[Mark Hollis]

I shall do this when I get in to work tomorrow, Vince. I’m looking forward to building a template that will make my workflow faster so that I can embellish from there.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Adobe wants everyone in the world to use Flash. And while I can appreciate the value of Flash, it does not have the capabilities of Quicktime or MXF.

Mac users can get Telestream’s Flip4Mac, which will seamlessly translate wmv files into something Quicktime can read. I have seen zero softness issues and with any decent Mac (G5 and above) anything you produce in a wmv will play back just fine on a Macintosh. And, if your client has the Flip4Mac Player Pro, which is $29 per seat, he or she can simply convert your wmv file to Quicktime (or you can do it with a Mac Mini and ship your client Quicktime files).

I was able to use Flip4Mac successfully with a G4 Macintosh running at 1GHz for any video up to standard compressed NTSC-PAL size. HD would not play back without dropping frames and completely uncompressed NTSC-PAL would drop frames. but if you played uncompressed NTSC-PAL from an array through Final Cut Pro, it did work just fine.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I was at an Adobe presentation some time ago and the Adobe people waxed long and hard about how much thay didn’t like Quicktime.

Quicktime, like MXF is a “wrapper” for material that may include codecs and other devices that will get you media. I have worked on another tool that cannot use the latest form of Quicktime because Apple’s changes seem to be all about supporting things like iPods and iPhones which don’t really matter to the production workflow.

As long as the version of Quicktime you have installed has the codecs you need, you should be good to go. But, to the extent I needed a particular Quicktime codec, I have tended to trust a two-step process more than a direct export to a Quicktime file.

I recommend the use of Quicktime Pro to transfer from one codec to another and from AVI to Quicktime. The best tool I have found for dealing with Quicktime is a Macintosh computer.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

The Animation codec and the Video codec describe two different color spaces. Animation is in RGB color space while Video is YCbCr (often called YUV).

If you don’t mind doing a two-step process, you can export an AVI and then use Mediacoder to export it to Quicktime .MOV. Mediacoder is free.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I get the same thing sometimes with Premiere Pro 1.5 on a system with 2G of system RAM.

Adding RAM is always a good idea and you are probably “underpowered” with your system. If you can double the amount of system RAM you have, you will notice that everything is less sluggish and you will need your hard drive less for virtual memory or “scratch disk memory” in general.

I usually go to Crucial’s website to determine how much RAM I have and how much I can add. Crucial has a nice little widget that you can download that will determine everything for you. This is not to suggest that you must buy from them — but they will give you the exact specifications for the computer you have.

I would not purchase RAM from any company that does not offer a 100% no-questions-asked lifetime warranty on RAM.

I note the same issues with version 1.5 and many of these are attributed to the application “conforming” material that I have added to a bin. Additionally, I notice that the application will get sluggish when I have lots of layers in an edit.

Adobe applications sometimes do not release memory when they’re working and the best way to clear out things is to exit the application and then start it up again. If you are running several applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, a web browser and so on) it is sometimes helpful to log out completely and then log back in, or do a restart sometime in the middle of your day (assuming you’re editing all day). This clears out all allocated RAM that ought to have been released to the system but wasn’t because one application or another doesn’t clean up well after itself.

Vince is correct that maxing out your RAM might be expensive and the theoretical limit of a Windows 32-bit application is 4G of system RAM. I doubt that Premiere can actually use more than 3G of RAM though, so the maximum useful RAM you can put in your system is 3G.

But if you must add RAM in pairs for your computer, Crucial will tell you that and you should follow their directions, adding 4G to get 3G of useful RAM.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I would not sentence CS4 to the Gulag yet.

I detailed the specifications of the computer on which I run Premiere Pro 1.5. It cannot handle CS4. I have not tried it on my MacPro, as I only have the Windows version.

My Mac Pro is a dual-quad Intel Xenon (Nehalem) system and does tend to get out of its own way.

In a proper machine, CS4 may well be able to make air. It has been my experience that software is usually written for processors and computers that have not quite come out yet.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Pardon me if I steal a thread here:

Be very careful about scratch disks. I am very, very reluctant to use a boot drive for anything, save applications and storage of completed material, like that darned Excel spreadsheet my accountant had me produce.

But on my own computer, I have it back up everything all of the time (Apple’s Time Machine is a stroke of genius) to another hard drive that is 50% larger than my boot drive. I do not back up video storage. If I need safety, I run a RAID 5.

Scratch disks for all Adobe applications that use them must be a drive that is relatively empty and very fast.

As to RAM, in a 64-bit system, you want to add as much as is feasable for your budget. I believe the scratch disk is less used when you have more RAM and multicore systems will use more.

Today, I think the fastest first-tier Windows computer is made by Apple. HP may just have developed something very interesting, though. I’m not sure I’d ever do what Bob’s doing. Maybe I’m too conservative but I want a computer that the manufacturer will repair or replace within one day and get me back up and running with minimal fuss.

People who don’t earn their living doing this may disagree and, for them, any computer that will run the Adobe applications will be fine. But I prefer to spend appropriate money setting up a configuration that will emphasize reliability.

Hard drives will work as virtual memory just fine. Computer programmers have been using them for some time, swapping in and out large datasets with ease. Adding Real Ram will cause the application to work faster.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Heck, use your Symphony!

It’s just a Newscutter with better color correction…

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I’m not really sure that we are a good example but here goes:

I am using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on a Dell xps600 and a Dell xps Gen3 (with the latter mostly doing capture and the former editing) for the Connecticut Public Affairs Network (CT-N) in Hartford. We edit a weekly show called Capitol Reports.

We have a weekly deadline, not a daily one or a twice-daily one but our deadline is firm. We have to be done in time to completely close-caption the show and hit an airtime.

I come from a hard news background and worked with an Avid DS making graphics for NBC Nightly News as well as the in-show promo or opener. I know from deadlines. The folks at Avid did not think that the DS was capable of doing what NBC did with it. They use Avid Newscutters (Media Composer with a few things disabled) for their stories.

I would say that Premiere Pro is as capable of crashing a deadline as any software out there. Your limitations have to do with what producers (on deadline) expect and the quality of the person operating the software. When you are faced with render times, a cut becomes a very valid transition.

You want to buy technology that can support the product. We will not run Premiere CS4 on our systems because they won’t make deadline. This is not to bash the software — the Dells just cannot chug through the rendering needed.

Our final timeline currently has 7 audio and 7 video layers, though I intend to see if I can reduce that.

We edit our stories and then export them as .AVI media so that Premiere Pro doesn’t have to manage all of the layers in the stories — just the final edit.

We don’t like how long it takes Premiere Pro to “conform” AVIs (even the ones it created) but we take special pains to make sure we’re doing these when we’re not under the gun as much as possible. We would like to be able to work directly with P2 media files but we cannot work with CS4, so we have to convert those elsewhere or use videotape.

For videotape formats, we’re using DVCPro and Sony Betacam SX. Ingest of Betacam SX is really easy. I’m having problems controlling the Panasonic DVCPro AJ-SD255 with Premiere Pro, but it will capture if I place the VCR in local and just hit the red button.

We will upgrade to HD in the future (though we’re not doing that next year). We’re going to transition to Final Cut Pro in January and buy a server for that. We’ll have several seats of FCP running on Mac Pros and I’ll answer the Final Cut Pro question the same way: It depends on the producer’s expectations and the quality of the person operating the software.

I have over 20 years of experience in television meeting deadlines. There is nothing specifically lacking in Adobe’s application that would prevent you from hitting a deadline with it.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Bob, really, 32-bit Windows applications can only see 3G of system RAM and they have to be written specifically to even see that (many can only see 2G).

The default Windows XP Professional boot.ini file must be modified to handle memory usage with many applications and the hardware that they use. For this purpose, the boot.ini file must include the following text:

“Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB DS=2700” /fastdetect /3GB/USERVA=2700

Bill Gates said a few years ago, “You can do everything in 64K.”

He later said, “640K ought to be enough for anyone.”

In theory, a 32-bit application can see 4G of system RAM and 32-bit applications that run on Apple’s OS X can use close to all of that. But Microsoft mired itself into a RAM-addressing scheme that requires space in the computer’s memory for peripherals, like your monitor, keyboard, I/O systems (everything from Firewire to AJA cards) and so on. So 32-bit Windows applications (and, indeed 64-bit applications that run under Microsoft’s OS) suffer from a need to reserve RAM address space for hardware. I don’t suppose under 64-bit Vista and Windows 7 we’ll run into the upper limits of RAM all that soon, as the theoretical limit for 64-bit applications is 16.8 million terabytes. Though I’m sure that a version of Photoshop in your future will run into that upper limit.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?