Don Hertz
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Barry,
We moved 15 workstations to Premiere CC from FCP 7 last year with great success. We are using shared storage (NAS with 1Gb connections) and the exact same formats you mentioned – XDCAM 50Mbps 422 in both Quicktime and MXF containers and ProRes422. I sometimes take projects home to do some work on them and we will often send in-process projects to our NY office for another editor to take over. As long as you are well organized with your SAN and have everything inside the project folder then its a pretty simple drag and drop to an external hard drive. We use the G-tech drives mentioned in a few other posts for portability. Workstation wise, we replaced all but 5 workstations with iMacs and they run great. The other 5 are still running the older Mac Pros but we have a “test” system in house for the new Mac Pro and will likely be transitioning those remaining systems over this year.
Premiere’s 3-way color corrector is our go-to tool for most of the color adjustments. It works just as well and is just as fast as FCPs. We just took a Speedgrade class and may start using that for some higher end projects as it’s very powerful and the new dynamic link functionality look promising. We stopped investing in a lot of third party plug-ins like Magic Bullet. It was getting expensive to maintain them across 15+ workstations, make sure everyone was on the same version when we moved a project around, etc. The combination of Premiere’s 3-Way color corrector and the ability to build Looks in Speedgrade that can be imported into all of our Premiere systems and applied directly in Premiere has replaced what we used Magic Bullet for here.
We love Adobe Media Encoder. Unlike FCP and Compressor, you can queue a project over to it and then flip back over and continue working in Premiere while it encodes.
Personally, I discouraged our editors from switching to FCP keyboard layout. I found many of Premiere’s shortcuts much faster and after a month on Premiere I just changed the individual few that were still bothering me to something else.
If you are considering switching or have just switched I can’t recommend the book “Adobe Premiere Pro Studio Techniques” by Jeff Greenberg enough. It’s a great introduction to Premiere, but unlike a lot of books assumes that you are coming from a firm background of NLE editing in another application like FCP or AVID so it doesn’t waste a lot of time explaining basic editing concepts and gets right to the need to know information. It’s also fairly new and covers all the CC features up to last falls dot release.
Sincerely,
Don Hertz
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Same issue here. After the 7.2 update AME won’t launch. It did the first time but then locked up when I was loading clips into it. Now it either locks up on the splash screen while loading or just never launches when I hit the Queue button in Premiere. I’m on a Macbook Pro. I’ve tried numerous things, trashing preferences, clearing cache files, launching the program from outside Premiere. Nothing so far. I believe Adobe is aware of the issue.
Don
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I use a 2012 MBP with 8Gb RAM when I’m at the office or traveling, then a full fledge iMac based studio at home. The MBP Pro works just fine. I use Premiere CC, AE, and Media Encoder a lot. I do not use Motion. Obviously its not as fast as my system at home – but also not so slow that I’m frustrated having to use it when I need to.
Don Hertz
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Have been running it on a “test” system here since Friday and have found no issues with Premiere yet. Most of our footage is XDCAM.
It did however break some of our Automator actions – which had to be rebuilt and the video playback in our asset management interface (which is browser based) doesn’t like something in Safari 7, although it works just fine with Chrome so probably not a big deal until a patch arrives.
Sincerely,
Don Hertz
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Scott,
We switched our entire facility from FCP and Avid to CC earlier this year and have been very happy with it so far. We have about 20 Creative Cloud seats and growing. We work on a variety of deadline intensive projects including commercials, television shows, and promo style graphics. We also have a VOD and QC department that processes shows created out of house at a rate of 20-30 shows a day. All are using Premiere, Audition, After Effects, and Photoshop to get the job done. The new captioning features in Premiere, in particular, have revolutionized how our QC and VOD departments process multiple versions of content for various distribution outlets.
CC has a nice admin interface that lets our IT department easily add new users, move licenses around, and control upgrades on individual user accounts (that way an overly eager employee can’t download the newest release and break our workflow until we’ve tested it ourselves).
Externally, we have over a hundred producers that send us television show and commercial content on a weekly basis. We’ve never done a formal survey to see who is using what system but based on my knowledge of the 20 or so that I check with on a regular basis I would guess that at least 60% are on Premiere, 25% still on FCP 7, 10% AVID, and the remaining 5% a mix of other things. I know we have at least one producer using Vegas. I haven’t come across anyone yet using FCP X, although I’m sure a few are out there and that group will grow as Apple continues to improve that package. We are a smaller network and many of our external producers are 3-10 person shops and in several cases the camera operators and directors are also the editors. That is most likely effecting the percentages noted above.
Good luck.
Don Hertz
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It’s been awhile since I’ve done that and there might be an easier way but I believe once you have all your noise reduction settings in place you can just save it as a Favorite (click a small star icon somewhere in the effect window.) Then you go to the EDIT menu and open up the Batch window. Drag in the other files you want to apply the effect to, choose your Favorite, and hit go. It’ll add the favorite effect to every file in the list.
Again, its been awhile and maybe there’s an easier method in CC. I’m not at my editing system now. I’ll be interested if someone else chimes in with a better solution.
Don
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Select a portion of the waveform that is only the hiss sound you want to remove. Then choose “Capture Noise Print”. Then select the entire waveform and choose “Noise Reduction”. A window will pop up with setting you can adjust to vary the amount of reduction.
There are a lot of really good video tutorials around on-line if you need help figuring it out.
As a former FCS user myself – once you learn it you’ll find Audition much better than Soundtrack Pro.
Don
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Is FCP on the same system? If XDCAM is showing up there – then you have the codec installed. Just go into Adobe Media Encoder and create a new preset for XDCAM by choosing a Quicktime format with an XDCAM codec (any flavor you want – 4:2:2, 4:2:0, 50mbit, 35mbit, etc). Once you create a new preset in Adobe Media Encoder, that same preset will show up inside Adobe Premiere when you choose Export > Media.
If it’s on a different system (and still a Mac) then you need to install the XDCAM codec first. Download the Apple ProAppsQTCodecs installer (free – just Google it). If you have a Pro App from Apple installed then you can just double click and install it. If not, you just need to unpack it and manually drag the codecs into your Quicktime folder.
Don
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I’m no audio expert but the first two things I would try is send the clip over to Audition, take a noise print of the hiss behind the lady and apply noise reduction. If you try to remove too much on the first pass you may get distortion in the voice. I find it’s better to do it multiple times, removing a little of the noise each time. I’d then put a Parametric EQ on both – give the guy a bit more high end, and perhaps the female a bit more low end.
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Are you running the latest Premiere CC? The 7.0.1 release made a lot of improvements with XDCAM. It’s running flawlessly here on the exact same iMac config.
Also – you don’t need FCP, Motion, or Compressor to access the ProApps Codec package. You can use a free utility like unpkg to unpack the installer and drag and drop the codecs into you Quicktime folder.
There are a few codecs that cause problems with Premiere and removing them from Quicktime might help you. Go to Macintosh HD > Library > Quicktime and drag out everything you don’t need to try and make the list as minimal as possible. You can always drag them back in later. I would suggest keeping ProRes, DVCPROHD and IMX for starters and moving everything else out. Then restart, launch Premiere, and see if things are better. If so, start re-adding codecs 1 or 2 at a time until you track down the one causing all the problems. Not sure this is your problem – but we had 2 systems here (out of 12) giving us odd playback issues with XDCAM footage and this solved it on both of them. I just can’t remember which codec we ended up having to remove.
Good luck.
Don Hertz
Don Hertz