[Mike Jackson]

That’s definitely a sticky situation. I have a few thoughts, but nothing game-changing:

– I’d definitely file a feature request with Adobe to add an option to write XMP IDs when importing XMLs. A LOT of editors could use that.

– If your project isn’t too insanely huge, the duplicate media is a pain, but not a show-stopper (if you have a lot of RAM). In my experience, having lots of long sequences was more of a memory and performance hog than lots of media. And as Andrew says, the most recent version of Premiere may handle this issue better.

– Beware of merged clips. I haven’t tried to import them from FCP via XML since the first version of CC, so they may work better now… but in the past, they were buggy as hell and basically failed in horrible ways. So definitely double-check them before you do any work, to ensure they transferred correctly.

[Mike Jackson]

Well, it’s only now, with two big projects done, that the possible culprit (many sequences) has become clear.

That said, with the accumulation of producer notes, network notes, etc. etc, it leads to a lot of versions, and the constant need to refer (or revert back) to them at a moment’s notice. Other people may like to work differently, but for myself, I’d rather pay the ‘load time tax’ once at the start of my work day, and then be able to move nimbly between sequences for the rest of the day. Alternative methods, requiring me to stop and load other sequences repeatedly during the day, just slow me down while I’m ‘in the zone’. It’s a totally valid way to work though, and might be the best option for some people.

But all THAT said, the instant we lock picture I now blow out all the old sequences ; )

[Mike Jackson]

I beg to differ (and I feel weird doing it – Long time reader of your posts here at the Cow, even if I don’t post often). As soon as you start color-correcting and throwing effects on the footage, the aquisition codec becomes much less important. It becomes all about the color space in which the calculations are done, and the quality of the codec it’s exported to.

Simple example – If I take an 8-bit image and then transcode it to an 8-bit, 10-bit or whatever format, the image will essentially stay the same.

If I add a severe gaussian blur and stay in a lower-quality pipeline, there will be banding in the image.

If I render in maximum color depth but export to a low quality codec, there will still be banding.

If I render in maximum color depth and export to DPX or ProRes444, there will be NO banding.

So it really all depends on how far he’s pushing the image with his filters. If it’s a lot, you ARE likely to see a difference between the results of the two codecs.

[Mike Jackson]

I’ve experienced this same issue on both a feature and the very late stages of a pilot I just finished – Premiere keeps working away at something mysterious after all footage is loaded, peak files generated, etc.

In the final stages of the feature, wait times could be up to 15 minutes before I could get cutting. What was interesting was that the amount of footage (4Tb) barely increased after the first couple of weeks, but the load times kept going up. Similarly, it was only at the very end of the pilot that I started noticing the ‘start-up lag’. Again, no new footage had been added to the project.

So what changed in both projects and slowed them down? The only thing I can think of is THE NUMBER OF SEQUENCES. By the end of both of these projects I had many many versions of each sequence. I’ve never been able to get ths confirmed by anyone at Adobe, but my personal theory is that Premiere has to think about all your sequences before it’s ready to go. When I’ve deleted large numbers of sequences from my projects, the load time has definitely improved.

I also concur with the recommendation to transcode 4k H264. We had a ton of 4k GoPro drone footage in both shows, and it was just too sluggish to work with efficiently.

[Mike Jackson]

I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate here and actually say the opposite from Shane: Do ProResHQ. What Shane says is absolutely true if all you’re doing is transcoding your original footage… But depending on how much you did with your color / beauty filters, you might actually benefit from the ’10-bit’ export.

Now this assumes that you also toggle ‘render at maximum depth’, but it should significantly reduce any banding or artifacting that may be otherwise introduced by your filters.

In the end, it all comes down to how hard you pushed your footage. If you didn’t do much, stick with the 8-bit pipeline and save the file space. On the other hand, hard drives are cheap. On the other other hand, if your final delivery format is .mp4, the added color fidelity of ProRes(HQ) is going to get lost again anyway.

[Mike Jackson]

Well, it’s POSSIBLE, but I found the results to be inconsistent. Premiere checks to see if it already has a piece of media in the project based on a number of criteria – I got a list from the kind folks at Adobe while we were working on the feature, and it’s attached below. But as I say, somtimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. And we were working off of duplicate drives with near-duplicate projects.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it improves in a future release, but as of right now, as far as I’m aware, the metadata trick is the only way to guarantee success.

Here’s that duplicate criteria list:

Here are some of the criteria used to determine if we have a duplicate media item:

Media start time

Title

Path

Media boundaries (in and out points)

Clip name

Audio channel mapping and clip gain if the clip contains audio

PAR, frame rate, inverted alpha if the clip contains video

Duration

Sync offset

Metadata modification state

and that’s not a complete list. We also look at internal project structures that you might not be able to inspect via the UI.

[Mike Jackson]

I just want to add that when moving clips around the timeline in Premiere, holding down shift lets you slide the audio up and down between different tracks, without changing what track your video is on. Instantly solves the clip-collision issue in probably 75% of cases.

[Mike Jackson]

I just finished up a feature and we did a lot of this, with the director and assistant editor both handing me bins and sequences that I would import.

You can use the Media Browser to dig into other project files, which I love. Just click on them and select the sequences and/or bins you want, and choose ‘import’.

The tricky part is avoiding media duplication. We had the same system, with the three of us working off duplicate media drives. Sometimes when we imported a sequence it would recognize that the clips it linked to were already in the project, sometimes it didn’t, and we’d start to bloat up with duplicates.

There’s a solve, but you have to implement it from the start: In Preferences: Media, you can check ‘Write XMP ID to files on import’. This will tag each piece of media with a unique ID, which Premiere can keep track of. Then it will always recognize duplicate clips.

Keep in mind though, that this is metadata written into the media files themselves. So one person (probably you) needs to import all the media into Premiere, and THEN copy all the media onto the other drive and hand it off to the editor. Then you’ll both be working off the tagged files and everything should be smooth sailing.

[Mike Jackson]

Walter’s right, the 8Gb of RAM is probably your problem. Adobe lists it as the ‘minimum’, but you really need at least 16 gigs for smooth performance.

A couple of other things that might be relevent:

You don’t list a Blackmagic or Kona card on your system, but if you do have one, old drivers might adversly affect performance.

You don’t list the exact version of Premiere you’re using, but it was only when I updated to CC 2014 (and upgraded my RAM) that everything started working smoothly on my own system. Before that, I had all the same problems you describe.

[Mike Jackson]

You made a few assumptions about my system here David, and kind of missed my point ; )

I actually have a powerful NVIDIA card in my system (which I use to great effect for ray-traced rendering in After Effects). And I’m well aware that more RAM would be beneficial, but RAM for my vintage of MacPro is now hard to find and expensive.

At any rate: My key point about RED footage is that although Premiere CAN play it back (with a beefy enough system, usually at 1/2 or 1/4 res), that doesn’t mean that’s going to make for your best workflow. Any codec with less overhead and smaller file sizes is going to deliver more streams simultaneously, with better overall performance. Personally I (and many others) believe that the time spent transcoding RED to ProRes is well worth it, because the editing will then go faster and smoother (and be at full resolution).

All that said, I love that any time I want to go back and look at the source R3Ds, Premiere lets me do that quickly and easily.