Keith Moreau
Forum Replies Created
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Do you have the ability to ‘borrow’ a New Mac Book pro and load the Adobe CS 5.5 trial on it and see if it works for you? I do think non-video apps would work well with it, and you might get by with video for some projects.
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I had a problem with a Prores 422 LT .mov file not being recognized from PPro Windows, but this could have been an anomaly.
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when you export, you can select some presets that Adobe provides, you can also customize them by going lower down in the export window, click on the video tab and scroll further down, you can adjust the bitrate and framerate there and you can
For Youtube I use a high bitrate since the have a 2TB limit for files, vimeo basic has a 500MB limit so depending on the length of the video you have to vary it to fit within the 500MB.
You will find that H.264 at very high bitrates won’t necessarily play on your Mac that smoothly, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about this.
You should do some uploads to youtube and vimeo. They take your video and re-encode it so it plays well with various bandwidth connections and systems (flash, h.264, html5) so their video will always be a re-encode of whatever you upload. Then check the smoothness once playing from their sites.
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You need to export with the exact frame rate as your sequence for best results. What app are you playing back the video with? Sometimes the high bitrate H.264 files (such as the HDTV setting) will not play back smoothly with Quicktime player, if that is what you are using. I use Movist, it’s free and uses a variety of decoders, mostly ffmpeg, to play back and it’s quite efficient.
Encoding: For Vimeo I use H.264, framerate same as source, bitrate 5000kbs-10000kbs depending on the final file size, for Youtube similar except I use 1080 P size.
If in doubt, the AppleTV (inside H.264) setting (with the framerate of your sequence) is a very good setting for both Vimeo and Youtube, though the bitrate could be even higher.
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Ewan
You won’t get Nvidia CUDA support with a Macbook Pro as the graphics card, though excellent on the high end models, is AMD (ATI) Radeon and isn’t CUDA capable. That means you won’t get real time effects processing using CUDA, which is an advantage with Premiere Pro. That being said, you can edit simpler projects, if you have a fast 4 processor Macbook Pro with the RAM maxed out (you can get up to 16GB) and if you have a SSD hard drive, and also have your media on an external FW800 or better yet, when they come out Thunderbolt hard drives, you might get by.
However, Lion JUST came out last week. On all hardware and software, there WILL BE PROBLEMS. Pro video producers will not typically upgrade an OS for a while if they have a choice. I took about a year before I upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6, and Premiere Pro forced me to do that because though 10.5 was doing just fine as an editing platform PPro CS5 needed 10.6. Your dilemma would be that any Mac released on or after Lion will probably only support Lion, you can’t usually go back.
However, I do believe that hardware released before Lion could still run on 10.6. This means the MacBook Pros and Mac Pros.
However… for major editing work, I think you’ll do best with something like a Mac Pro. You can add all the RAM you can afford and PPro and After Effects loves and needs RAM. I have 24GB and sometimes I feel I could use more. And you can add an Nvidia CUDA capable card.
Right now Adobe is offering a 50% off PPro and Production Premium ‘crossgrade,’ you might convince your employers that you could save a lot of time and hard drive space by not having to transcode all your footage to Prores (if you have DSLR or AVCHD you have to now in FCP 7).
Before getting a new Mac Pro you should see if you can still load it with 10.6, then Premiere Pro and the Nvidia cards should work well. Or be very, very sure that Premiere Pro and any graphics card work well with Lion. And you can save some money by not getting the 4800 but getting the 4000 instead which I think is the best bang for the buck, I had a 4800 but returned it for the 4000 and haven’t noticed much less performance. I think RAM and speedy hard drives might be more important than 4000 vs 4800.
To find out more about the Mac hardware, here’s a good website:
https://macperformanceguide.com/
Good Luck.
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I guess one way is to do it manually, just don’t final trim before sending, maybe put in markers where the actual trim points will be, but this is a pain. Anybody know a more automatic way of doing this with Premiere Pro and AE?
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Hi Ewan
I switched about a year ago to Premiere Pro CS 5 and now 5.5. I have an older Mac Pro 2008 with 24GB of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4000 card. It’s a dream to be able to natively edit video without transcoding. Premiere Pro is almost exactly like FCP interface, and they make it even easier by added a FCP keyboard shortcut preset, which I use plus with my own custom additions.
On a Mac, I think it has it’s quirks, but if you have a lot of Prores material or old FCP projects and such, I think it might be a pain to convert over to a PC. Recently, there has been a lot of complaining about the lack of performance of Premiere Pro on the Mac vs the PC. (Including me). It’s hard to tell for me if the PC version is ‘snapper’, but I recently did an experiment where I created a ‘Boot Camp’ partition on my Mac 2008 with Windows 7 and Premiere Pro (that was painful but educational). For those that don’t know, Boot Camp is an Apple Mac feature that allows you to basically use your Mac as a PC and run Windows on it. A lot of people do this, less so more recently with the advent of good virtualization software like VMWare Fusion and Parallels, but you are getting the best performance out of your Mac acting like a Windows PC with Boot Camp. I was able to get Premiere Pro for the Mac Pro PC running, and I had Media Managed a Premiere Pro project moved over to a NTFS partition just so I could compare the performance of the Windows version vs Mac on the same exact hardware. Premiere Pro recognized the Quadro 4000 and allowed me to use Mercury Playback Engine GPU optimization with it, which was nice.
The result? Well the well known ‘laggy drag of clips on the timeline’ bug that you may have seen here and on the Adobe PPro forums does not exist on Windows, just the Mac version. Overall I would say that the responsiveness was slightly snappier, maybe 5% to 10%. It was not a large project, so I don’t know if the Windows version would suffer from what I’ve experienced as a project gets more complex, but I have a feeling when Adobe solves the laggy timeline problem this might also go away on the Mac.
However, there is no way I could convert over to PC at this time, I realized when trying to work with my small sample project. I have tons of legacy FCP 7 projects I’d need to still use (if even just to export the XML to PPro) , I have have tons of plugins I use with Premiere Pro Mac, there seem to be some flavors of Prores that I was using in my project that Premiere Pro windows didn’t recognize, in fact it seemed that a lot of the Quicktime stuff was just unavailable on the Windows version, which, if you have a lot of Quicktime Prores or other files, it might be a pain to have to figure out. I currently have several RAID 5 multi-TB eSATA drives, working with a card that isn’t supported on Windows, and formatted in HFS + which is supported in Windows only by 3rd party software (MacDrive and others which I have used on occasion).
The slightly snapper response of the Windows Premiere Pro wasn’t astoundingly different, it was less than I thought, considering the reports to the contrary. Maybe if I had a 2011 whiz-bang PC I’d notice more of a difference, but I was also comparing that to my Mac OS experience on the same hardware, so I think it was a fair comparison.
So there would be a huge investment for me to do the the switchover. Plus I have all kinds of software that runs on the Mac, all kinds of Apple projects and software. All kinds of non-video editing stuff as well that I use my Mac for. So while it was interesting to see what the experience could be like, I also realized that I had to stay with my Mac.
If all I did on my system was editing, and I didn’t have a decade of FCP projects and media, I might reconsider, but for now I’m staying with the Mac and I hope they come out soon with a new Mac Pro with Thunderbolt, and I hope Adobe takes all these comments about Mac vs PC performance and other feature requests to heart. They are going to be getting a TON of Mac OS Premiere Pro users coming their way.
-Keith
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Tim, thanks for the long post and no offense taken, you’ve been really helpful to me in this forum about many issues. Do you currently edit with Mac OS X and Premiere Pro CS 5 or 5.5? It sounds like you don’t, but let me know and if so let me know how you think it performs vs a Windows system. I’m betting that the Windows Premiere Pro performs better with equivalent hardware, which is what I was trying to say in my post.
I’m a ‘switcher,’ that is about a year ago I got fed up with Apple’s FCP and their 4 year old obsolete software and heard reports from other ‘switchers,’ such as Chris Fenwick and others were using Premiere Pro instead of FCP. I got tired of the endless, buggy and unpredictable behavior with FCP as well as it depending on underlying technology (Quicktime) that was great in the 90’s but was limiting it’s ability to do much with new codecs. I was starting to use all kinds of codecs and multi-cam shoots that needed to be transcoded for FCP to work with them, and I could see that the time this was taking as well as as the hard drive space was going to become unmanageable.
I’m actually a very strong proponent of Premiere Pro. Though my main editing system is Mac Pro is a 2008 model, it is an 8 core top of the line, and I enhanced it with a SSD boot drive as well as 24GB of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4000 to help Premiere Pro’s CUDA performance. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t believe in Adobe Premiere Pro. I’ve invested big bucks in the ecosystem. And when Apple comes out with new Mac Pro that supports Thunderbolt, I will be upgrading (if they ever do release another Mac Pro.)
When I go over to help fellow filmmakers and editors with their FCP systems because I’m regarded as somewhat of a technical expert, I recommend they try out Premiere pro, they would be a lot more productive. When they mention how many Hollywood features have been cut with FCP, I say, “Yes, and those editors also had an army of assistant editors to keep the FCP cut from crashing altogether with string and bailing wire, you don’t, so you’re on your own with FCP and you have to deal with it’s flakiness.”
I’m also, however a strong proponent of the Mac and Apple, always have been. Their recent resurgence and ridiculous popularity of late is a testament to the Apple / Mac quality and customer service. I don’t want to have to give up my Mac to have an optimal Premiere Pro experience, and I don’t think a lot of Mac users will want to either. So I know that Adobe reads these forums, and I’m trying to point out that as disenchanted Mac / FCP users try to move over to Premiere Pro, they will encounter these issues over and over, and it’s not necessarily because to their system that was optimized for FCP, some of it will be because the Mac version of Premiere Pro isn’t optimized yet by Adobe as it has been for Windows.
That being said, Premiere Pro and the whole CS suite is remarkable on any platform.
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I think it really behooves Adobe to address these performance issues with the Mac version of Premiere Pro. The Mac can and is a very powerful machine, though paying a premium for the hardware, the user experience can be great. Mac computers are the 3rd largest computer sales in the US, behind Dell (#1) and HP (#2) at 11% of all computer sales (not including IOS devices such as iPad and iPhone) and have a disproportionately large percentage in the Video / Creative professionals area, I’ve heard some say in the 50% to 75% range. Certainly in the video world it’s in this range.
I think Adobe programmers use an abstraction layer to allow their Graphic Interface and middle layers to be the same between Mac and PC platforms, and the lower layer is customized for Windows or Mac. This way they can make changes to both platforms more universally.
However, the low level layers that are OS specific need expert programmers in their platform, and these deal more closely with the hardware idiosyncrasies of the platforms. I think Adobe needs to make this a top priority, considering all the switchers from FCP that will be coming their way but experiencing less than optimal performance.
I would like to see some posters on the Mac version of Premiere Pro to tell their experiences with the software. In my experience, it’s been good for low-complexity short form projects. For me, when the premiere project begins to get to get complex, it seems it gets very sluggish, and it makes me wonder if I can actually produce a project with thousands of elements with Premiere, at least on the Mac platform. FCP has a lot of long form projects under it’s belt and in hollywood, I actually don’t know if Premiere on the Mac does.
That being said, Premiere Pro is poised to become what FCP became prior to the FCPX debacle, if they can get their Mac performance up and address these issues.
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It seems to be a well known problem, I experience it as well as it seems, most other Mac users. Adobe, though seemingly helpful, has not admitted the problem. There are threads here about this problem, as well as a very long post on the Adobe forums here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/826437
Please post to that forum as well and describe your hardware and problem so Adobe has more clues.