[Dennis Radeke]

If you’re using Premiere Pro CS5, then it natively supports XDCAM EX/HD. If you don’t have the codec, you either need to download it as extra content or you are using a trial version.

[Dennis Radeke]

Premiere Pro understands both straight and premultiplied alpha channels: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WS1c9bc5c2e465a58a91cf0b1038518aef7-7c6fa.html

You can access the ability to ignore an alpha channel via the modify properties option of a clip.

Hope this helps,
Dennis

[Dennis Radeke]

I will also mention that IF you have Adobe Media Encoder and FCP on the same system, you can background transcode to ProRes by creating a watch folder in AME. It’s a 64-bit native application so can use all of your CPU’s and RAM.

Good luck with whatever you use.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Will Sanderson] “Thanks for the suggestion — Adobe Media Encoder was really helpful for the batch conversion.”

Cool – glad I could help.

[Dennis Radeke]

Compressor should also do the job, or if you have Adobe Media Encoder, it could transcode the files in the background.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Dave LaRonde] “I hope you’re not offended if I regard those comments as being just a little too much like Adobe-marketing-weasel-speak.”

Not offended. It’s still true even if you are skeptical. 😉

[Dennis Radeke]

[Dave LaRonde] “Nor do you absolutely need a capture card or a video monitor to edit in FCP; it still works without them. But on both editing systems, the lack of certain hardware severely hampers the ability to work speedily and efficiently.”

True.

But in the case of Premiere Pro CS5, the lack of a GPU does not hamper your ability to edit H264 in the least. The GPU comes into play when adding effects like color correction, PIPs, etc. Even then, you can put on an awful lot of effects (read ‘too many’) before a non-GPU based Mac system running Premiere Pro will quit on you.

I’m still searching for the best analogy but I’ll leave you with this one: Premiere Pro CS5 without a CUDA GPU is like having a super fast formula 1 race car with no nitrous injector. It’s still a very fast car.

PS – Yes…I am NOT a car guy. 😉

[Dennis Radeke]

[Gary Askham] “But you need a specific NVidia graphics card for it to work properly”

This is not true. You do NOT NEED an nvidia graphics card to edit H.264.

[Dennis Radeke]

Thanks for your response and I’ll preface by saying that I’ll try to not come off as ‘snarky’.

[Alan Okey] “h.264 is a lossy codec that doesn’t hold up well over successive generations of decompression/recompression”

Potentially true. I would only add that if you a) handle the color well in the front end and have no need to worry about it until you create final output for your specific deliverables, then it isn’t that big of a deal. That is the approach of Premiere Pro.

[Alan Okey] “the high CPU overhead required for decoding/encoding makes h.264 a poor performer for multi-stream (multicam) editing.”

Adobe has demonstrated that a 64-bit multi-core, multi-threaded system can make editing multiple streams including multi-cam possible. For example, I can edit 2 streams of 5D footage at half-res on my laptop without even the benefit of an external drive. Imagine what the average iMac can do or the awesome 12 core Mac with a good amount of memory. I would say that this idea (H264 as a poor performer) is a holdover from old paradigms. I expect many will disagree and that’s okay.

[Alan Okey] “When Apple engineered ProRes, they could have built upon long-GOP h.264 had they thought it to be a good foundation for a production codec.”

I’ll just mention that Adobe does a great job editing ProRes too. I agree that all things being equal an INTRA-frame codec is a better overall editing experience. The flip side of this those is potentially exploding file sizes. It’s the same argument we’ve had for at least a decade and obviously both sides have merit.

[Alan Okey] “h.264 excels at what it was designed to be – an efficient codec for delivery, achieving excellent image quality at low data rates. It was never designed to be a production codec, as its high overhead makes it much more difficult to work with. There’s a reason that Premiere needs a beefy GPU to edit h.264 smoothly.”

Part 1 – Agree.
Part 2 – Agree, but the market and users have determined that editing H.264 IS important and therefore it matters who is providing solutions rather than what is optimal. When has creating content (or production in general) ever worked in an optimal fashion?!? 😉
Part 3- Premiere Pro doesn’t need a GPU at all to edit H.264 smoothly. My MBP, though it has an nvidia GPU, it does not help my performance of CS5 one bit. This is a common misconception. The GPU helps create a balanced system so that the user can be more productive and not beholden to renders.

Thanks for the dialog and input and I hope that this helps give more clarity for some users. Like many of the excellent pros on this forum that answer the same question many times, I feel responsible to point out that H.264 can be edited with relative ease even if it’s not designed to be a production codec.

With respect and no snarkiness…
Dennis

[Dennis Radeke]

[Alan Okey] “My fear is that a large number of people (especially those shooting on DSLRs) see this as an example of FCP being old and not in sync with the times rather than understanding or agreeing with the fundamental reasons why h.264 isn’t an ideal codec for editing.”

I’d love to hear your opinions on why H.264 isn’t an ideal codec, but I would surmise that there are two. First, because H264 is a temporal codec that editing it can be difficult. Second, H264 is not a 4:2:2 colorspace. Are there others?