[Mark Hollis]

This is Preferences File corruption. Navigate to your User/Library/Preferences folder and then trash any .plist file for the application. Also trash any file that is in an /Adobe folder in your Library that refers to Premiere that looks like a .plist file or was saved when you last used the application.

Should be all better after that.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I’m going to hazard a guess here that the hardware — or rather the software that makes the hardware work (the drivers) are not compatible with the Adobe products you are trying to use.

First solution is to look for an update from Adobe that sill support what you have installed. Failing that, ask the hardware company if they have a specific driver for Adobe’s applications (because some hardware manufacturers do that). Last step should be to turn off hardware acceleration and let the Adobe applications just deal with it.

Remember, hardware is a moving target. Adobe is not Avid and they don’t have a “closed box” with known variables. So some things may not work.

If you really need the hardware acceleration for other applications, you might consider setting up a dual-boot system. That way, if you’re using the Adobe applications, you boot up without the drivers that cause problems and for the other applications, you boot with drivers that enhance the hardware.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Comment 1: Adobe hates Quicktime. I attended an event some years ago and asked about Quicktime specifically and Mac support in general and the company rep launched into a diatribe about how bad Apple was. I realize there are issues with Quicktime and issues with Quicktime Pro (Apple doesn’t have a 64-bit Quicktime Pro for either their own computers or ones running Windows — their Quicktime X for Snow Leopard is a player only). You can hate it (with good reason) or love it but, since the folks at Adobe have such an animus against Apple’s wrapper, I don’t think they’re ever going to optimize their systems for Quicktime.

Comment 2: HDV is like SECAM. It’s not a production format. It’s great for shooting video and squeezing it so much that it squeaks. It’s OK for archival material but I wouldn’t want my timeline to be HDV. It is so highly compressed that I’ll bet your computer is really heating up its processor figuring out what each pixel is supposed to be based on the iFrame and all of the math it has to do to figure the changes that you’re probably better off rendering HDV to a less compressed codec for actual editing. After all, you can recompress later.

Bob, you’re always going to be rendering something — be it in the foreground or in the background. Moore’s law suggests that we’ll be able to render realtime, eventually. But by that time, we’ll expect more layers on our timeline and more complex and interesting transitions.

My experience dates back to 3D animators laying their frames individually one by each from their SGI workstation to a 1″ C-Format VTR and hoping the machine didn’t do h-phase bumps while that was going on overnight and, sometimes for days. I’m pretty happy with render times like I described.

I think GPUs (which are massively parallel processors) will help a lot. The secret is to write for them. Adobe won’t have done that until CS5.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I’m not sure what a “Pentium D” is, but that’s what I’m using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on. It’s a Dell XPS 600 with 2 Pentium D processors. And the company I work for is pretty much akin to “starving student” presently, as we’re using really old stuff and just trying to make do.

I think your best wrapper is Quicktime Pro and h.264, even though we have an entire library of .AVI material that is 4:1:1 DVCPro standard def resolution. Problem with Quicktime is the gamma shift that occurs when you use that wrapper.

But going forward, I don’t see anything better that anyone else has developed. There’s .WMV (Windows Media 9 is the encoder, even though the current player version is version 10) but I worry about security with any Microsoft product as well as Microsoft’s commitment to the wrapper (they abandoned .AVI as has been mentioned).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Vince is dead on when he talks about charging your clients for project archives. Back in the dark ages before electric lights, people shot on tape. Those field tapes, together with an EDL were the backup for the project and the master tape that was made was the final product. One could reassemble one’s work (to a certain degree) and re-edit the result from those tapes.

We didn’t let a master out of the house unless the client had paid in full, and at that time we’d ship master, field tapes and an EDL disk to the client for their intellectual amusement.

If they wanted us to keep the materials, we’d charge them for storage. We had a pretty small database of videotapes to manage as a result.

Today is the Modern Era, with clients shooting on P2 and XDCam and other “tapeless” formats. They’re totally awesome, unless we cannot read them, then we’re sad.

I’ve a theory that relates to the former way of doing things that goes like this:

I RAID 5 stripe my drives. I ingest all material. I create an edit and I output that edit in a manner that pleases my client, be it HDV (Yuck!), Blu-Ray, regular DVD, HDCam, DVCPro-HD, Varicam or semaphore messages (not serious about the last bit). I give the client all P2 media back. “Here Ya’ go, they’re all yours.” Now, if that client wants to save that material, he or she will keep the P2 cards just as they are and go out and purchase new ones. The client can have the finished master (or all of the finished product) in whatever form he or she wants as long as payment is made in full.

I will back up my Premiere Project.

But it’s not my responsibility to keep the client from destroying all media they brought in.

Just this last weekend, I threw out a 1″ Master tape that I have had for — well too long. Client is long gone. I don’t work in that city any more. Everyone was happy with what I did and they may actually remember what a great job I did. But the client never picked up the master. I hung onto it because I wanted some of the material for a demo reel. I wrote a letter to the client. No response. I called. I sent out carrier pigeons.

Not my responsibility and I cannot charge the client for storage any more.

So if you’re considering backing up material for your own demo reel, go ahead. Everything else ought to be your client’s responsibility and that should be absolutely crystal clear from the start.

Maybe in San Francisco clients like for editors to store their stuff. But I’ll bet Sen Franciscan editors and edit facilities know how to charge them for that service as well as the edit (just a hunch).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Jeff’s comments are well taken but here is what I know about GPU-driven “realtime” video:

I have experience editing on an HP Z800 with a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 OpenGL graphics accelerator card. The HP workstation is a screamer; it has a 2.93 GHz dual quad-core Intel® Xeon® processor. It had 12G of system RAM. So you have high performance in processing and also in the GPU. It was hooked up to a RAID array.

The system would reliably play back four to six HD video streams at once, but you still had to render if you intended on playing back to any tape format or you intended to send any file footage anywhere. This is because you would get dropped frames randomly — but mostly everything played back just fine, but that one DVE move would sometimes catch when it started, get sticky in the middle or catch when it ended. Text animation on the screen was not reliable.

Of course, on a system like that, render times are a lot shorter. Rendering color correction on an HD clip took about 5 seconds for a 10-second clip. You could reliably hit your [Enter] key to initiate a render when you were mulling over which effect to add or reviewing the script to make sure you had every shot in you wanted. Waiting time was pretty much a non-issue.

You definitely want to buy a top-of-the-line processor, as it’s used in rendering as well. And remember: You can always upgrade your GPU, assuming the slots don’t change that much.

Although…

If your current system is working just fine, why not wait until Adobe releases CS5 so that you have a firm handle on exactly which GPUs are supported.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

There is a way to stretch 4×3 to 16×9 without as much stretching but it’s through a Terranex transcoder and those things run into money.

I would resize things a bit and hope for the best, but stretching, other than through a Terranex converter (and even through the converter) is almost always strange-looking.

But if you are at home, watching on an HD television, you’ll see a stretch all the time whenever you look at 4×3 material if the television has been set to stretch the image.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You can recalibrate “within the application,” using Adobe’s calibration. That way what you see as you are capturing will show a little closer to reality in the video world — but this is a coarse adjustment.

In Premiere Pro, pull down Preferences>General and adjust User Interface Brightness as appropriate. As I’m using 1.5, I’m sure that’s pretty coarse but later versions of Adobe’s applications may have improvements to monitor calibration that were added to Photoshop, which does allow you to set up your monitor within Photoshop to match output (press, video, computer) so that what you see is closer to what you will get.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

With respect to non-automated keyframe addition:

I use two techniques to keep things easy and light:

I will happily do a “dip” in audio levels using four keyframes around the dip, with audio levels set as the audio begins and then dipped to where audio should be for a dip into narration or actuality audio, then back up at the end. I don’t regard four keyframes all that hard to manage.

But if things are getting complex — especially for music tracks where there is no video connected to the track, I’m quite happy to razor blade the audio, apply a volume control and set volume and then do an audio crossfade from one to the other. Sure, I have audio cuts all over the piece, but those crossfades give me exactly the right level transitions as I need them without any keyframing of the audio.

Where I have video connected to audio, I tend to use keyframes, but one can unlink audio and video, add a cut with a razor blade, relink or make the three (or four) audio/video tracks into a Group and keep working.

Keeps me off the faders.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

If you are looking for an old version of Quicktime, you can find it here.

For Quicktime Pro owners: Be sure you save your Quicktime Pro registration number before you roll back your version so that you can apply the registration to the earlier version and not have to buy Quicktime Pro again.

I would not have been so eager to upgrade to Windows 7 on my computer if it were used for actual production or post-production work.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?