[Mark Palmos]

[Alex Udell] “I never did get to see the video you did describing the track patching . You still have that around?

What about you? What/How are you doing these days?”

Hi there mate,
I can have a lookie see later today, I have bad bronchitis at the moment, been up since 4am coughing, so will try get some sleep in a while, but will send you a link if its still there. It isnt a fully developed thought though… i seem to remember there being some oversights in my suggestion, but i will send it anyway.

I recently told my biggest clients that I no longer wanted to polish their turds, but did want more work from them. I got their attention. Basically I realised I was way burned out on trying to make yet another very sexy pitch or credentials video for this agency, but really wanted to do stuff involving filming people, and editing of stuff that is more about content than smoke and mirrors whizz bang… so I am almost 100percent doing video podcasts. I bought a prompter, some portable lights, traded my car in for an estate, and bang around London and the south east doing work I much prefer. It was a risky move, but im very glad i did it!

catcha later,
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

[Tim Kolb] “…but simple aggregation of features like this creates what we have currently…in/out for some functions, work area for others, multiple select for others…insert/copy/extract/cut/copy/duplicate/track focus/track target…lots of options I guess…

…no disrespect or “shot” intended in my post, cheap or otherwise”

Hi Tim,
After discreet edit, I moved to CS2 and then CS3 before FCS2, so I am not simply an fcp user wanting things to be familiar…

What I would propose is PP cuts/copies/deletes what was selected last to be cut/copied/deleted – that OR as with FCP, the common command will work on IO points unless clips have been click selected, they would then take priority. For me the speed advantage of unifying these would far overweigh the uber-rare occasion I would want to have clips click-seleted while simultaneously wanting to delete/cut/copy an IO range.

no probs on the perceived shot,
cheers, Mark

[Mark Palmos]

[Tim Kolb] “Yes…some of us did choose Premiere Pro back when FCP was still an actual option… We don’t wish the application to become FCP.”

Hi Tim,

IMO that’s a bit of a cheap shot. I have heard that comment many times, and almost always by people who were used to working on Avid… its a way to silence the comments by undermining them.

I sincerely hope that Premiere Pro gets it’s act together regarding these basic aspects of editing. We talk about “intuition” and of course what we mean is that something behaves as we would expect, which is generally based on past experience.

Long before NLEditing, ctrl-c was a command to copy. It seems bizarre to me that an editing programme does not have a command to copy a range marked by IO points. Similarly, to delete. There is no command in PP to delete an area between IO points… staggering, I know, but true.

I wonder if there ever was an evaluation of the cut commands in PP, that when selecting clips by mouse you choose ctrl-x and if selecting by IO range you use lift or extract. I would be very surprised if there is a solid explanation as to why it is the way it is at the moment. Surely if you are cutting pasting copying deleting, you do that to achieve the same purpose regardless of the way you select the clips. Ive never heard a rationalisation that even comes close to justifying the current way of having different commands for performing the same function. If you know one, I would love to hear it.

A lot of my editing is basic cut copy paste delete, and this is why these two issues, track targetting and editing commands really drive me nuts.

Thanks for the interesting chat, cheers, Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

Hi John,

Youre right about shouting at the adobe guys, I do think however that they are still influenced by some of the (horribly clunky and outdated) avid paradigms.

As for osx and finder, dont get me started… one of the major advantages of windows IMO is the superior explorer, and the WAY superior dialogue boxes. In (most) windows programmes (not adobe premiere pro!) you get the fully fledged windows dialogue box to open, save, save as, export. This is a dream compared to osx… for these reasons

1/ if you were tooling around deep in your E:/year/client/project/HD clips/from camera/ folder, you can copy the path, and paste it to any of these file open/save/render/etc requesters, and you go whammo directly to the folder, no need to mess about digging and remembering where that thing is…

2/ if you have reason to rename/move/delete/copy/check for file size/sort by file size/etc… the windows requester allows you to do that as if it was a small version of windows explorer. Fantastic functionality! I have NO idea why Premiere Pro instead uses the teenzy, dumbed down little dialogue box which offers nothing other than to make a new folder.

anyhow, there is a LOT to love about PP.

cheers,
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

Hi Andrew,

You will find some frustrations, as there are things which are more intuitive/easier on FCP7, but then there are a lot of things that are better about PP…

My biggest gripes on PP are both basic editing issues.

1/ track selection – tabbing tracks method and function is clumsy and unnecessarily complex for 99% of functions. One click/keyboard command should be enough to target a track

2/ basic editing commands – I DETEST the way Premiere Pro uses different commands for range-selected clips (by IO point) and clips that are selected by clicking on them using your mouse or marquee selecting a bunch of them. I very strongly believe, for example, Ctrl-X (or whatever you choose) should do the same CUT function no matter which method of selection you use. It becomes muddled and convoluted otherwise… and to very little advantage other than rare specialist occasions where you WANT to have some clips selected by mouse click WHILE you cut some other piece of the timeline (I have not once in 20 years of Non-Linear editing, wanted to do this, but it seems there are some influential people who have persuaded the Adobe engineers otherwise). Then there are the odd missing keyboard commands, mark IO, press delete or backspace, NOTHING HAPPENS!! mark IO, press Ctrl-C to copy, NOTHING HAPPENS!!!.

As much as I dislike Apple as a company, what they get more right more often than anyone else is the user experience, making things feel easy and natural to use. It amazes me when people with enormous brain power like the guys that work on Adobe products, come up with brain dead zones like these and offer no justification as to why it remains this way.

Otherwise, I FAR prefer the versatility of using Premiere, especially now I have upgraded from a Mac, and have not once found a file I cannot use in any timeline with NO transcoding necessary… gotta love that, a lot!

Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

heh heh, ja alex, old dogs and new tricks? naaah!
it does amaze me however, that discreet edit* had SO much right, and that a great bit of software like Premiere is missing some basic functions.

I wonder how mr sherwood is doing, I think he’s in the sony camp these days… Hows things with you alex?

cheers mate,
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

LOL, thanks Tom, but I think you have misunderstood me.
I am talking about areas of the timeline marked by In and Out points, and not marquee selected clips.
There’s no copy, delete, ripple delete for an IO selection.
Cheers, Mark

[Mark Palmos]

Apples “brave move” will shape adobe and avid? God, I hope they aren’t so stupid as to dumb down and spoil a perfectly good editing paradigm with some gimmicky magnetic nonsense. I expect they are quietly chuckling at apples massive miscalculation.
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

Mate, don’t throw your computer away, just throw fcpx away, it’s prosumer rubbish! Premiere is doing fantastic things…

[Mark Palmos]

1/ the no drag and drop thing was because I had set premiere.exe and after effects.exe to be run as administrator. I disabled that and drag and drop works fine.

2/ milkiness is vlc player, not the actual render. the render is not milky playing back with windows media player.

user error in both cases, ahem!

Mark.