[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the driver info.

It’s normal procedure for an Apple OS Update to break NVidia’s Cuda and driver support and then for us to have to download new drivers from Nvidia, it’s caught me several times.

However that’s not what is responsible for the problems the Mac users are seeing with this ‘lagging’ problem. Maybe it’s just a fact of life (at least for me) with Premiere Pro but it’s sluggish, especially when your project gets complex.

That being said it’s still the best NLE option for the Mac out there. It’s now either PPro or Avid.

However I feel that if Adobe has the resources they could improve the Mac product. Could somebody post a screen recording of their Mac or Windows that doesn’t ‘lag’ like we are all seeing, thanks much.

[Keith Moreau]

I’ve always had the laggy clip drag issue you’ve mentioned, in Mac OS 10.6.8 and Mac Pro 2008 8 core with 24GB and Quadro 4000 card. Happened in CS 5 and 5.5. I think this is a pretty common issue. I’m going to try it with my newer Macbook Pro. it seems to get slower as the project gets larger and more complex. We really need to resolve this!

[Keith Moreau]

I have the same problem, Mac Pro early 2008 with Nvidia Quadro 4000 24 GB RAM. It seems to get slower as the project gets larger, to the point where I really have to move the clip very slowly to accurately place it.

Overall, PPro for me is pretty laggy, like it takes maybe 1/2 second to start a clip, sometimes sound doesn’t play the first time, I stop and start and it plays fine. I attribute the lagginess to the fact that I am playing back avchd, h.264, xdcam footage and AE linked compositions at the same time, but it would be nice if I didn’t always feel like I was walking in molasses with this app.

I’ve experienced this problem on both PPro 5 and 5.5

Paul Joy has a list set up on his blog to see if others are having this problem, pauljoy.com.

[Keith Moreau]

Wow, that worked. Thanks. So setting to 100% first fixes it. I was in fit mode previously. At 100% was still small on my 30″ so then setting to Fit expanded it and still kept it sharp in pause mode. Good to remember!

Thanks Jeff!

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Jeff

Thanks, that works, though my secondary monitor isn’t that big. Is it just that the “~” option for full screen just has a bug where pause mode isn’t going to be full resolution? Seems like this is effective when not in full screen mode?

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Tom

Sorry, I should have specified stuff better. I have Mac Pro 2008 8 Core, Mac OS 10.6.7, Nvidia Quadro 4000, DVI to Apple 30″ cinema display (and another DVI display).

I do have a Blackmagic Intensity Pro but it’s not hooked up to anything now but it does have HDMI outputs

Does that help?

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

I’m disappointed in the FCP X 1.0 feature set (or shall I say ‘lack of feature set,’ though I’m not surprised. I do think they will be rolling out improvements to replace some of the FCP7 features that are missing and mission critical. I think what we’re seeing is 2-3 years of pent up anticipation from those that live and breath FCP7 and have been waiting for something to fix the bugginess and slowness of FCP7, not change their entire way of editing and workflow that they’ve invested in for perhaps a decade.

I’m not as blindly angry because I personally saw that Apple had a monumental job ahead of them to optimize FCP7, mostly because of it’s reliance on antiquated Quicktime architecture, and that they would be throwing this away. Also because the feature set in FCP7 was immense. Buggy and unstable, but immense and built up over 15 years. It would have been pretty unbelievable if they could release FCP X with all those features. I actually thought there would not be a new FCP release until 2012. In a way I was right, they won’t have a professionally usable replacement for FCP 7, (FCP X v 1.x) until 2012 at least, and that’s if Apple is working toward it vigorously.

I think the biggest mistake is that Apple did not allow an upgrade path for FCP7 projects, and they left out important importing and exporting into some standard format, such as FCP7 XML, and that they left out a very important multiclip feature.

I have heard all these things are coming, but they are not here yet. I do also think that once people can wrap their heads around the new system, they may reconsider FCP X’s usefulness. I may try it for short projects, or for self-contained segments of longer pieces that I incorporate into Premiere Pro. Think of it as a way of producing an After Effects composition that you export as a self contained quicktime file. FCP X is still cheaper than some of the plugins for FCP7 I have, and it probably does much, much more.

People like Larry Jordan and Philip Hodgetts, whom I respect immensely are saying this is a 1.0 release and that it will get better, and I believe them. Just like FCP7 and prior, there will be a whole cottage industry to make up for the deficiencies in FCPX. There will be downward pressure to make those FCP X plugins cheaper, which is good, there will be a much bigger market for FCP X than FCP 7, I think, so those developers will ‘make it up in volume.’

In the meantime, if you want a 64 bit, 21st century version of FCP 7, Premiere Pro is probably a good way to go.

[Keith Moreau]

For anything that might require rendering in FCP, such as transitions and effects, PPro may be able to play natively without rendering.

[Keith Moreau]

I use both, started on FCP, then last fall decided to try PPro. The reason? Mainly, I realized, that with all the footage I was shooting on DSLR H.264 and AVCHD, which FCP didn’t handle natively, I was going to have to invest in lots of hard drives to store and work with all ProRes transcoded media before even thinking of using it with Final Cut Pro.

So this was the starting point for me, not having to transcode. It was a practical choice. I went through a few growing pains, but actually, PPro’s interface is almost identical to Final Cut Pro’s. I guess they have the same roots, so it was surprisingly quick to transition. Being able to use FCP’s keyboard shortcuts in PPro helped a lot, so I didn’t have to learn a new set of shortcuts.

Now whenever I have to go back to a project that I cut with FCP I’m ready to throw my Mac Pro out the window with frustration. I find it slow, buggy, and unpredictable compared to Premiere Pro. There are still some strange bugs in Premiere Pro CS5 and CS5.5, things I have to work around occasionally, but mostly it’s a lot less buggy and with the right CUDA GPU enabled video cards installed, it’s so much more faster to get to editing than FCP. Many of the common filters are GPU accelerated so rather than having to basically render almost every filter with FCP, I can do a lot of the post production in real time with PPro.

The one kind of slow thing compared to FCP is outputting a encoded file. I agree with a previous poster that it’s best to output to some form of ‘master’ file, that’s close to the sequence settings then do your encodes from that file. In FCP, though you have to render all the time, outputting a master Quicktime file (whatever codec your sequence is set to) is fast. Premiere Pro goes back to the source media to create it’s final output encodes, and this is slower. It’s basically rendering the whole sequence when it outputs. It’s probably higher quality than FCP, but that was a disappointment in PPro and was nearly a disaster on a few early projects because I was expecting FCP speed on the output.

I also find, for some reason, color correction on PPro is less intuitive than FCP, even though they have similar 3-way color correctors, I find PPro’s 3-way is hard to get good results. This might be my lack of knowledge but I found color correcting in FCP much easier to get good results.

Final Cut X may blow away PPro, but I feel that diving into it now is foolhardy. Who knows how buggy it will be or how limited it will be. Maybe it will be awesome and totally replace Premiere. Of course I will immediately buy it for $299 and try it. If it is I may jump back. I just don’t want to transcode stuff and render stuff in the timeline anymore. I want to work, not transcode, render, and use hard drive space unnecessarily.

[Keith Moreau]

If you have any spanned EX1 clips that you’ve edited with in Premiere Pro, even if you go to use the Calibrated plugin, then export FCP XML and import into FCP, those spanned clips will have problems because PPro refers to the clips in the XML as the first file name of the spanned set of clips. If you’ve made edits in the 2nd file, 3rd, 4th file in the spanned clip, it FCP won’t refer to the correct clips. It’s a pain for me and a bug in my opinion, but since FCP can work with native EX1 files without the Calibrated software plugin, I don’t see it as Adobe thinking it’s a bug however the way PPro deals with EX clips is very inconvenient for me.