[Paul Roper]

Hi Chris,

I took a look at FreeForm Pro on mettle.com – it looks like a great plug-in but for this project I’m just “making do” with some more simple tracking for now.

Many thanks,

Paul

[Paul Roper]

Ooo – that looks interesting, Dan. Where did you find those parameter match names?? (Or do you just know EVERYTHING that’s ever been written about expressions?!)

And yes, it’s very much an olde worlde effect – not multi-processor aware and still has the same omissions (lifespan, WITHOUT property mappers, please?!) as it’s always had. But where I’m currently working won’t stump up the few bucks for Particular.

I kinda get the feeling that Adobe have abandoned Particle Playground, assuming anyone serious about particles gets Particular. Any thoughts, Todd?

Thanks for the quick responses!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks Chris.

Maybe FCP X can do it – guess I’ll never know (not going down the FCP X route – not until FCP Y at least!)

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks, Ben for that information.

The only expressions I have in the whole project are some colours linked to each other (I have about 16 shape layers, each with the fill colour linked (via an expression created with the pick-whip) to one colour, so I can change them all at once – but not keyframed).

The only keyframes are a few simple motion keyframes plus some opacity keyframes – no time stretch, freeze frames or time-based expressions.

I think it was probably After Effects just ‘having a moment’.

Thanks for those links to that AE error database – very useful!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks, Kevin, for all that excellent information – very useful!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Tom, that server issue is very interesting – I assumed that if FCP can access large video files with no problems then Premiere would be able to do the same.

Jon, I am always so underwhelmed with Apple’s woefully inadequate offering of video cards – I look enviously at the super-powered offerings to PC users. I currently think that it’s more of a video card issue than a network issue due to the fact that if I’m moving, say, 3 layers around (very slowly), then those 3 frames have been loaded from the network into RAM (or VRAM?) and the network then becomes irrelevant. Probably.

My dream edit system has always been one in which as much video as possible gets loaded from the drives into RAM and all editing is done without further access to the drives. RAM is so cheap these days that having (as I have) 32GB RAM is not extraordinary. Obviously if you’re working on a two hour film, then you’re not going to be able to get all your rushes into RAM, but if you’re cutting a 30 second commercial, it’d be entirely feasible to get your 10 minutes or so of rushes into RAM. Some kind of intelligence built into the edit program could help – if you’ve been working on scene 27 for the past 10 minutes, the program would (in the background) load all the shots/rushes for that scene into RAM. Creating a RAM disk would be a way to manually do this, but an automated method would be far better.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It’s almost certainly not the servers – they happily feed dozens of streams of HD ProRes video to multiple editors. I can easily stream 4 channels of HD ProRes within FCP (eg. when doing a multicam sequence) while the other 20 or so editors are doing something similar, without a dropped frame in sight.

The lag in Premiere happens on a still frame – the video is not playing when I’m trying to move stuff around. It’s a real pain, because it’s a vital part of the workflow, and from what I can tell from one day’s tests, the only area where Premiere falls down (although I haven’t yet created a large project with long sequences – I’ve heard/read that this can cause Premiere to wither and die).

I absolutely adore the After Effects/Premiere interoperability and could probably just about live with Premiere’s laggy multilayer adjustments if I need to. Maybe it’s fixed in CS5.5?

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I just checked and Media 100 still exists – maybe give that another try! Plus there’s always Lightworks which is now open source and FREE (but PC only). So the question isn’t quite as ‘Avid or Premiere’ as you might think. Not that I’ve ever used either Media 100 or Lightworks. My early days were using Quantel kit. When will someone look at that old Quantel interface and learn that editing with a pen/tablet can be twice as fast if you register what the pen’s doing while it’s not in contact with the tablet? Combining the incredibly responsive Quantel gestural control with something like FCP or Premiere would be fantastic.

I’m just rambling now.

Back on topic(ish) – if you buy yourself a brand new multi-processor Mac to run FCP7, don’t expect it to be much faster – FCP7 is based on 18th Century steam technology and all but one of your expensive processors will just be sitting there doing nothing while you wait patiently for stuff to render. If you open up your Mac while it’s rendering a complex colour grade, you’ll actually see little Northern blokes with flat caps and whippets running around shovelling coal into your processor, while a couple of shire horses wait patiently on your graphics card.

The holy grail of Final Cut would have been if Apple kept the program exactly the same, but made it 64-bit/multiprocessor aware to speed it all up. I pointlessly hope that Apple might one day bring out FCP 8 which will be exactly this.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

The drag lag which Tom’s link refers to is when dragging clips in the timeline – this is not a problem for me, it’s when I try to move/scale stuff in the program window. Even when working at half res, it’s unbelievably slow.

Full system specs:

The array is a room full of very fast servers connected via fibrechannel, serving about 20 editors using FCP with no problems.

Mac OS 10.6.4 – could my OS not being bang-up-to-date mean I’m running antiquated drivers?

Premiere Pro 5.0.4 (CS5) – I just ran the Adobe Updater and everything’s up to date.

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
Memory: 32 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5770

[Paul Roper]

Dealers’ stocks of FCP7 are quickly running out (apparently) so if you want to keep your existing workflow but update to FCP7, you’d better be quick about it. Having said that, you could use FCP5 or 7 all day long and maybe only notice one or two differences. FCP 7 (to me) feels like it should be called FCP5.5.

I am a long time FCP user, experimenting with Premiere, not Avid, solely because I already own Premiere.

There’s been a lot of panic about Apple dropping FCP in favour of iMovie Pro (FCP X) but look at it this way – if you’re happy editing with your current setup and it does everything you need it to, and you’re unlikely to be exchanging projects with anyone running FCP X, just stay with what you’ve got.

I saw that you said you use AE a lot – you’ll LOVE Premiere’s ability to link to an AE comp in the timeline and instantly show (no ‘reload footage’, no ‘reconnect media’ – it’s just THERE instantly!) anything you’ve changed in the AE comp – without even rendering it in AE! I, too, hop from AE to FCP all day long, and Premiere’s ability to do this is a MAJOR plus. I cannot possibly count the number of times I have to reconnect media in FCP or FCP refuses to accept that the media’s changed.

Well, those are my thoughts on the subject anyway!

– Paul