[Maarten Mylemans]

Yep, that seems to be the case, all software seems to have its quirks and downright crippling bugs.

But Phil you seem quite content with Avid Media Composer?

I too have read some horror stories about FCP. Sure, part of those can be because of piloting errors (the people using the software), but not all of those. The biggest gripe seems to be the inconsistency of Apple about what it supports from version to version.

With Adobe you know what they will support, you just know it’ll be in a buggy way (that’s just a joke, although there’s truth in that!).

I just want to minimize post-production stress (out of the normal stress that comes with deadlines). Technical troubleshooting is such a buzzkill! You’re happily working on a scene, everything’s rosy, the actors were great, there’s wonderful continuity, you have all the shots you want and then… your system crashes, and it won’t export, and you get fatal errors… and aaargh.

Maybe I should do what Spielberg does? Stil manually cut with film, at least there won’t be system crashes, and people have developed wonderful workarounds, since they’ve been working with it for about a hundred years now 😀 (just a joke, I don’t think it’s feasible to want to do that anymore)

[Maarten Mylemans]

Thanks for the info, Mike. Well, considering your feedback, it’s best I stay with CS3, because I’ve managed to complete a feature project with it before and so have a workflow in place that I know works.
Also because I know what can go wrong I can anticipate this.

Or if I had the budget, I’d just hire out all my post-production to another company! And pay them to stress over bugs 😀

[Maarten Mylemans]

[Tim Kolb] “As far as CS4 growing up…(by all means try Vegas, but…) once you get an updated 64 bit, 8 core, 16 GB machine, I’d guess you’ll find that CS4’s puberty will largely be in the past… “

Well, Tim, your positivity about Premiere encouraged me to take another look at my software issues and see if they aren’t indeed just my view filtered through a good bit of “rage view”.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my last feature project only ran into two bugs (crippling bugs nonetheless), and it only began after having edited about 2/3 of the movie (every scene was a seperate project, to reduce loading, and only after the complete movie was done did I combine all the projects into one).

It was a quicktime bug, that broke my VFX files, so I had rerender them, and the in/end points going from PPro to AE (not all the time, but I had to be careful). And the biggest problem in the end was getting it out of Premiere (because of the quicktime bug) in a format that was playable and watchable (we were using a laptop to stream the movie to the projector at the cinema, as I didn’t trust Blu-Ray enough at the time because it was still a brand new technology).

I’ve also read on the Reduser forum that a representative from Adobe spoke less than kind words about Apple and Quicktime, which leads me to think maybe I should start using other codecs (than a Quicktime wrapper).

Also, I edit HDV natively, which I read is actually very taxing on your system, maybe I can try an intermediate codec.

Tony: that’s wonderful that you do that for your community! Well, if you find that it runs well on your system with such long footage, I think the road seems clear.

Vegas is way too weird for me to get into, I tried it, but, after 9 years of Premiere, I just can’t get into it 🙂

In the end it probably won’t matter what software I use, as long as it’s one that I’m comfortable with and on a system that can actually handle it!

Thank you Tim, for many good insights and feedback. Now on to search for the perfect editing machine…

[Maarten Mylemans]

Hmm, so I’ve been reading up on user’s experiences with FCP, and seems there are quite some gripes with that program as well. Like Apple changing the way something works and it’s apparently very picky about the version of OS and Quicktime you’re using.

Oh, booh, can’t software just work? 😀
Anyhow, before I’ll be making the jump and start spending on hardware, I’m trying out Sony Vegas (which has a weird workflow if you’re used to PPro) and AVID. Although I will miss the Dynamic Link option. Maybe with PPro CS5 the program will grow up…

I will probably stick with PC, if so, is it best to go for a preconfigured workstation like one from HP or 1beyond, or can I design my own?

[Maarten Mylemans]

Tim: that’s absolutely true. Guess I’ll be upgrading soon.

Now I’ve discovered that you can run Windows on the new Mac Pro’s? So actually I can have the best of both worlds now… Have a shiny Mac Pro with FCP, stable hardware and if I need Windows, I just boot it up on the same computer.
Hmm… does seem like a nice setup. And since FCP has been proven to be feature length friendly, I might just make the switch.

[Maarten Mylemans]

-get the RAM up to 8 GB minimum, 16 GB preferably

-get a couple 4 core processors

-get rid of the gamer card and get a Quadro

-make sure you have some speedy drives in a RAID configuration.

Thanks for the info, I can see how 8 GB could help, but since PPro is still a 32 bit application, it won’t see anything above 4 GB, so I don’t see how 16 GB will give me more workpower (because Windows 7 only uses about 1.5 GB of working RAM). The rest of course yes, that would be a big improvement 😀

Maybe it’s better to just go for an HP workstation that’s been optimized? So to reduce system incompatibility? Whenever I’m looking at how my resources are used when I’m working in PPro, it’s doesn’t look like it’s taxing my system very much. And CS3 runs fine , except for the bugs of course.

So the bugging out (like the wrong in/end points when copy/pasting between PPro and AE) might be because of not enough power? I’d rather know that that’s the problem for sure before spending a couple of thousand dollars on hardware!

My hard drives are seperate, I only actually use just one drive out of the four for video editing. Once a project is done, it gets backed up. Since my projects are generally fairly short I never need more than 750 GB for a project.

Thank you all for the feedback. For the time being I’ll give Sony Vegas a try and keep using PPro CS3, as that seems to not bring my system to its knees. I’m gonna try copy/pasting between PPro CS3 and AE CS4 to see if that’ll fix the in/end points 😀 (between PPro CS4 and AE CS4 I haven’t had that bug, so that’s one thing good!).

We’re starting production on a feature film in the near future and I’m gonna use that chance to have a thorough look at our post workflow and completely redesign it to be more stress friendly. Nice thing will be that the budget will allow us to buy new software and hardware, so that’s why I’m looking around to see what the experiences are with other packages. Because I don’t see myself editing a feature film on PPro again, until someone else does it on a new version and tells me they didn’t have problems 😀

So either an HP workstation with AVID media composer, or a MAC Pro with FCP. Is there anyway to test these things? Or reviews?

[Maarten Mylemans]

Thanks for the recommendations, again 🙂

Nick: Oh, dear, I just completely misread your sentence! I thought you said “all editing software is riddled with bugs”, while you said the opposite of course. So, yay, that’s good to hear!

Tim: I’m sorry if I gave the impression that the quicktime bug is well known… it’s actually a quite exotic bug that sort of seems to almost at random pop up on CS3 installations. But when it does, quicktime inside of Premiere gets broken (it has a very specific error code, but can’t remember what it was). When I went looking for solutions, only a handful of people had it, but there was no fix, so I had to rerender all my sfx shots from my feature film to uncompressed AVI in order to export my film.

Have you done an entire featurelength film in Premiere? Because for me that’s where Premiere started bugging out, before that I did maybe movies of maximum 15 minutes, and Premiere worked fine. But when I got about halfway into my feature project, Premiere just started flipping and it was one hell of a road to the finish from there on. Eventually had to use Debugmode Frameserver to even just get my movie out of Premiere.

That xml data switch, where can I find that? The thing is, I tried two versions of Media Encoder: 4.0 and 4.2, the 4.0 would start encoding almost immediately. But with 4.2, even exporting a single frame grab, I’d have it sit there for an hour and it would still say “loading project”.

I don’t feel like my system is underpowered, because I never have problems with other software, mainly After Effects and Photoshop, they stay quite responsive (even when working with an 8K frame in photoshop at 300dpi for publising). And I’ve only really had to troubleshoot one bug in either of them (in the course of working with those for about 7 years now).

Scott: okay, so Avid is still kinda risky 🙂
Maybe it is safer to go the MAC route just because I can’t really mess up the hardware configuration because I don’t design it myself? 😀 (I’ve always designed my own workstations)

Here are my system specs:
Windows 7 64-bit (only recently, all the bugs I’m talking about were also present on Windows XP)
Intel Core DUO 2.66 GHz
3GB RAM
Nvidia 8800 GTX with 712MB RAM
I have about 2.2 Terrabyte of storage in my PC, spread over 4 disks all at 7200 RPM

[Maarten Mylemans]

Thanks for the responses!

Nick: thank you for the recommendation. The reason I didn’t post this in the Premiere forum section is because I’m tired of looking for solutions on how to fix Premiere… and I’ve already done extensive research on the problems I’m running up against. All of my research returns the same answers time and again: “it’s a bug in the program, use a workaround.” Which I would be able to live with if I didn’t have to find a workaround every two mouse clicks.

Phil: Yep, I’m on a standalone workstation, it’s kinda sad to hear that most editing software are riddled with bugs. Maybe I’ll finally give Avid a try, I’ve been putting that off because it’s always so uncomfortable to learn a new software, but the irritation of having to troubleshoot even the most basic of actions is now outweighing that uncomfortableness.

Since I’m on a PC, FCP isn’t an option at the moment (I am looking into changing systems too though). If Avid Media composer is more stable, I’m gonna give it a try, see how it works out.

The only thing I’d be miffed about is having to work out an entirely new workflow between Avid and After Effects and all the other programs I use… oh, well.

If someone else has anything to share on editing programs that work or don’t work, please do! I don’t want to lose anymore sleep over failed editing software 🙂