEN but it also renders the small triangles that mark the splitter line.

“Making subclips in PPro makes workflow sense when you understand what the operating principles of the software are…”

Not really. It’s about which software’s workflow is best. Also, different editors have different workflows much like the projects themselves. So, imposing a software based workflow is a bit limitating. It’s true each software has it’s own defining features, but to get hampered by a poor/primitive (just to justiy the Neanderthal term) Media Mangement scheme it’s a totally different story.
Furthermore, I agree my knowledge of Premiere is quite limited, but, one of the many cons I have is that, Premiere also seems to force a mouse based workflow on the users. Yes, keyboard is customizable and I noticed the Avid preset :p but still every Premiere editor’s I have seen best friend was the mouse. Ofcourse, Steven may be biased to remind me again that the number of Premiere editors I know can be hardly considered a statistic but then again… why not.
Anyway, I do not intend to throw rotten tomatoes at anyone. It’s just that, until now, PPro has given me tons of headaches although I was interested in exploring it since I met persons who hailed this new version and talked so much about the new and improved Premiere.
I believe, that as long as this topic remains within tolerable limits we could get something out of eachoter.

Graciously yours,
Colourblind

[Andrei-cristian Murgescu]

Thanks Steven.

As a note, I did visit the Premiere forums and I did read your post regarding the subclips issue but at first it didn’t work. After reading your post on this forum I finally managed to do it. However, you must admit the process is pretty time consumming and akward, but well, it works. As for my iritated state that was due to the numerous glitches in Premiere’s fetures. I do not have too much Premiere experience but for now I do find trimming extremelly impracticable, collor correction is ok, but has a ludicrous glitch that in my opinion should trigger the firing of many people (more on that latter). Don’t get me wrong I’m a huge Adobe fan but, Premiere in my opinion is a tiny (yet annoyng crack) in their shiny armor.