[Keith Moreau]

Angelo

I’m attempting to do the same thing with the supposed accurate YUV to RGB that Premiere Pro does. I want to try to avoid the Blackmagic / Aja / Matrox route if possible.

I have a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card with HDMI output and attempted to use it for monitor on a computer monitor as well as a HDMI TV. On my Mac system, it was such a pain to get to be stable and useful that I just removed it from my Mac Pro, it just wasn’t worth it for all the trouble it caused. I realize this is the cheapest I/O solution you can get, and probably the $1000 I/O solutions are more stable and higher quality, but I’ve also heard reports of all kinds of problems with them on Mac and Premiere Pro. I think that the Final Cut Pro ‘universe’ was much bigger than the Premiere Pro universe for the I/O manufacturers, and they had more incentive to ‘get it right’ with FCP than with Premiere Pro. They probably see the writing on the wall that Apple and FCP are going away for them in the next 1-3 years, and they better get stable solutions working on the alternatives, such as Premiere Pro.

I have a ASUS PA246 which is calibrated with an iDisplay Pro. I do, however realize that this monitor is around $500, and though probably a ‘best buy’ in it’s category, it isn’t as accurate as a Flanders, TVLogic or other monitors that are in the $5,000 range, or even the HP Dreamcolor in the $2000 range. I can even see the inaccuracies an a simple white to black gradient which shows a ‘rainbow’ of colors in some ranges rather than pure while to black. Also, as I am on a Mac, I can’t get the 10-bit Displayport output that my NVidia Quadro 4000 puts out, which is a shame.

However, with all these flaws, I’m wondering if it’s still ‘good enough’. What monitor are you using now, and how do you have it connected to what card and computer?

Thanks for you input.

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

turns out it was the RGB Color corrector filter, I think it may be a bug with the type of media I was using it on, which was XDCAM EX in a quicktime wrapper. Premiere Pro has some bugs when it comes to things other than prores wrapped in quicktime. When I took out the RGB color corrector the problem went away, but I had to use another filter to replicate what the former filter did.

[Keith Moreau]

I believe you start to drag the clip, then hold down the option key and the cursor turns into a curved arrow then place it before the clip you want to swap. I don’t use FCP that much so it might be control rather than option, give it a try.

[Keith Moreau]

I don’t know if it’s a matter of Adobe ‘adopting’ Prores or any other codec. Premiere Pro has the ability to use preview files of anything it can export. This can be set up in the sequence settings, and it doesn’t seem to slow normal operations down to use an iFrame codec like Prores while editing. It’s just that, at least for me, checking the ‘Use Preview Files’ on export doesn’t seem to significantly speed up rendering.

So what would be advantageous for Adobe would be to:

1) Provide the option to create preview files in the background ala FCPX or AE. When the CPU / GPU is needed for editing, all background rendering stops.
2) Improve granularity of what is rendered, for example clips, GPU vs CPU, video or audio tracks, ala FCP. Keep better track of what is rendered via what isn’t rendered at the sub clip level.
3) Provide a choice of using the rendered preview files or not while editing. Don’t lose track of the rendered files if you turn that option back on
4) Make “Use Preview files” (of your selection) for exporting appreciably faster without re-rendering or whatever else that seems to take a lot of time when exporting

[Keith Moreau]

I think it’s an issue if you are used to rendering a little at a time with FCP and have a very quick render the project end, vs moving to Premiere Pro and are thrilled that you don’t have to render all the time, and then when you get to the end of the project, which needs to be output and uploaded or a Blu Ray Fedexed by the end of the day you realize the render is going to take 15 hours and you are in a very bad place.

About 6-9 months ago you’ll see some posts by me, trying to fine-tune the rendering process and wondering why it was so slow. There will be a lot of FCP editors in the same situation.

This is a very serious issue that needs to be understood by former FCP editors because of how the 2 programs work differently. I now budget a couple of days at the end to render a longer form project when I work with Premiere Pro.

Tom had a 1 minute piece which took 8 minutes to output and he was surprised. What if you had a 45 minute piece to render?

However, if you plan correctly, avoid certain rendering activities, you can make it work.

[Keith Moreau]

Tom, I had the same observations as you. You save time on the front end, but the renders take a long time. I also experimented with using Preview files, and I set my preview files to Prores as well because the default is some time of iframe mpeg format adobe uses.

I found that using previews didn’t significantly improve output time and if you don’t need them to work with the edit, they can take long time to render, so you’ve wasted twice as much time.

One technique I did use, when I need to output a lot of different formats, was to output one good ‘master’ format, like Prores 422 once, then use Media Encoder to make other versions, such as H.264 or whatever. If you just choose to queue various output formate and queued them into Media encoder, serialized the outputs for a number of different destinations, it would use the same original files each time, and the renders would take forever. Some effects, for me it was Digital Anarchy’s Beauty Box, is extremely slow on Premiere Pro. I was on a deadline and this nearly made me late. It was pretty stressful.

Scaling seems to take a long time, so I would avoid scaling for the ‘master.’ If you are at 1080P, output 1080P. Use CUDA accelerated effects is you can, this speeds up the render.

Adobe should make Previews actually work and save time during a render, and have the option of doing previews ‘in the background’ like our favorite app, FCP X. 🙂 And they should have a more versatile way of selecting what should be previewed, it’s pretty crude and all or nothing now.

[Keith Moreau]

I’m trying to see how I can realistically grade using the built in, preferably CUDA accelerated color correction tools. I believe the problem is gone now. I think the problem was the result of a seriously sick install on Premiere Pro CS5.5 on my Mac due to the “Root User” issue. After spending a few panic-stricken hours fiddling with it, I’m now back to normal and I can use multiple 3-way secondaries on a clip. I’m not seeing the problem I was seeing before, which were accompanied with a lot of crashing Premiere Pro.

The dynamic link aspects of CS5, (referring to trying to use Color Finesse) while wonderful, still add a bit of overhead as well as limits, for example once you’ve sent something to AE, it cannot be lengthened, and there as issues with handles for dissolves, etc. If I try to work within PPro, I don’t have these issues.

However, I’m beginning t think that I might need to use something else for CC, I haven’t yet given up on the built-in color correction tools, still plugging away, but I can’t seem to get what I want very easily. I’m not sure why, but it was much easier for me to do simple grades with Final Cut Pro’s built in 3 way CC.

Thanks for the advice.

[Keith Moreau]

I don’t think XDCAM ex footage is accelerated via GPU in PPro Mac and probably Windows. However CUDA accelerated Adobe effects, and there are quite a few, do use CUDA acceleration and no Mac Book Pro has that capable type NVidia card as far as I know. I’m not sure if WIndows Laptops have CUDA capable graphics cards or not.

[Keith Moreau]

OK, I just tested it myself. Though it might be useful in some situations, at least on Premiere Pro 5.5 on a Mac, it just moves the playhead to the beginning of the clip you select in the drop down list. It doesn’t select it, and it only does this with one clip at a time. So, for me it’s not going to help much, unless I’m missing something.

[Keith Moreau]

Does this technique allow to use the list of clips in the drop down to select multiple clips rather than one at at time? If so this would work well for me. My original usage was for copying and pasting attributes for clips that were cut up and spread across the timeline. I would for example, do a color correction on one clip, volume, whatever, and then copy that clip and use a technique to select all the clips with the same name, then paste. This is easy in FCP, will I be able to do that with this Premiere Pro technique?