Chris Jacek
Forum Replies Created
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Jacob,
Sadly, I still never resolved this. Yet another year goes by and my reward for sticking with Premiere is the need to cut and slip my audio every 30 seconds to stay in quasi-sync. I, too, am a Windows user (a convert, that used to work on the FCP team at Apple). I’m hoping that someday Adobe carries through on their teases to address this.
Chris
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
It’s not just because it is popular. It is also because the iPhone cameras are of a high enough quality to be viable. If Kodak Instamatic cameras were capable of taking photos of a comparable quality to their Nikon rigs (mind you, I say “comparable”, not equal), then National Geographic would definitely have used them in certain situations. Again, let me stress “in certain situations”. The cameras on iPhones serve a similar purpose. If you’re outdoors on a sunny day, you can get footage that is better than passable. It will never compete with a Red Camera, but it is certainly good enough to be used in most situations. Someone hiking the Appalachian Trail might find an iPhone camera to be very useful, just as they would have appreciated the theoretical 35mm Kodak Instamatic that could shoot photos comparable to SLR.
Most importantly, what is acceptable to use is often NOT OUR CHOICE. If snobby production people like us got to choose what people use, people would be compelled to use a light kit and external microphone on everything. If there’s 100 million iPhones out there (I’m guessing there are even more), and just one percent of them are shooting video that needs to be edited, then that’s a million cameras worth of footage that Adobe doesn’t mind alienating. Not very flexible at all.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Dave LaRonde] “Well, how much does iMovie cost?”
Just your soul. Okay maybe that’s an exaggeration. But it definitely would cost ones dignity.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Alan Lloyd] “The problem is not Premiere. The problem is Apple not making a fixed frame rate camera part of the iPhone.”
I cannot agree with this. The premise is flawed, because the editing platform must follow the capture technology, especially if the capture product becomes widely accepted. If you’d used that logic in the past, no NLEs should have ever accepted H.264 footage. Or, as I mentioned earlier, using that same logic, Adobe would be justified in refusing any footage that lacks dedicated time code. Adobe continually touts how flexible their creative tools are. In this case, they are being extremely inflexible.
What if Apple, or anyone else, creates a revolutionary VFR codec that is 10X the quality and 10x more efficient? Would it still be okay to ignore the sync issue, when everyone is buying these amazing new cameras?
As one technology evolves, it is the responsibility of those who serve users of that technology to adapt (or die). Those of us who’ve been in the game long enough surely remember the post-houses who refused to finish on NLEs in the mid 90s, because online tape-to-tape suites were “the professional” way to do it. Those post houses are now paintball facilities and parking lots.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
I think I addressed how this is not a reasonable expectation in my Dec 6 post. I hate to use the old “time is money” cliche, but it is certainly appropriate here. I’m sure there are others like me whose ability to maintain a good hourly rate is dependent upon volume. If I need to wait 5 minutes to encode a video that takes me less than 5 minutes to edit (a common situation for me), my productivity has been reduced by more than half.
It would be one thing if this were a common limitation across all nonlinear platforms. It is another thing altogether when competitors have had a solution for years, and you simply refuse to address it. And perhaps the following statement is best for the “debate” forum, but one must wonder whether Adobe would have been so dismissive if they didn’t have users trapped with the subscription model.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
That sounds like a nice update. But it unfortunately doesn’t help much in situations where we have no control over the acquisition process. Still, if I were shooting on an iPhone, I would certainly appreciate this effort.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
No, it has nothing to do with slowness of computers. If anything, my setup could be described as overkill for blog videos (2015 workstation with gobs or ram, all SSD, fast Nvidia, yada yada).
Handbrake works some of the time, but nowhere near every time. When there is too much “corrected” camera shake in these VFR files, there are no viable fixes that I’ve found. So I just chop it up and slip a few frames here and there. Either way (transcoding or editing the sync slippage), it is an unnecessary and time-consuming step when there are other products on the market that have handled this issue better for years.
We can all say that best practices of professionals like ourselves would eliminate any such problems, and I certainly agree when it comes to work that I’m doing. The reality, however, is that collaboration across disciplines becomes greater every day, and many of us “professionals” will have clients, or even supervisors who don’t have a clue about best practices, but are still signing expecting a result.
I think that hiding behind the argument of Premiere being a professional product, so it doesn’t need to address basic functionality of its competitors, is short-sighted at best, and a B.S. excuse at worst. It would be like saying that Adobe Premiere only accepts video with SEMPTE timecode. Yes, once upon a time, that was a obiquitous professional standard, and might have been an acceptable limitation, but times change.
Like them or not, iPhone cameras are viable cameras. When you have millions of viable cameras on the market, to me it is irresponsible not to address an issue that causes workflow disruption to those of us who must work with the resulting footage.
And please do no post another link to Adobe’s feature request page. I’ve made this request numerous times, as have many others, only for our requests to fall upon deaf ears. It’s nice for Adobe to collect feedback, but is a bit disingenuous to hide behind that feature request page as a way of dodging responsibility for R&D expectations. Issues like this should fall under the umbrella of competitive analysis. Or is Adobe satisfied with ceding all of those potential users to FCP X and other inferior (except with this particular issue) products?
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
Unfortunately, that’s not a realistic option. These are non-professionals who often don’t even use a tripod or external microphone. I’m a remote sub-contractor, so I have no contact with those who are shooting.
I’m sure I am not alone in these kinds of scenarios. We are in a time when it’s simply not plausible to demand best practices, as we are often hired to work with what can best be compared to “found footage.” We are allowed our professional standards only when we control the process.
The fact of the matter is that there are millions upon millions of iPhones and other cameras that shoot variable frame rate video, the majority of which are in the hands of people who have no idea what a variable frame rate is. Adobe is a company that often boasts about its great flexibility. To me, this cannot be viewed as anything but a failure to back up that claim.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
Has anyone found the answer to this? It is frustrating to keep activating and de-activate tracks, when all you want is the FCP 7 functionality of items pasting into the same tracks they were copied from.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
Actually, to the best of my knowledge, Randy did not create all those programs, at least not as the designer. I don’t believe that he became the product designer until about a year before FCP X was released. I was working on the FCP QA team from 2000-2002 and Randy was the lead engineer, but not the designer. That was Brian Meeney, if I remember the name correctly. If not, it was very close. Brian had considerable experience as an editor. Randy was a coding genius, but had no real-world editing experience to speak of. There were always arguments (though mostly friendly) between the engineering-oriented people (like Randy) and editing-oriented people (like myself) about what end-users actually wanted.
Over the past 4 years, I think we’ve proven that these kinds of arguments still exist.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee