Dennis Radeke
Forum Replies Created
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[David Roth Weiss] “I disagree with you on this one point Dennis. While very basic editing commands are essentially similar, it’s the little things in life and in editing that really make a difference. Mastering one non-linear editing app does not equate to mastery of the others.”
Thanks David. I didn’t mean to imply that there wasn’t a learning curve – by no means. I think this is the biggest obstacle to anyone contemplating a change whether to (or away) from Adobe or Apple.
There are some tools and universal keyboard shortcuts that cross Apple, Avid and Adobe so that things like JKL, IO and a few others would help some people get up to speed.
Learning the nuances though to make someone really fast, are indeed a bit different for everyone and that will take the extra time. Deciding if the investment will bring a return is the real question and each person has to decide that themselves. 😉 Pretty sure we can agree on that one!
Cheers,
Dennis -
[David Roth Weiss] “If you actually know FCP the odds are that learning Premiere and getting up to speed will far outweigh any advantage you gain by avoiding transcoding”
Perhaps, but all three big ‘a’ companies use the same basic editing methodology, same basic interface and many of the same keyboard shortcuts. Premiere Pro also includes FCP 7 and Avid keyboard shortcuts to help you along.
[David Roth Weiss] “Furthermore, the transcoding is done by your computer, not by you the editor, and you\’d do better to simply learn to manage the transcoding and automate the process using the batch processing made possible by Compressor droplets to do it entirely in your spare or down time.”
Clearly, this is a philosophical choice and I generally say that one approach isn’t better than the other: native vs. transcode. There are advantages to native as well as a traditional transcode workflow.
[David Roth Weiss] “Then there\’s the cost of the Adobe suite and the new Nvidia card you\’ll need to take advantage of the GPU functionality you\’re so keen on… A cost benefit analysis would most likely reveal that a decision to make the move has lots of cost and little real benefit.”
This is true, there is a cost involved.
I’ll also mention that I’m not 100% sure that the AVCHD (h264) is included in the Premiere Pro trial. What I would try is using the Media Browser, view your native AVCHD media and drag a clip to the new item button in the project if you do not see AVCHD presets in Premiere Pro. We cannot include licensed codecs in the trial… 🙁
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[Michael Gissing] “Just curious Dennis. In the past, did FCP fanboys hang around the Premiere Pro forum and snipe from the sidelines? I am wondering if your constant reminders of just how great CS5 has become, are payback for someone’s previous indiscretions on y8ou8r favoured boards?”
Definitely not Michael and I try to go out of my way to be as straightforward and honest as I can be. My goal is to be a part of the community and address questions that may come up with Adobe – whether with FCP or by itself. Am I passionate about my products – only as much as many are with other creative products such as FCP – in short – most definitely.
My honest apologies to you and any who feel I am ‘sniping’
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[Rafael Amador] “”QuickTime isn’t 64 bit…….Adobe seems to have worked around the problem by spinning off a 32 bit thread for QuickTime support so you lose that Mercury Engine goodness”.”
Well, I took this and forwarded it to one of the GPU engineers at Adobe to actually get the scoop on this. I’ve read Philip’s entries with a lot of interest and he seems like a terrific person.
Nevertheless, Philip’s statement is his thoughts or supposition and not necessarily what is going on. Below is essentially a cut and paste from the email response I received from one of the GPU engineers actually writing the code on Premiere Pro’s Mercury Engine (the GPU part anyway)…
“It is true that the QuickTime libraries provided by Apple are not 64-bit and we spin off a 32-bit helper process to talk to QuickTime. The slowest piece of this is QuickTime itself and it simply cannot deliver frames fast enough for many formats.
To work around this we have written our own QuickTime parsing library and where possible handle the QuickTime files with our native codecs as we would for other file types. We have made this work for what we have judged to be the most important QuickTime files, as an example this is how we achieve good performance for Canon 5D footage, which are QuickTime files. There are some limitations to this, if we do not have native support for the codec (such as ProRes) we cannot use this native path and have to talk to the out of process 32-bit QuickTime server.
Beyond that the Mercury Playback Engine still can provide plenty of other benefits when using QuickTime files. Despite the QuickTime process being 32-bit, we immediately bring all frames into the main 64-bit process so we can continue taking full advantage of a 64-bit address space. While QuickTime is single threaded, once the frames are brought into the main process we will render and apply effects on multiple threads taking full advantage of all cores using technologies like Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch. Also if a CUDA card is present all supported rendering and effects will be moved to the GPU. This can lessen the CPU load allowing more time for decoding. Even if the performance of the QuickTime files in this setup isn’t great, having a CUDA card will allow adding many effects essentially for free.”
I’ll use this as an opportunity to mention again that MPE is in fact 3 distinct features and not just GPU: 64-bit native code, 64-bit memory addressing and the GPU goodness. Everyone is getting two of the three when using CS5.
Again, to reiterate – this is meant to give clarification around Premiere Pro, Quicktime and GPU interaction
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With apologies – I posted when I meant to ‘preview’
My point was only to counter that you CAN edit H.264 and that the video I posted happens to be timely in the context of this statement.
I would say in a general sense that any temporally based codec does present more challenges for editing in general. 10 years ago, we didn’t think we could edit MPEG-2 effectively. Even 5 years later, editing MPEG-2 was a non-issue. H.264 is just more of the same. An issue now, but less so as time goes on.
Let me also thank you for your patient replies on the forums for years. I’ve monitored this forum for at least a year and I’m amazed at your even handed replies.
Cheers, Dennis
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[Shane Ross] “Because H.264 is not an editing codec. And now you see why.”
CS5: Cutting off the Card from Clint Milby on Vimeo.
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Simply put, if you know FCP, it takes time and ‘relearning’ to change your established workflows to a new editing platform. I think a lot of people would rather edit than invest some time in determining whether their work could be better served by another vendor like Adobe.
However, some people are changing. One longtime editor Chris Fenwick is chronicling his journey to Premiere Pro. You can check it out at https://www.chrisfenwick.com/
In the end, you have to make the determination yourself through research whether Adobe, Apple, Avid, etc is right for you. I think for most people, a combination of tools is the most reasonable approach.
Some pros for Premiere Pro:
64-bit native application (so is AE and Adobe Media Encoder)
Uses all of your cores
Uses all of your memory
Opportunity for GPU hardware acceleration
Native editing (never transcode or rewrap unless YOU want to)
Best DSLR workflow (best file based workflow period)
Native RED workflow
Integration with the rest of the Adobe suiteDisclaimer – I am an Adobe person…hopefully most people already know that by now… 😉
Dennis
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Premiere Pro CS5 is 64-bit native and will use all 12 of your cores and all of your available memory. It even has FCP 7 shortcuts if you’re comfortable with those. It will also send to Adobe Media Encoder (also 64-bit) and render in the background, so you can edit and render at the same time.
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No doubt every application can always be better. Encore is no different. The fact remains though that it does provide many aspects of blu-ray authoring on a Mac platform and it has improved version over version. In addition, your product will extend its functionality – this is all good news for the Mac platform and its pro users.
As for this thread, as many have stated, any one of the big three editors can probably fill the job. Avid, Apple and Adobe all have their pros and cons. Only the users can determine if Premiere Pro can replace FCP for them.
As to Adobe’s commitment to the pros in the video space – Adobe was in the video business before Apple and remains committed to it to this day. Adobe was first to develop on Apple’s cocoa platform of the big three (oh, the irony!). Adobe is also the first to develop GPU hardware acceleration…etc…
Adobe doesn’t have a Final Cut Server or an Avid Interplay, but Premiere Pro can hang off the storage of either. People should do their research, ask questions and hopefully make the decision that is best for them. For some, this will be Adobe – others not.
And for my disclaimer – I am an active Adobe employee…
Dennis
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You could do it in two ways (thinking off the top of my head)
1 – create a photoshop file with those dimensions, import it into Premiere Pro and then drag it to the ‘new item’ button at the bottom of the project panel. wouldn’t take into account audio and frame rate though…
2 – the more sure fire way would be as follows:– create new sequence (don’t click okay)
– go to general tab
– switch editing mode to desktop
– change aspect ratio to square pixel (1.0)
– change frame rate to whatever you need
– ditto for audio
– at the bottom left is a button to save it as a preset.Hope this helps,
Dennis – Adobe guy