[Dennis Radeke]

Premiere Pro multi-camera pros/cons

Anything can be a camera including another sequence
you can mix multiple formats/codecs as different cameras – no conforming to one codec.
By default you make camera 1, your master audio but you can choose to have audio follow video
no integrated double system sound for easy syncing of separate audio/video
only 4 cameras in Premiere Pro multicam

[Dennis Radeke]

I”m not exactly sure what kind of camera you mentioned actually is, but I’m going to guess that it is HDV. If so, I think you have a problem. The Apple HDV codec is propietary and not included (to my knowledge) in the Quicktime codecs that are included with the player. The fact that you can play even some of them is pretty surprising.

The only thing I could suggest is to try VLC player https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
and see if you can get some more info about what your codec actually is.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Jerry Hofmann] “Buy the drive space and transcode it all to ProRes. If you don’t, the work involved up rezing the “edit” you end up with will be a real pain. Much like a manual conform.”

Perhaps, but you can export DPX files directly out of Premiere Pro, so I’m not that it’s his only option.

[Dennis Radeke]

[mark wilson] “Mac Pro 8 core – 4 – Internal Hard Drives
64 gig OCW RAM
Nvidia Quadro 4800 for Mac
Two G-Tech es Pro 8 TB raid drive
Matrox MX02 LE w/MAX
Adobe Master Collection CS5”

– 64GB is nice but 32GB is all the Mac sees unless you boot into the 64-bit kernal. My recommendation is to stay with 32GB of RAM. That’s a good healthy amount. You can always upgrade to more later.
– Nvidia just release Quadro 4000 for Mac. Less money and same or more processing power. Go for that.
– Love G-Tech drives
– Research your hardware before coming to any conclusion. I’d say that for every hardware manufacturer.
– Do you need Master Collection? Do you do Print, design or web work? If not, then just get Production Premium.

[Dennis Radeke]

Maybe this is a stitching problem with whatever file based media the camera shoots in? For example, RED files can be more than 1 clip but show up as only 1 to the editor.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Dave LaRonde] ” However, I’m pretty sure that Premiere’s Mercury playback engine utilizes both the graphics card AND the computer’s cores. Thus getting a 12-core machine might be more to your liking”

This is correct.

[Dave LaRonde] “Don’t attempt to put this system together yourself! Your boss needs to spring for someone who KNOWS how to put systems together: a value-added-reseller (VAR).”

This I also agree with. While you can get a Mac or PC straight from the source, paying extra to get KNOWLEDGE is valuable to many people – especially those who’ve tried it the other way before.

[Dave LaRonde] “Not all NLEs work the same, they each have their strengths, weaknesses and quirks, and you’ll have to learn a whole new batch of them in Premiere. You’ll also have to wrap your head around a different software developer’s workflow philosophy within the application.”

No argument there. NLE’s are alike in many ways so many things will translate, but not all. Be prepared to spend time learning whatever you switch to…

[Dennis Radeke]

XML import came with Premiere Pro CS4
XML export came with Premiere Pro CS5

IF the editor was able to move to CS5, here’s what I’d do:
1 – Use AME to batch convert the XDCAM (or is it avchd) media to ProRes maintaining same clip names
2 – assuming the sequence frame size was the same, I would offline the media and reconnect it to the ProRes clips with the same name.
3 – test, save and export FCP XML for color correcting.

With CS3 and FCP7, I don’t see a real way to easily do this. Maybe automatic duck or something like that.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Chad Brewer] “Unfortunately neither Encore or Premiere will recognize a Quicktime.”

Huh??? Not true, but for authoring longform content it’s better to go thru compressor or AME rather than let Encore handle your conversion to MPEG2

[Dennis Radeke]

[David Roth Weiss] “Now, if Adobe could just get Speech Search to be a little bit more accurate that might be a deal maker…”

We’ll be working on it. For CS5, you have three options instead of 1 in CS4. YOu have the standard analyzation, a script align feature like Avid and the ability to point to a text file and say that this is what is being spoken. So, the accuracy is there, it just may take a bit more work than you’d like. As I said, we’ll be working on it.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Jürgen Hackl] “We just got our new MacPro (12core, 48GB RAM, Radeon HD5780). I tried to use multicam in Premiere CS5 with three XDCAM EX (35Mbit) streams and surprisingly the system can’t playback the 3 streams and starts to juggle. Then I tried the same thing in Final Cut and it worked perfectly.”

Hey Jürgen – Two possibilities (well, one certainty and one possibility). You are starving your CPU for RAM. If you have 12 cores but only 4GB of RAM, you basically have only 3GB of RAM to play with and then spread that across 12 cores, you basically get 250MB of RAM per core. We generally ask for 1-2GB per core.

The other idea is that you may be trying to use ProRes XDCAM and your drive throughput may not be fast enough. If you provide some more details on your system that might help. Still, try to get a bunch more RAM and try again.