[Neil Bastin]

“The term Professional is always used out of context my the so called professionals.”

I agree. This thread has once again opened the Pandora’s box of professionalism in our “industry”, whatever that is. Of course, when you ask a categorical question to such a diverse crowd that is to be expected.

So then, what is a professional? What is a professional Editor? Who edits as part of his job, but doesn’t call himself editor per se, but video producer, or director, or audiovisual designer? Is a DV/HDV self-educated, freelance desktop editor a professional? And who calls him/herself an editor just because he/she has Final Cut Studio installed on his/her MacBook Pro and charges a fee for everything he/she cuts? Sometimes there’s no easy answer. No matter how you look at it, the terms “Editing” and “professional” have become way too broad.

On Television today many commercials, Documentaries, Musical Videos, Church Videos and more are all done with Premiere.

In my case, I work in a small production house where every editing suite runs Premiere Pro 2.0 on Windows, two of them with the entire CS3 suite and Blackmagic capture cards. One of the rooms is frequently used for editing a TV show which is recorded “as-live”. For this kind of lengthy but “light” editing jobs and the shorter projects like VNR’s, TV promos and corporate videos, PPro 2.0 works beautifully. It’s trustworthy around here. On the other hand, PPro CS3 by itself is not good enough for editing, but that’s another story.

From what I’ve been told and seen around, seems like the role Premiere Pro plays in the “professional” arena in the US goes down like this:

BROADCASTING – Not for hire or as an employee, unless it’s an oddball promo department or a very small TV station that works with DV/DVCPRO footage.

FILM/TV EDITORS in major post houses in the San Fernando Valley / Santa Barbara / New York – Come on! Do I have to answer? Do they know Premiere PRO even exists? (No, seriously…)

MEDIUM-TO-SMALL PRODUCTION/POST HOUSES (doing anything EXCEPT episodic TV or full-length films) – YES, but not too commonly used. In many cases, FCP or Avid are the main editing suites and Premiere sits there as an alternative cutting/conversion/preview tool for motion graphics/3D/compositing/VFX artists.

SMALL, INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION/POST HOUSES – Not many, but definitely YES. It’s still a relative minority, but many independents have found Premiere Pro suitable for their needs, especially when properly integrated with the rest of the Adobe suite. That’s my case.

EVENT VIDEOGRAPHERS – Of course! The original Premiere crowd is very much alive and well, except for the few that did convert to Final Cut years ago. But amongst those, many have come back for good reason. They should be happy that Premiere Pro by itself is now
a smaller suite of apps, enough for most people.

But frankly, the fact that you won’t find many job postings for “Premiere Pro editors” speaks for itself. And if you actually find one, it would probably be from a Canadian boutique or a very local US TV station. Many employers call the position “editor” but require candidates to have a working knowledge of the other Adobe Suite apps, which makes the ideal candidate a “one-man-band”-type person instead of an editor.

Maybe Premiere is destined to keep the role of a rouge, guerrilla-type tool of choice for risk-taking filmmakers, independent creatives, corporate video editors, event videographers and YouTube enthusiasts. But who knows, that might even change.(outside of L.A. and the Unions, of course)

Neil Bastin

[Neil Bastin]

Just to let everyone know, Matrox has already released Windows CS4 drivers for their RT.X2 cards, and the Axio drivers are just around the corner. They have been open and clear with their customers even before the CS4 release. Why can’t BMD have that kind of customer relations policy?

To a lesser extent, this is like the Vista driver nightmare all over again. I too am worried about this driver situation because of my past experiences. For me, no configuration has worked as stable as the Premiere Pro 2.0 / Decklink 6.7.1 combination (which I still use today to avoid crashes in front of my clients), unlike CS3 which has been sluggish, riddled with bugs and very unstable from day one. But CS3 Software-only, although not perfect, is smooth and stable enough for doing offline cuts.

So my reasoning is this: if CS4 is going to perform as bad as CS3 on my Decklink HD Extreme card, I’m willing to wait as long as necessary for STABILITY (probably the most-needed feature in a professional environment) and sacrifice a couple of months of extra features.

But even so, I agree that BMD could be a bit more supportive of its customers and keep us better informed. Same goes for Adobe. In fact, Adobe is at fault for much more, but that’s another subject.

Neil Bastin

[Neil Bastin]

It wouldn’t surprise me if this had something to do with fixing Vista compatibility or getting ready for Leopard.

[Neil Bastin]

“Just like the native filters that ship with AE, the native filters that ship with Boris products cannot be used in any other host.”

Well, as a matter of fact I use most of my native AE plugins in Premiere Pro 2.0. I just copied the .aex files to a AE Plugins folder in PPro. That led me to think that a dirty trick like that could work with other hosts or plugins, but now I know better. Thanks, Peter.

[Neil Bastin]

I too have this odd problem on one of two systems I assembled. Both have an Intel D975xbx board and HD Extremes. The one having capture problems has two sticks of 1GB DDR533 PNY Optima-brand RAM and a striped set made out of two Hitachi 250GB SATA drives, and the motherboard is a replacement by the dealer (first one never worked, was DOA). Also, I’m not very confident on the Burst Electronics BG-2 blackburst generator, but I have no broadcast meters at hand to test it out. The system that captures PERFECTLY fine has 2 sticks of 1 GB Corsair XMS DDR667 RAM (DDR675 capable) and two Seagate Barracuda SATA drives. Both RAIDs are configured exactly the same, using the Silicon Image controller. I haven’t been able to do proper testing, but three possible scenarios come to mind: A) some kind of bus bottleneck (which theoretically is not supposed to happen) caused somewhere in the motherboard, B) sync generator is not providing a signal strong/stable enough for the Decklink, or C) either the motherboard or the Decklink is faulty in some way.

As soon as I do some testing I’ll post my results here.

Neil

[Neil Bastin]

I’ve been having this same problem on two systems I assembled for the company I work for. Instead of the original Exreme, we put HD Extremes on these systems and they exhibit the exact same problem you describe. I emailed BMD USA support, they called me back, I described the problem thoroughly and a couple of hours later the support rep calls me and says “it’s a bug” that “it’s being investigated”. I’m getting tired of the workarounds and now I find out the new drivers don’t fix this? Uh. I don’t want my bad experiences with Matrox coming back from another company. Too much money on the line…