[Karim Daire]

Hi John-Michael,

thanks for your reply.
Someone else already wrote about the stitching thing that QT handles differently than Premiere. This information is new to me but explains a lot.

I don’t care if something is done differently as long as its more effective. I do not convert Material to ProRes before editing… I used to do that in FCP with DSLR Footage and worked a lot faster than now having the humungous render times on export with Premiere.
Its a lot more comfortable with Premiere but as far as I can see it I kind of “get the bill at the end”.

So there is absolutely no reliable way of rendering while editing and then having quick export times for delivery? I mean exactly the final part is where deadlines and last minute corrections tend to get annoying. If Premiere has this big minus, that is a huge impact and I wonder why i never read about that.

I thought I could use my preview settings on Pro-Res or uncompressed to guarantee maximal quality, render on my timeline and then use these preview files when rendering my final master.

But as far as I understand you it doesn’t matter because Premiere renders it all again after all. In my book this is a time killer deluxe. Why not just convert the footage before? If i batch convert my footage I am still faster in FCP than having to watch render bars for minutes every time I want to get my material out of Premiere?

I don’t understand how this is differently and not worse.
I heard that basically its a waste to use Adobe software (AE and Premiere) on a MAC. Is it true that performance is better on Windows machines?
I am tired of Apple anyways and if I change to CS6 I might consider changing back to windows for that. Any hints?

Thanks for all your help in this thread. The creative cow community rocks! 🙂

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Hi Wil,

I guess you are right… I worked around the bug. You can fill the videolayer below the alphaclip and everything renders fine. As soon as there are gaps below it renders in a blue tint.
Its a general bug in CS5 and CS5.5, at least I get it with Animation and ProRes4444 Codec the same way and its a fully opaque clip which just has alpha in transitions at the beginning and end. When Footage is below it renders fine.
You should be able to reproduce this bug, I know other people who had the same problems, even on Windows Machines.

Lets see if they fixed it with CS6 then!

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Hi Ryan,

I am working on a Macbookpro17″ with a radeon 6750m and for video playback with a Matrox MXO2. But actually I am working without videocard.

Of course when talking about “slow renders” I compare results on exactly the same machine and I never had problems working on a Macbook with Final Cut. Premiere takes breaks when working on large projects with a lot of footage. preview often freezes and I get totally unreliable playback at times. I also regularly get problems with lost render files or corrupt render files that need to be deleted and rerendered.

I am a little stumped since the general feedback on premiere was so good lately and it looks like many professionals changed to Premiere if not back to Avid.

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Hi Chris,

thanks for your reply.
I tried again but I remember I user Prores444 before and changed back to Animationcodec because Premiere messes this up just the same. I found the fix but its just plain ridiculous. If I use alpha footage and the video layer below changes from content to none the layer above (even if fully opaque) switches to blue.. not matter which codec I use.

Since I am working with Premiere I am missing Final Cuts reliability. Am i the only one who always stumbles across bugs like this?
Also for the export/render times. When I work like you propose (native Video codec mixed with prores422/444 Animations/Titles I get ridiculous rendert times on export.

Thats why I wonder if I know that I will master to Prores422 isn’t it a more useful workflow to use a ProRes422 for my preview files and then use these preview files to render on Export. I mean, why should I use DSLR preview files rendered in premiere to export to ProRes from Premiere… that seems redundant to me.
If I render on my timeline an get WYSIWG+fast final exports in the end, that would be exactly the FCP workflow. It kills me to have unreliable export times if I got a deadline, especially if premiere then renders bluescreens it doesn’t display in my timeline before. I don’t know how many hours I have wasted with this and I just don’t find a working fix.

Since many say that Premiere is a worthy replacement of FCP7 I start to wonder what I am doing wrong here to get these unacceptable results from the program.
Render times are massively slower than in my previous workflows on the same machine?!

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Thanks for your answer… I was fearing it would include a lot of scripting which is not quite my cup of tea and would be too much hassle.

My basic problem is that corrections and different language version take to long for a project. Could there be a way of working with expressions to make life easier there?

I was thinking of setting up a dummy/guide composition with textlayers including all of my textscript.

Would there be a way of linking my animated textobjects source all over the project to the textfields in the single dummy composition so all text corrections could be done in this single composition instead of scrubbing through thousands of precomps and layers on the whole length of my clip for every language version??

Or to pose a basic questions… how do you handle complex projects which require a lot of text changes for different languages after the animation job is done in a manner that minimizes the time spent on replacing the texts??

I hope I was able to explain my problem. Thanks for any hints in advance,

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

I know that both programs handle XDCam fundamentally different but FCP can handle XDCam EX with its own Log+Transfer-Tool. I think it still can’t import XDCam HD. So when relinking the XDCam-EX MP4s I get the normal dialog but it denies the import.

No workarounds for that? Is there some way I can rebatch them to the QT-XDCam Files that FCP rewraps on import?

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

I looked into DivX Pro7 and the results of DivX Pro were OK, but as far as I could see it only exports .divx files. I need .avi files. Now someone else here wrote before about “rewrapping” clips as QT or AVI, i never heard of that before.
Any hints on how to turn the .divx files into .avi?

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Hi Matt,

I live in Germany… is your offer available over here too or does Adobe sell the Crossgrades over here? I can’t find any similar european offers for adobe on their site or their licensed partners. Just crossgraded to Avid but no Production premium Crossgrade to find?!

Greetings,

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Hi Michael,

I work with square pixel renders to get best possible quality of type and logo graphics for use on computers and if I need a DVD I can squeeze my 1024×576 files into a PAL Composition. Since I barely export to DVD any more this makes most sense for most of my projects. But FCP sets the import settings for Square Pixel Footage rather random. If I use PAL settings its fine but not with 1024×576 square pix renders.
After applying the right footage interpretation myself (if fields are used these are messed up most of the time too) I can squeeze those into PAL and FCP distorts them properly but if I use CS4 settings FCP can’t handle these, i get black bars and have to apply the right distortion myself. Thats why I don’t get only Adobe uses different square pixel ratios from CS4 upward?!?

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany

[Karim Daire]

Hi Rafael,

unfortunately if you select multiple clips and right click for the object settings only the right clicked object settings will be changed not the whole highlighted group.

But I just realized you can just select a group of clips and then set the anamorph switch and aspect ration settings in the columns of the file window, so this works fine.

Thanks for your hint, I was stuck in the context menu and never thought about checking the columns before.

Karim

-Karim-
Freelance Cutter, Compositor and Animator from Hamburg/Germany