[Cliff Stephenson]

Tom, in Jim’s defense… All any of us can do at this point is speculative based on Adobe’s past performance/attentiveness to the Mac market. I’d be as happy as anyone to see Adobe really pull out the stops and exceed all of our expectations on CS6. But right now I still have to temper my enthusiasm based on past performance. I just finished a major project (all of the behind the scenes for the upcoming Ghost Rider 2 Blu-ray) and, while it was certainly smoother sailing than it would have been with Final Cut, it was also at times incredibly frustrating and difficult. I probably ended up with 12 different recovery projects from all of the times it crashed near the end (and that’s only the times it actually saved my progress before crashing. There were probably 20 more crashes that didn’t save). Third party software, like Boris and Blackmagic, woefully underperforms on the Mac side. I don’t think it’s a Mac thing, because they seem to get it to work on Final Cut and Avid… it’s a Premiere on Mac thing.

So while I can appreciate that it works great on your Mac… that’s the point- It works great on YOUR Mac. I have no idea the level of complexity in the projects that YOUR Mac has to handle. I did a short quickie project (20 minute featurette from about 3 hours of footage) and Premiere handled it like a champ (other than having to farm out extremely simple things like transitions). But producing a 90 minute documentary made from 200+ hours of footage? That was a different tale. Again, I’m as hopeful as anyone that Adobe really pulls out the stops and delivers a great package with CS6, but (and this is not just directed as Adobe) I’m getting awfully tired of “it’s in the works.” If I delivered a project with the names in all the lower 3rds misspelled and told the studio that the correct spellings were “in the works,” how fast do you think they’d kick me off the lot?

[Cliff Stephenson]

Agreed, Given how much of a boost Adobe got from the implosion of Final Cut, it’s shocking to me that they haven’t been more interested/aggressive in meeting the needs of those that have essentially shifted the balance of power between FCP and PPro. Finding workable transitions and plug-ins on the Mac side has been, to put it kindly, neglected. Adobe had a massive migration on the Mac side in the last 12 months, but I’ve been noticing a slower, but just as noticeable, migration from Premiere to Avid with their MC6.

[Cliff Stephenson]

That’s why I was so baffled. It isn’t a request I get everyday (or even every 5 years).

[Cliff Stephenson]

It’s a picture in picture stream that was being laid off to HDCAM SR. Historically (I’ve done about 6 of these for Blu-ray) a straight 0mV black level has been fine, but this time they had a very specific spec that needed to be met (I assume to create an alpha for everything below a certain level of black). I adjusted the level filter as well as decreasing the brightness on the brightness/contrast filter and when we pulled it up on the scopes this morning it was registering sub 0, so it worked. I was just flying blind until then. Thanks for the help, though.

[Cliff Stephenson]

Agreed, that’s why I made a point to say make sure you won’t need audio from the clip at some point. You have to duplicate a track and then revert it’s audio properties back on the dup. But the OP did say he wanted to get rid of them and wouldn’t need them.

Otherwise, I do agree that simply grabbing the video only strip from the source window is the overall best, least error prone way to only put video in a timeline.

[Cliff Stephenson]

Actually, it’s fairly easy (as long as you know you won’t need the audio).

From your bin, right click on your track (or tracks, you can do a bunch at once) and select ‘modify’ ‘audio channels’ and then uncheck all of the audio channels you don’t want (presumably you wouldn’t have any checked if you don’t want audio at all). Then when you drag a clip from either the bin or the source window, it’ll bring in video only. But, like everything else, once you do that and drop that clip in the timeline, you won’t be able to change it back. You would have to right click ‘duplicate’ the clip and then you could get audio back on the dup.

But the nice thing is that you can alter/remove audio from every clip at once (again, as long as you haven’t used that clip in the timeline yet. Then, again, you’d have to dup it and remove the audio on the dup.

Make sense?

[Cliff Stephenson]

I really didn’t have any media management issues. To be honest… I started the project in Final Cut (been working on it since late 2010), but as soon as Final Cut X was released and I realized it was completely inappropriate for professional work, I exported the XML from FCP, imported into Premiere and kept going. So half my clips are rewrapped XDCAM EX QuickTimes and the other half is native XDCAM EX BPAV files. The only thing that I found with regard to that much media is that when you open a project, it can take 10 minutes or so to reconnect all media. BUT, unlike in FCP (where you have to sit around for 10 minutes waiting for the project to open) Premiere at least lets you start working right away and reconnects around your work. It’s about 3TB of footage, but I never had a single problem with it.

[Cliff Stephenson]

I think the reasons are 2…
#1- Apple and Avid are just really deeply dug into the profession community. Premiere Pro, like it or not, is still the new kid on the block (despite being around for decades). Adobe never really positioned or pushed Premiere Pro as a serious alternative to the professional community like they did Photoshop and After Effects. A lot of people really (for a long time) regarded Premiere Pro along the same lines of Vegas or iMovie. Was probably good for the prosumer, but not a professional application. That has changed as people moved away from FCP 7&X

#2- And this is somewhat related to #1, but people just aren’t aware of what Premiere Pro can do. I had a director/cinematographer (not an indie guy, he’s shot some major studio movies) over and he was asking why I was cutting on Premiere instead of Final Cut or Avid and I started to go through some of the things that Premiere is actually capable of (like round-tripping to AE or Audition, keyword searching, content analysis, native format support, that fact that it saves your project on a crash, 64 bit, etc…) and he was kind of blown away by what Premiere had to offer. I think because people have been so used to using Avid and Final Cut for so long, that people hadn’t really noticed what Adobe had been doing or could offer. Apple really couldn’t have handed them a better gift with Final Cut X. That was the catalyst for many to say, “Hmmm. I’ve already got this thing installed as part of my creative suite… let me poke around a bit.” I just cut a 90 minute documentary in a project that has about 15,000 clips and Premiere Pro ran through it like a champ. There’s no reason to believe you couldn’t cut a feature on Premiere Pro and probably have it be easier.

That said, I think there’s still some improvement to be made in Premiere, but I’m excited to see what Adobe has up their sleeve for CS6 in the next couple of months.

[Cliff Stephenson]

I’ve noticed that too. When you reach the transition, overall levels are increased and there is a noticeable bump where blacks become grey and it looks just awful. This is particularly noticeable because a lot of my transitions are into or out of scope film clips, so the black borders top and bottom immediately flash grey on the first frame of any Red transition and return to the proper black levels once you’ve passed the transition.

I’ve also tried playing around with the keyframes, but even setting opacity to 0 results in what I can only describe as a gamma shift. Hopefully this is a fix I’m not aware of or, if not, it gets fixed soon because I can’t really use Red like I was hoping to.

[Cliff Stephenson]

Yeah, I upgraded to 10.7.3 about a month ago. I don’t know what kind of projects Tom is working on, but I just finished (this morning) cutting a 97 minute documentary in a project that has approx. 16,000 pieces of media in it. While Premiere worked well enough for me on Snow Leopard, it’s beens much more stable since Lion. The biggest issue being when it would crash on Snow Leopard (maybe once every three days, but sometimes twice in a day, especially with Boris or other 3rd party stuff) it would try to save about 20% of the time. Now in Lion, not only is it crashing less (only twice in the last month) it saved both times and I was able to open the recovery project pretty much where I left off.

When I was cutting on FCP, especially near the end of a project, it would crash 5-6 times a night.

I’m running Lion on:
Mac Pro (early 2009)
Dual Quad with 48 GB RAM
Quadro 4000 with the DVI out to my main monitor and the DisplayPort out to the HDMI in on my reference monitor (but I don’t use that for CC)
Using the Blackmagic Decklink Extreme for the audio

Works better than it ever did with FCP.

But I agree with Gerry, Premiere on Mac is woefully inconsistant. It seems odd, given how many people came over to Premiere from Final Cut (a Mac exclusive bit of software) in the last year, that there hasn’t been more of an effort put into getting the Mac side of Premiere up to snuff. I’m also including all the 3rd party guys in this as well. Blackmagic and Aja STILL don’t work as they should with Premiere on Mac. And while Boris finally released Red 5 for Premiere/Mac, I’m baffled as to why they (or anyone else) can’t get proper transitions on the Mac side. There’s a whole folder of BCC 8 transitions and they’re useless. It just applies them as filters to an entire clip (and this is a product that was released not too long ago). I can’t understand how this went through development and QC and nobody thought it was a problem to release a product that didn’t work properly on a MAJOR operating system. I’m excited to see what Adobe has in store for 6.0 and I think I’m good with Premiere for a long while, but EVERYONE really needs to step up their game and really get some good, consistant support on the Mac side of things.