[Nick Lovell]

I’d be very curious to hear the results of your tests!

Just discovered this little trick in Premiere recently. I’m one of the many trying out Premiere and Avid in response to FCPX, and up until now I’ve been gnashing my teeth with Premiere because preview times, and preview performance, have been very disappointing compared to FCP. The same ProRes clip in FCP played flawlessly, in Premiere it couldn’t handle it. I was like, “this is supposed to be FASTER than FCP? What gives?!” When I figured how to change the preview codec to ProRes, though, it was a lot better.

For whatever reason, the first time I tried it, I dragged the footage to the “New Item” button in the Project pane. The preview defaulted to MPEG I-frame only… Now, I just tried it again and it changed to ProRes… Go figure.

[Nick Lovell]

Hey, all! Another FCP guy considering jumping ship here!

I like the interface quite a bit, but I’m having some issues with basic play and editing speed.

I’m trying out a small project with files from a 5DMkII. Thus far, native files play the best and the smoothest. Bringing in my old friend ProRes makes for extremely slow rendering times, even compared to H.264!

However, there’s still a lag when I “J K L” around in a clip on the native fooage. This is very similar to what happens in FCP when I’m using H.264 without an intermediate/editing codec… It’s clear that the machine is working hard to play the H.264, and can’t keep up with my going back and forth. This is on a Mac Pro 2.4 Quad Core, 8GB RAM.

Now, later in the evening I tried installing a trial of Cineform on an old MacBook Pro. I know that this is a bit of apples-and-oranges here, but I don’t have admin privileges on the tower, so…

Anyway, I installed all the Cineform Neo stuff, got the plug-ins setup for Premiere. Converted a file to Cineform (I used the “High,” middle-of-the-road quality setting) brought it into Premiere. It was a jerky mess… Couldn’t play the file smoothly, kept stuttering. Tried different playback and resolution settings (1/4, 1/2, full), all had the same problem.

Just to see if it was an issue with the older laptop, I converted the same clip to ProRes, brought it into FCP and it played beautifully, and instantly responded to my commands.

Any ideas on a solution? I know that my MBP is a little long in the tooth, but in this little informal test, FCP kinda spanked Premiere as far as performance, which is the exact opposite of what I was expecting.

Let me know your thoughts! Thanks!

[Nick Lovell]

Hey there! Which camera are you using?

Here’s another option that I’ve done a few times, it involves some extra production setup, though.

If you have the option of capturing to the Kona live on set from an output on the camera that’s offering an output closer to the data the censor is capturing before it gets converted to HDV, you can improve the fidelity of your green screen.

Example – shooting using a Sony V1U, we ran the HDMI to an AJA Io. We did the same thing coming out of an EX-1 using HD-SDI. The video coming out of these cameras were 1920×1080 (so you have more resolution than the native 1440×1080 of HDV), and the chroma subsampling is 4:2:2 (so you have more color information than either HDV or XDCAM-EX).

The difference is subtle but noticeable. It’s no substitute for lighting the green screen right, of course, and like I said, this might be more trouble than you’re wanting to go through on set. You’ll also need to make sure that you have a hard drive fast enough to maintain the data rate over that period of time.

One last note, even without this setup, I’ve been very happy with using Primatte Keyer Pro in FCP. Not sure if you have the option, but that plug in is ten times better than the built-in FCP chroma key tools.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Nick Lovell]

Thanks so much for your response!

The video is true 23.98… Looking at the information in the format tab, here’s what it is:

Vid Rate: 23.98 fps
Frame Size: 1440 x 1080
Compressor: Apple ProRes 422
Pixel Aspect: HD (1440×1080)
Field Dominance: None
Audio: 1 Stereo
Aud Rate: 48.0 KHz
Aud Format: 16-bit Integer

I believe those are the only items that would have an effect on the Kona’s ability to play it. Anything here that might indicate why it’s not liking it, or any other helpful information about the footage I could provide, just let me know.

Thanks!

Nick

[Nick Lovell]

Here’s the article you mention:

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1957?viewlocale=en_US

Great info! Thanks, Wayne!!!

[Nick Lovell]

I agree, helpful info! Thanks for asking and keeping the thread alive, David!

[Nick Lovell]

Trashed the preference files, that did the trick!

Thanks, Jeremy!

[Nick Lovell]

Several times now… I power down at the end of each day.

[Nick Lovell]

Was hoping to avoid that, but if there’s a good chance it would work it might be worth saving the extra 2-3 minutes FCP takes to start up now, LOL.

[Nick Lovell]

That’s the trick… It now happens every time I open Final Cut, even when Final Cut is NOT loading that project. “Open last project on open” is off.