[Mike Smith]

Hi Ryan,

The artifacts you’re seeing relate to a bug in Premiere CS5.5 and the way it deals with the DNxHD codec above 24bit color depth.

The easiest solution for your situation is probably to have Premiere export picture with 24bit depth rather than 48bit, etc. This takes away the benefit of a 10bit per channel codec like DNxHD, but its the quickest fix.

The other solutions are to re-encode your DNxHD source material to something else or upgrade to CS6, which seemingly fixed this issue.

-mike

[Mike Smith]

Hi Michael

I agree this does sound strange!

To be clear, the stuttering is often subtle with only an occasional frame drop, like watching a hulu stream, but its nowhere near as reliable as watching the same media under FCP.

Where is the status indicator for how many frames drop, etc?

Specs-wise, my primary setup is a custom Windows 7 64bit machine:
Gigabyte Tech Z68 Logic Board
i7 2600K Quad Core CPU at 3.4GHz
8 GB RAM
GTX 550 Ti Display Card
Blackmagic Intensity
Areca RAID card that sustains 270MB/sec

I’ve run into the same problems on an i7 Quad laptop with 8GB of RAM, a boot-camped Mac Pro with a GTX 285 and 8GB of RAM, etc.

I almost always run with the MPE in Software-only mode, running the MPE in hardware mode has no effect on the reliability of playback.

The source media is generally AVCHD, ProRes, DNxHD or Cineform with previews rendered to AVCHD or Cineform.

-mike

[Mike Smith]

Thanks for the suggestion, Alex.

Clip properties is the first place I looked when I started to acquaint myself with Premiere Pro. Unfortunately, if the clip is offline, then there is no file path info. And when the project is an imported FCP XML, the media is ALWAYS offline.

I tend to organize my own projects rather carefully, but the file path function was important when opening up any that landed in my lap that I had not started.

I’m actually quite amazed that “last known location” has not made an appearance in Premiere Pro, even InDesign and their other print-oriented apps, keep a record of where linked files were last located.

-mike

[Mike Smith]

Alex, is there a way to see the “last known path” when reconnecting a clip?

One thing I really miss about FCP is that it showed you the last location of a missing file right in the reconnect window.

-mike

[Mike Smith]

To answer your question about why we would change platforms when going to Premiere:

The rest of our studio pipeline for 3d, comp, etc was already Windows based, Final Cut was the sole Mac-only tool we were using. And we had held off upgrading the Mac hardware for some time leading up to the FCPX release.

Adobe sealed the deal with their switch offer, we could add an entire new Production Premium seat on an extra Win7 system for less than the cost of buying premiere & a photoshop upgrade ala carte and retrofitting the mac system with a cuda-capable nvidia card. So now we have a legacy Final Cut system that is entirely separate from the new Premiere editing rig.

[Mike Smith]

I’ve also had an issue with dynamic linking, but I was not able to resolve it:

I selected clip A, made an AE comp, saved it and it was fine.

I selected clip B, also made an AE comp. But AE or Premiere got confused after that.

When I went back to Premiere, even though both comps had different names for their .aep files and their compositions, both files read in Premire Pro as being the comp for clip A.

To be clear: both .aep files for comp A and comp B, even after I directly re-imported them into premiere, both read as comp A.

Ultimately, I had to just render the clips out of AE as the DL function refused to let me use comp B.

-mike