David Cherniack
Forum Replies Created
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My experience with 45 hours of material for a documentary, a few thousand clips and 2 levels of sub-timelines: I’d prefer having 32 root canals.
Anyone starting a very large project should keep in mind the following:
Because media management is rudimetary and memory management is still not completely fixed, design your workflow so that you can easily split it up into multiple projects if you run into trouble. Keep sub-timelines to one layer or not at all. If you’re planning on re-ingesting your material at a higher rez, remember that all timelines in the project (whether sub or not) count as part of the project trim. Finally have a voodoo doll representing the architects of the software standing by. You may need it.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
BTW, if you really want some horror stories with large documentary projects you should check with Marisu. I believe she sometimes has to work with 10,000 or so clips. Maybe she and others haven’t seen this sub-thread and it should be started as a new thread.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Hey, Larry,
Though we’ve talked about it I may as well mention my experiences for the community.
Running Axio with 3GB of ram and PPro 2 with a large project with 2 levels of subtimelines and a DV project with a few thousand clips.
Because of the well known memory management problems with PPro 1.5 Matrox provided a system tray icon to track memory useage. At a certain point of growth in my project as soon as 1.5 reached about 85% of available memory the program would crash. In point of fact, I had to stop editing because it would only take a few edits to reach the dreaded 85%.
I had high hopes that Adobe, having heard from numerous large project users about the problem (one only need to go on Adobe’s PPro forum) would have fixed memory management in version 2. Unfortunately cross app integration seems to have taken a higher priority and they only put together a partial fix. Memory gets consumed but it also is freed up – some of it, but not all of it. Consequently the 85% crash limit is reached, but just not as quickly. Saving the project, rendering, audio conforming, all consume more memory than they give back. I have to restart PPro 3-6 times a day to avoid crashing. It really is quite frustrating. I don’t know how Adobe can claim to serve a professional market with such a glaring defficiency.
That’s my exprerience. As good as Axio is, the Premiere Pro architecture wasn’t spec’ed to support large projects….at least in my experience.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[shane chadder] “Can’t you just resort by date?”
The date being? There doesn’t appear to be any date field when sequence are created or clips are ingested. Would be useful, though, wouldn’t it.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[marisu fronc] ” it will just continue to be a hassle until the powers that be decide that Premiere isn’t the best fit for what we do.”
….Or until the people at Adobe fix the underlying architecture to deal with large projects….
Version 2 works better with memory manageent, but it is still not satisfactory by any stretch of the imagination. Matrox gives a small utility with Axio to monitor Premiere’s memory usage. You can watch it gobble more and more ram, always releasing less than it’s used. And the worst is that when you save, it really eats it. How I long for Discreet edit’s saving undos to disk.
The fact that Adobe could only do a partial fix with version 2 does not bode well. The underlying architecture probably requires a complete re-write. But my guess is that Adobe may be waiting to go to a 64 bit OS and solve the memory problem by making users throw more ram at it. What a horrible thought!
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[Steven L. Gotz] “I have a suggestion for large projects.”
This is a suugestion that can work – a bit unwieldy but should be possible – taken to extremes essentially it becomes a project per sequence.
I’d rather they fix the underlying architecture.
David (written while restarting from a memory maxxed out crash)
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[marisu fronc] “Of course, I know, I know – everyone already yelled at me when I said my average job has about 10,000 or so sources but . . . . . . .”
Gawd Marisu, you are really pushing this puppy past the realms of sanity. My present project takes about 10 minutes to load and the timeline of the assembly takes about one minute to update (when you switch to it). And I have less than a thousand source clips.
Whoever designed the engine for this thing wasn’t thinking of us. I’m betting the limits are imposed by very fundamental specs and I don’t think we’ll see the necessary fixes do do really large projects until version 4. Hope I’m wrong.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Thanks, Steven.
That will work but as I have a large number of items it may be more trouble than it’s worth.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Hi Miguel,
You can send clips to Audition but there is no whole “timeline” level integration yet. One would think that this is high on the list of Adobe priorities, though how they establish their priorities is not always self evident.
FYI I’ve found that audio clips that are speeded up, way up, (a couple of thousand percent) in PPro will not go into Audition. They don’t even render correctly in PPro.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Wouldn’t it be nice if Adobe had someone like Jan, who, as far back as I can recall (10 years ago on the DV list), was representing Panasonic cameras online to users in the most fair minded ( for a compay rep 🙂 and helpful way.
I have little doubt that the success of their cameras owes lots to her willingness to learn from users. Cudos to her and wishes that all manufacturers could learn from her example.
David
AllinOneFilms.com