[Greg Janza]

hey caine, thanks for your honest thoughts. I’m sure there’s a lot of other folks out there that share your concerns.

All I can do is share my experience. I was a devout Apple user for over 20 years. And for many of those years Apple served me well. Apple was the default computer system of almost every post house that I worked for and I used it on my own projects at home so the convergence was nice.

And then in 2011, Apple makes it’s radical FCP change, infuriates its user base and Adobe perks up it’s ears to the grumblings of many within the industry. And in addition, Apple becomes primarily a phone company and professional computer development takes a backseat. Apple does release the trashcan mac but it was less than impressive. I used several trashcan macs at different post houses and I was underwhelmed.

For me personally, 2016 was the watershed year. I was working on a 2012 MBP that was maxed out and working at full capacity but I needed to update my edit system to become fully 4k compatible because I was now working almost exclusively on 4k projects. I looked at the latest offerings within the Apple portfolio and they weren’t all that impressive, with the exception of the price, which naturally was astronomical.

Through a motion graphic artist friend, I was turned onto a custom built PC. I learned that on the PC side of things there was a large amount of customization possible with motherboards, GPU’s, etc. and there was also room for future upgrading. The openness of the windows world was the exact opposite of Apple. And since Adobe CC is platform agnostic, the notion of abandoning mac became a viable thought.

And so once I got over my long developed disdain of all things PC and windows I dove in and bought a fully loaded custom built PC. I had a period in which I had to get used to the Windows environment and that was painful after 20 plus years on a mac but then I realized that the Windows environment was just fine and maybe in the larger scheme of things, even better than the OSX platform.

I have a dual setup so that if necessary I could do a FCPX project but in my market FCPX still has gained very little traction after six years. Every person decides what’s best for themselves and so I’m not making judgments on those that continue to support Apple. I’m just confirming that life indeed does go on even after leaving the fold of Apple.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

All of your media should be on that Samsung T5 and it should be plenty fast enough to smoothly playback 4k. If you’re attempting to playback media from your main HD you’ll definitely run into issues.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

What’s your workflow? What type of drive is the media on? Perhaps your bottleneck is the media drive itself and not the MBP.

Smooth full res 4k playback of Sony files requires a fast CPU, powerful GPU, plenty of RAM and fast media drives (i.e., a raid.)

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

[Walter Soyka] “how do you present your WIPs to clients or stakeholders?”

I use frame.io and it’s made the wip process much easier.

[Walter Soyka] “What do you hope to get out of a review? “

Feedback that either confirms or denies that I’m on the right track with the overall structure of the piece.

[Walter Soyka] “What level of roughness or polish do you aim to provide early on?”

I try to polish as much as possible before showing since time has proven again and again that many clients just can’t see past the mistakes.

[Walter Soyka] “How much does color/mix affect your WIPs? “

With LUT’s the color process is pretty simple and then i do a rough mix in premiere to make even the early versions easy to listen to.

[Walter Soyka] “What process or guidelines do you put around review?”

No guidelines. I simply encourage clients to make all comments on the frame.io website.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

[Caine Mitchell] “Premiere is a dog of an NLE, needs a complete re-write.”

The Mac experience with Premiere may get more and more frustrating due to OpenCL being inferior to CUDA.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

[Jim Elliott] “My question is – where is the problem? “

The problem is your Macbook. I work with a lot of Sony 4k footage and I have no issues editing and playing back at full res even with LUT’s attached.

If you want to avoid the proxy route you’ll need to upgrade your computer.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

[Walter Soyka] “An extra step is required for newer .prproj files. For the last several major versions, .prproj files are gzipped XML files, so they must be decompressed before editing and recompressed afterwards.”

thanks walter, I forgot about that essential step.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

if both drives had the same name and file paths then the re-linking would be simple and quick.

If that’s not possible there’s another way to avoid manual re-linking but it’s a bit of a pain. I stumbled onto this solution on another forum.

Here’s what was posted:

I had to deal with the same issue before and did the following. If you open the project file in a text editor (e.g. notepad), you’ll notice that it’s nothing but an XML file with hardcoded file paths for your media. I simply run a “search and replace all” text command to replace the old file paths with new file paths.

For example:

If currently you have assets on M:\Assets, the project file will have entries such as M:\Assets\Clip1.avi and M:\Assets\CLip2.avi, etc.
If after you move to another computer your assets are on X:\Assets, you can run a search and replace all command to replace “M:\Assets” with “X:\Assets”.

I would probably first backup the project file in case you mess up something. This search and replace is especially useful if you have tons of project files on a backup drive and few years later you plug it in to work on the project and the external drive now shows up under different drive letter. You can then use a third party tool (not sure if windows does it, I use Utlraedit) to do the “search and replace all” command in all project files on the harddrive.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

https://www.hbfilmworks.com/dcp-info.html

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Greg Janza]

Merging clips doesn’t cause any problems with syncing but there’s a trick if you want to use a merged clip with another clip to make a multi-cam sequence.

Create the merged clip and then control click on it and select “new sequence from clip”. Then select the sequence you just created and select the other clip you want to sync and create your multi-camera source sequence.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles