Mike Jackson
Forum Replies Created
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I’d definitely disagree with earlier concerns about Premiere’s robustness. I just finished cutting a dramatic feature with CC 2014, on a relatively old MacPro system, and it handled everything I threw at it. I think it actually crashed less frequently than FCP7 ever did.
I’ve cut a lot of docs over the years, and I think one of the most important questions, which hasn’t been raised, is what footage formats will you be dealing with? If you’ll be dealing with a lot of cameras, in a lot of different formats (as is so often the case with docs), Premiere is a real powerhouse.
And the thing about FCPX’s tagging and metadata systems is they’re (obviously) entirely ‘word’ oriented. They’re only as good as the work you put into organizing and labelling everything. If that’s your work process, fantastic. On the flip side, I tend to be a very visually oriented editor: Thinking up search terms isn’t how I find the next shot or that perfect piece of B-Roll. I do it by scanning footage for something that LOOKS right. Both programs have a hover-scrub function, and I find for my own process, THAT’S the real time-saver.
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I suspect it’s going to all come down to the power of your computer and the speed of your media storage. Tricked-out machine with tons of RAM and fast drives, you’ll probably be okay. Older or lower-speced machine might choke.
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I’m just about finished cutting a feature with Premiere CC 2014, and (as others here have said) my experience has been excellent… but a a little different.
We shot 4k on the RED, but are finishing at HD. Some advantages of this have been mentioned already (reframing chief among them), but what hasn’t is that in general, 4k RED footage looks a little soft at full-res. Down-rezed to HD, it always looks sharp and clean.
As for cutting the R3Ds, I find that it technically works, but never well enough for the way I like to cut. Your system needs to be very powerful, or you need to work at 1/4 or 1/8 resolution. I’m not fond of this, as its easy to miss small details in the background that can ruin a take, like an extra pulling a face or looking right down the barrel.
So we transcoded everything to HD PreRes files, and we’ll link back to the 4k R3Ds for the online. Performance is MUCH better, files are smaller, and everyhting worked very smoothly, even on my old MacPro with 16Gb RAM.
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I’ve been cutting a dramatic feature on Premiere the last few months, and I’ve been very happy with it. Like any program it has its quirks and bugs, but really no more than I used to run into with FCP 7. They hang me up at first, but once you figure out the work-arounds, they stop being a problem.
Our movie was shot on the RED Dragon, and although Adobe encourages people to use the RAW files, performance is just not good enough for heavy editing – Cutting at 1/4 rez isn’t really a good option, imho. So we transcoded everything to ProRes for our offline, and we’ll switch back to the RED files when we lock picture.
We also have some 4k GoPro stuff, and I always lose audio sync after playing back more than a couple seconds of it (unless I force a render). So yeah – technically Premiere can play anything, but some codecs are worth transcoding.
I’m cutting on a 2008 MacPro with 16Gb RAM, and I’ve actually been playing all the footage (3.5Tb worth!) off a single drive with an eSATA connector and performance has been great.
All that said, the project usually takes 10-12 minutes to open. That’s about twice as long as a similar-sized FCP project would take. And once its done loading and indexing, it keeps doing SOMETHING. I don’t know what, but until it finishes this final step, all functionality is terrible (like taking a long time to switch sequences). I have a program that shows my processor activity at all times (iStat), so I basically just wait for all my processors to flatline. Once they do, Premiere wakes up, and performs perfectly from then on.
But do make sure you’ve set it to use Mercury Playback, with whichever setting suits your graphics card (likely OpenCL).
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The advice you got above is solid. But the basic reason you’re getting banding is that you’re exporting to codecs with lower color space (10-bit 422 specifically, going down from your 32-bit RGB original). That introduces banding.
You don’t see the banding during Premiere playback, because it’s playing your original file, in all its 32-bit glory. It doesn’t re-compress it until export.
Adding the subtle grain to create ‘dithering’ is your safest bet, since almost no commercial broadcasting / web delivery formats support anything higher than 10-bit color (and most are 8-bit). So even a ProRes 444 export is going to get banding by the final stage of delivery.
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Your response seems to assume that it is somehow unreasonable to expect a hardware manufacturer to support backward-compatibility in their products, specifically to maintain support of one of the most popular (AND still HEAVILY in use) pieces of software it was designed to work with.
I absolutely reject this premise. Many other hardware manufacturers continue support for older software. Blackmagic could too, and they’re losing me as a customer because they chose not to.
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Maybe I’m misreading this, but are you trying to make a Chroma Key?
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Alternatively, use Dynamic Link and turn your pixel art into an After Effects composition. If you scale up the image in After Effects, with the quality toggle for the layer set to ‘low’ (and don’t let the renderer override it), AE should scale the image up and keep it ‘chunky’.
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Sorry to hear about your health problems and surgery. Hope things are improving now!
Unfortunately the Media Browser was the only thing I could suggest. Everything else would be kind of random, like trashing preferences or repairing disc permissions. Hopefully someone here with more intimate knowledge of the software can suggest something…?
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What Declan says ; )
As best I can tell, Canon’s software does something that smooths out the macro-blocking, without losing fine detail. Their ‘secret sauce’ for how they INTERPRET the H264 data is better than anyone else’s. Which makes sense, since they built the cameras and know EXACTLY what’s going on under the hood when the files are encoded.