[Mike Molenda]

I hear you can do one of those with an adjustment layer. All you have to do is put a hold keyframe on the opacity so it goes from 100 to zero over the span of one frame.

[Mike Molenda]

Before I submit a feature request, I’m actually waiting to get home and test this stuff out in CS6, which is installed on my home/freelance system, not my work system.

What version of Premiere are you on? Do you know if they’ve addressed this issue at all in CS6?

I’m kicking myself right now for not having tried deleting clips from my bins in CS6 already. It’s one of the first things I tested in a trial of Media Composer 6, which has the slightly more elegant solution of replacing the clips with offline media in the timeline. Nowhere near as good as the way FCP7 handled clip connections, though!

This issue isn’t a show-stopper, it just requires vigilance and organization. And getting used to a different method of asset management (if you’re coming from FCP). In the FCP system, a master clip in the bin and a clip in the timeline are each dependent on only the link to the source media. You essentially create a new clip every time you cut a master clip into the timeline. In Premiere, your clip in the timeline is dependent on the master clip in the bin, which is linked to the media file. A second-hand link.

It’s a subtle difference, and very difficult to articulate. I doubt it will get fixed in the CS6 cycle since it requires a pretty fundamental rethinking of how clips are handled, but I’d love to see it addressed nonetheless!

[Mike Molenda]

The 1,1 is a lovely little machine, isn’t it? I’ve even got the original display still working on mine. It will be a sad day when I finally have to put it out to pasture.

Ben, I believe I gave you some advice about altering the OpenCL txt file on another thread? I take it you’ve had no luck? What kind of work do you do? Is GPU acceleration absolutely essential for you? Just because your card doesn’t support hardware acceleration, does NOT mean that Premiere won’t work with it, or even that you can’t edit quite smoothly with software playback alone.

To answer your question directly, the list of officially supported GPUs for hardware acceleration in Premiere can be found here: https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html

For Mac, the only supported cards for Premiere GPU acceleration are the GeForce GTX 285, Quadro 4000, Quadro FX 4800, Radeon HD 6750M, and Radeon 6770M. None of these are supported in the Mac Pro 1,1.

GPU acceleration on the 1,1 is always going to require some kind of hacking, flashing, or other such trickery.

[Mike Molenda]

I was being facetious, but if I ever need to search for subterranean oil and natural gas reserves with a MacBook Pro, I will keep the Sonnet box in mind. I am envisioning a Mad-Max-type scenario here.

This is an interesting read though, amazing the uses this technology is being put to. And here we all are b*tching because we’re getting choppy H.264 playback on our timelines…

[Mike Molenda]

Here is the official SpeedGrade help documentation, if you’re interested:
https://helpx.adobe.com/content/help/en/speedgrade/topics.html

[Mike Molenda]

I think one of the great things Apple did with Color, and is missing from SG, is the ease of roundtripping.

You hit “Send to Color” and an XML was generated for you, brought into Color, and connected to your original media. Start your grading right away, no fuss, no muss. When you were done grading, you rendered, hit “Send to Final Cut Pro,” and your sequence was magically right back in Final Cut, with your correction applied. If nothing went wrong during the process, that is.

Even though Color was kind of a leap out of the comfort zone for FCS users, it never felt like Apple was sending you too far out into the woods. Sending an EDL to SpeedGrade feels a whole lot like the conform process in Resolve, and I feel like that’s going to be a turnoff for a lot of new users. But people seem to be flocking to Resolve Lite, so what do I know?

I’ve done a decent amount of work in Color, and a bit in Resolve Lite. So far there is nothing too unusual about the way SpeedGrade works in comparison to these applications. From a colorist’s perspective, everything either makes sense, or you can at least understand the thought process behind it.

Most of the work I do ends up distributed over the web, so the lack of broadcast monitoring isn’t a huge deal-breaker for me. If I need a calibrated monitor, it’s usually in a situation where it makes sense to pay for use of someone’s grading suite for a day or two (or exchange an in-kind favor). But I can see how this is going to limit SpeedGrade’s day-to-day usability for a whole lot of people, especially given the limited number of I/O devices it can talk to.

[Mike Molenda]

I’ve been trying to find a good way to articulate Ryan’s problem in a feature request because this does get annoying fast.

Basically, when you import an XML, or even a sequence from another Premiere project, it creates new master clips for every clip used in the imported sequence. It does not recognize that you may already have a master clip that you’re using in another sequence that is referring to the same media.

So if you want to keep both sequences in your project, you need to keep both master clips. If you delete a master clip from your bin, it will not stay in the sequence(s) that refer to it, it will get cut out, leaving a big steaming crater where it once was. Even if the sequence is not currently open. This is one of the things I loved about FCP7. You could delete every single one of your master clips and your sequence would be totally unaffected. You could even recreate the master clips by dragging them from your sequence to the bin.

So you’ve got to stash your duplicated clips away somewhere each time you import a sequence. It’s not too bad with careful organization, but God help you if you’re frequently sharing sequences back and forth with other editors/apps. If you’re exchanging the entire project each time, it’s going to grow exponentially!

As far as I know, there’s no easy solution to this. I try to be careful and import/export only sequences, not entire projects, and take the time to figure out if there are duplicates created that I don’t need, and remove them before tossing the duplicates into a bin. This is not always possible or feasible, however.

For longer-term projects, I also make sure to continually create archive versions of my project, taking care to always include the date in my project file and sequence names. That way I can periodically go through the current project file and delete old versions of the cut and the associated outdated clips.

Haven’t looked into this problem in CS6. I know they made some improvements to how media is managed in the bins. Maybe this is one of the changes? If not, won’t you all join me in submitting a feature request?

[Mike Molenda]

Man I bet you can get some real snappy timeline scrubbing out of those things. Think they will connect to my laptop via Thunderbolt? 🙂

[Mike Molenda]

I’ve been keyframing my own “flash frame” transitions (mimicking the excellent Too Much Too Soon plugin for FCP) for a while now.

Adjustment layers will be a huge timesaver for things this, and open the door for custom DIY transitions. And you can set the ease in/out! Definitely not as elegant as drag-n-drop transitions, but a neat tip nonetheless. Thanks!

[Mike Molenda]

Are you going to be providing/selling DVDs of this play to the proud parents?

I used to get a lot of this kind of work (school plays, dance recitals) outsourced to me by a friend who would shoot a dozen or so of them every May and then get overwhelmed by the editing.

Here’s what we did on the DVDs:

The main feature was a straight multicam edit of the show with a title and a credit roll of all the kids’ names at the end. My advice here: make sure you get each kid close up on camera at least once! People don’t buy these things for the high drama, they buy them to have some footage of their kid on stage that they can send to Jaja and Busha.

Then we’d have a “Special Features” item on the DVD menu that would take you to a ten-minute or so montage of “behind-the-scenes” footage set to music. Again, try to get each kid on camera!

These types of things have to be literally all over YouTube, if you’re looking for examples you can watch.

Hope this helps.