[Bill Celnick]

I’ve been shooting weddings for over 30 years now, and I’d say that for the last 8, I’ve been shooting with a combination of traditional camcorders and DSLRs – DSLRS for the “eye candy” parts of the day such as preps, photo sessions, and camcorders for everything else.

My DSLRs have primarily been Lumix – GH4, G85, S1…I would describe my feelings towards them as “love/hate” – especially the S1 – beautiful images in low light, but you loose too much time focusing – auto focus is lacking despite several firmware updates that promised better focus among other things.

I’ve been through many camcorders over the years – bought one in August – Canon XA 50 which has become my go to camera (and I had always been partial to Sony before this). I like it much better then I expected to – and I’m using the DSLRs less and less.

[Bill Celnick]

I recently bought a new Mac with an M1 chip as a 3rd system, and with the initial install of Creative Cloud, I believe that Premiere 2022 was the only option.

Since I also edit on a PC laptop when away from home, which was running Premiere 2019, and I needed to work on a project I began in Premiere 2022 on this laptop..since projects can’t be opened in an older version retroactively, I had no choice but to install 2022 on the laptop.

Another reason would be the transcription features available on 2022 that isn’t on older versions – for some of my projects it will be very useful.

[Bill Celnick]

I tend to resist new versions until there is a compelling reason to update to the new release, but always choose the option not to uninstall the previous version.

There is just never a time (excepting the lack of work in mid 2020 due to Covid) when all my projects are complete – always something’s in the loop.

[Bill Celnick]

In my work flow- which is primarily corporate or personal events, it’s rarely necessary once a project is finished to access the footage again – but, all of my footage and project files are saved off-line, and I can re-import and reopen if needed.

I think when I do need to revisit older work, it’s more the final, or almost final masters I’m interested in, not the camera files.

[Bill Celnick]

I don’t rename on ingest, but do so once within my Premiere project bin if necessary, and even then the original file name will be kept – for example MV11050 might become MV11050talk1.

For my Sony camcorders, which label everything C001 etc, whether it’s different cameras or different cards same camera, it’s a must to rename, but within a project only.

[Bill Celnick]

I bought a new Mac Mini with the M1 chip a few weeks ago as a secondary edit system to go along with my Puget Sound PC (2016) and Mac Pro from 2010 (which is basically obsolete).

So far I’m very pleased – with Premiere, I’m finding renders and exports in some cases to be faster then my PC, and that has 64GB of ram. The negatives are that some of my plugins, such as Plural Eyes are not compatible, at least not yet.

Now my Puget System cost me about $5500 back in 2016. The Mac Mini cost $1299 Not suggesting that it’s better – but for $1299 (I had keyboards, monitors, mice etc) I got a 2nd system that works almost as well, and for my simpler projects: conferences, seminars, etc, it gives me all I need.

[Bill Celnick]

It’s time to leave CS3 behind – I know it’s tempting to stay with what you know, and of course, you don’t have to pay a monthly subscription fee, but unless you’re still producing VHS and DVD, it’s time to move on. Maybe FCP at a one time fee, or Resolve which is free are worth looking at.

For myself I’m using Premiere 2019 on my older Windows system, and just installed 2021 on my new Mac Mini.

[Bill Celnick]

PS: My final export is 1080P – 9GB file

[Bill Celnick]

Hi Ashley

I set my new Mac Mini M1 up yesterday and redid an edit of a project I did last week on my PC, and overall I’m very impressed. Although it’s on some levels apples to oranges, here are my set-ups, and impressions.

The Mac:

M1 16GB Ram, 1 TB Hard Drive, external Samsung SSD connected via bus-powerd hub.

The PC: Puget Systems (2016)

64 GB Ram, Geoforce 1070, ssd system drive, Seagate 7200 rpm Spindle drive -internal

The edit:

-a youth musical performance – 67 minutes shot with 4 cameras and external audio mixed in.

-3 cameras shot 4K 2160 – h.264

-1 camera – AVCHD 1080p

-Within Premiere: no transcoding to another codec after ingest, no proxies created.
Sequence settings AVC-Intra 1080p

-Did not use multicam – directly placed all tracks on timeline

-used cross dissolves for every transition – about 300 in total

-reframed and rescaled much of the 4K footage

-adjusted brightness and contrast minimally

-applied a LUT via an adjustment layer to the whole timeline (applied after all other edits made)

Results:

-timeline playback: at full resolution PC hung more than the mac, mac worked best at ¼ resolution

Export: for our purposes we exported an h.264 file to Mediazialla’s recommended settings which is 1 pass 20 bit.

The PC exported the file in 43 minutes, the Mac in 55 minutes. I’m fine with that considering the price tag.

For me – the real test will come when I have a project that requires warp stabilization and Neat Video noise reduction – particularly Neat Video – it does a phenomenal job, but slows my renders and exports down considerably.

Overall after 24 hours, I’m very happy with my purchase.

I hope this helps.

[Bill Celnick]

I actually have one on order – should be here sometime late today – assuming no issues setting up and downloading all the apps, hopefully I’ll do some testing this week-end.

Most of my footage is 4K, cameras are Lumix S1, GH4, UX 90 and will be using a 2TB external SSD for my media files.