[Chris Davis]

Terry Brown on Feb 28, 2009 at 6:00:22 am
“I find best workflow is to use DL for preview purpose but then render out the composition from AE and import it to premier this is about 20 times quicker than letting PPro do the rendering.
Is CS4 any better?”

Interesting. Anyone else having this experience?
-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Thanks for the reply. I thought no one had responded, but just checked my Spam box and the notification was there. So you can indeed use multiple tracking points and track filters and freeze to them in Motion — great. I’d rather do effects in Motion because I’m using FCP and I’ve read that there’s a gamma shift to worry about when roundtripping to AE. Only problem is no tutorials for this kind of thing. Time for The Manual.
-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Thanks to those who are still responding — good to get a variety of perspectives. Seems everyone has different experiences regarding stability compared to FCP.

I am still curious if Premiere allows rendering HDV footage directly into output formats for SD DVD and Blue Ray (with custom bit settings), so that I do not have to recompress the footage twice (i.e. render in HDV, and then recompress into H.264 for Blue Ray or downscale and recompress into SD MPEG-2 for SD DVD).

Thanks,
Chris

[Chris Davis]

Oops. Thanks. Here they are:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/larsen_carl/analyzing_motion.php

https://www.layersmagazine.com/shattering-glass-with-adobe-after-effects.html

[Chris Davis]

Thanks for the link. From your article:

“FCP can ingest HDV natively and edit on an uncompressed timeline, avoiding any recompression issues as the timeline itself is not attempting to maintain an HDV data rate…. The output of the timeline would then involve going out HD-SDI to a conventional HD format (probably not a normal event video workflow) or transcoding back to HDV or to SD DVD or whatever.”

I’m a little lost here. Are you saying that there’s a way to both render HDV footage after adding effects and compress it into, for example H.264 for Blue Ray in just one step (with custom bitrate settings and everything); or that it must be rendered (recompressed) into one codec (e.g. HDV or ProRes) once effects are applied, then recompressed again into another (e.g. H.264)?

Is the main point of editing in an uncompressed timeline to minimize the image loss that eventual rendering in to HDV will do? If I render parts along the way to allow real time playback, will this require the traditional super fast RAID array for uncompressed HD to pull off?

Thanks for your patience.
-Chris

[Chris Davis]

I didn’t say to ‘render’ the footage to uncompressed in either case… Recompression isn’t needed before editing. In both FCP and CS4, you can export the sequence to the authoring app and not compress until that step.

I didn’t mean to misquote you, just trying to understand what you’re saying. To clarify, can I export my sequence to Compressor without rendering (into HDV or ProRes), and recompress the unrendered HDV footage directly into H.264 or SD MPEG-2 in this way? Is a similar workflow possible with Adobe? I thought the footage had to be rendered first, but would love to be wrong.

I’ve not experienced anywhere near the issues with runnability that the production company I room with has had with FCP… However, all experience is anecdotal and if I was to somehow fashion my own experience into “FCP is a problem and PPro is Great”, I’d be talking as off-base as those who make the blanket statement that “FCP is rock solid and PPro is buggy.”

Makes sense to me. Thanks again for your help.

[Chris Davis]

HDV can be handled as HDV in PPro, or you could create a custom uncompressed project setting to handle it in the same way. An uncompressed timeline won’t keep re-compressing when you’re slicing up GOPs.

Is the only way to avoid rendering HDV footage in HDV in PPro to render it in uncomressed 8 or 10 bit before compressing it to H.264 for Blue Ray (or downsizing it and compressing it for MPEG-2 for SD DVD)?

FCP is pretty good, but I’ve seen FCP systems with quirks as well…if you tried to run FCP without enough RAM, it wouldn’t run very well either.

It seems like you are saying that PPro CS3/4 is as stable as FCP 6, so long as there is at least 8GB of RAM and it is used on a Mac (or a PC with Vista). Is this correct?

Thanks again.

[Chris Davis]

Thanks for your response.

Stability issues…yes, indeed… Overall, all the programs in CS3/4 need RAM…lots and lots of RAM… Many users notice that things improve markedly when they move to Vista 64 or to a Mac.

This doesn’t sound promising. How much RAM does the program need? Is it possible to add enough RAM to make PPro as stable as FCP?

[Chris Davis]

Thanks for your reply

I am sorry I missed something here why do you need RGB?
I though FCP worked in YUV, but the laptop converts to RGB in the DVI port. Don’t need nor want RGB. That’s the problem

What are you outputting to?
Nothing yet. But wanted to go to a HDTV.

And why only on a laptop- that is no place to be handling 1080 RGB files for editing.
That’s all I have. It’s worked OK so far, I haven’t done animation yet. I may start downscaling clips to SD before I edit them for more complex projects.

[Chris Davis]

Shane,
Thanks for the news, even if it isn’t good news. I want to clarify — you’re saying that even if I set up my computer to output 1920×1080 and used a DVI to HDMI adaptor into a LCD HD TV, it would still not be close to color accurate. The rep told me that a TV would automatically convert the signal into YUV. Sounds like you’re saying this is nonsense, which fits with what I’ve heard elsewhere. What is the TV showing color-wise if I were to feed it RGB though a DVI to HDMI adaptor (assuming I matched the pixels)? Is it just showing some skewed version of RGB rather than YUV?