[Jon Howard]

Nope. I’m doing most of my work in Nuke Studio now. Doesn’t seem the Premiere dev team is interested in adding image sequence conforming functionality to Premiere. It’s likely far too niche for them to spend the time on. Can Premiere read exr files now? It didn’t used to be able to.

Since most of the commercial work I see is shot on Alexa as ProRes 4444 files, I started using that as my main format for finishing, then render out DPXs for Nuke from Premiere as needed. Not super space efficient but the color handling is tight and I could do accurate conforms easily enough in Resolve Lite (free) and pass off an XML of the conformed picture back to Premiere.

Nuke Studio has rendered that mostly obsolete. I have to put up with a lot more software quirks, especially in the timeline, but I’m only ever touching Premiere anymore for versioning.

Best of luck with your work!

Jon

[Jon Howard]

I’m having the exact same issue. I used to be able to fix it by preceding a blank spot in my timeline with a clip of black video. Now that doesn’t work. Did you ever get any resolution on this issue?

[Jon Howard]

Yes, without success. You can’t control the size of the window it sends over and it tries to push across too much data. It would be fine if you were trying to do a powerpoint presentation or work with still images. The playback is extremely steppy though and you could never expect a remote client to be able approve timings or performance based on it.

[Jon Howard]

Thanks for the recommendation! We’ll check it out and report the results. We have some Blackmagic hardware here already so it looks like we could give it a whirl without any up front purchases.

Jon

[Jon Howard]

Hi there Jan,

I’m at a company that used iChat Theater pretty often and we’ve switched to Premiere, so we’re also interested in a solution. Join.me didn’t work out for us. We’ve had better results with Google Hangouts On Air in Studio mode, but still not as good as iChat Theater.

Did you ever find a suitable replacement?

Best,
Jon

“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.” – Sengstan

[Jon Howard]

Extremely helpful info. Thanks!

[Jon Howard]

Hey there Kevin,

Thanks for the response. I hope my note doesn’t come across as overly negative. Premiere CC is a great, great tool and we’re having a great time with it. The feature sets that have been added or improved with each release are super impressive. Very much looking forward to the update in October. The markers are really the only thing we’re coming up against.

I’ve submitted feature requests about the markers recently as well as a while ago, going back to CS5, so hopefully they get some traction. Some other stuff I thought would be a low priority – like the timecode and marker overlays in the monitor windows – is getting addressed and knocked out of the park. Fingers crossed for the marker workflow!

Best,
Jon

[Jon Howard]

This is very interesting. I’m on a 12 core Mac using a Quadro 4000 and I’ve noticed that, while it helps playback, rendering and exporting aren’t much different than on my Retina MacBook Pro. Also, I’ve noticed, and written a post about it, that SpeedGrade CC does not seem to be leveraging the Quadro 4000 for renders at all, and as such renders out 4-5 times slower than Resolve. Looks like Adobe is using the GPU only for playback and not for rendering across the board. Hopefully that changes pretty soon.

Wish I had something more helpful.

Best,
Jon

“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.” – Sengstan

[Jon Howard]

I have a little experience with both applications, moreso with Resolve, but I can outline some differences between the current version of Resolve and SpeedGrade CC:

– Resolve installs database software on your computer to enable multiple users, each with their own presets, projects and saved grades and still frames, to coexist on a single system. This requires a bit of set up and can get funky during upgrades. SpeedGrade is more like any other Adobe application in that you just fire it up and get to work.

– Resolve is a node-based grading suite while SpeedGrade is layer-based. Even though I love a node-based workflow and am a huge fan of Nuke, Resolve’s node system is a little clunky. You can’t name your nodes and as such, they just kind of pile up and you have to turn them on and off to see what they’re doing. SpeedGrade’s layers have editable names and, when you use grading clips, are visible at any point in your timeline. They’re not totally comparable systems, but SpeedGrade’s layers feel really nice coming from someone who hasn’t used Resolve enough to get totally comfortable with their node system.

– Resolve only works with Blackmagic I/O hardware, Speedgrade only works with AJA and Matrox I/O hardware.

– Resolve appears to a better job of leveraging GPU for rendering. I made a post about this asking for some input, but I’m getting 4-5 times faster renders using Resolve than SpeedGrade. If there’s any question about what system you should use, this more than anything else is the clincher, at least for me.

– Resolve can do batch rendering whereas SpeedGrade cannot.

– Both systems have very good scopes built in. Both systems have a modular (i.e. tab-based) UI, which divides the workflow up into media ingest, grading and rendering interfaces. Both systems have excellent file format support.

– Resolve is scalable to very, very large facilities and has a multi-thousand dollar version with proprietary hardware, running on Linux. Company 3, which is one of the foremost color grading facilities in the world, uses Resolve. SpeedGrade seems at this time to be scaled more for individuals needing powerful grading tools that integrate well with Adobe Premiere. Given the years-long foothold that Baselight, Resolve, Scratch Lab and Pablo have in the arena of high-end, professional grading, it seems unlikely that Adobe is interested in competing in that market.

As a side note, SpeedGrade has some really killer features. It has a color matching tool that is incredible. If you’ve graded a still, or received a graded still, from Photoshop, you can load it into your snapshots and match the grade within SpeedGrade. Why more people aren’t soiling their britches over this is beyond me. It’s an amazing feature that should make any indie filmmaker, art director or mograph artist very happy.

There are plenty of very specific differences between the apps that are clear when you get into their respective approaches to workflow and UI, but the good news is that they’re both very, very good tools that can get you professional quality results if you know how to grade.

Hope this helps!

Jon

[Jon Howard]

Technically it was a bug in FCP. Quicktime correctly sees the file as stereo. Makes a bit of sense since FCP hasn’t been supported in a couple years and hasn’t updated in several more. The quickest workaround, if you have to have the file as stereo in FCP after exporting from Premiere, is to simply highlight the audio and click option+L to make the audio a stereo pair in FCP.

“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.” – Sengstan