[Per Holmes]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your response. That was one of the things I tried, but it causes more seek on the RAID, so the upper limit is lower. The workflow is also very bad with editing two sets of clips, adding Track Matte Effects, setting Frame Hold for two sets of clips.

I’ve decided to go with the Lagarith codec. Playback and scrubbing is snappy, even as I pile on layers of RGBA graphics. The files are a very reasonable size, and encoding is as fast as the other codecs.

The downside, or so I thought, was that I’d never be able to open the project on a Mac. But I read someone who said that they’d opened Lagarith AVI files on a Mac without codecs pre-installed.

But my failsafe is that I make sure that all Lagarith encoded AVIs go into a single folder in the project directory. This way, it would be possible to batch convert all the clips to e.g. Lossless RGBA AVI, which will for sure open on any device, and it should be possible to open the project anywhere as far into the future as I can see.

Thanks!

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

I’m having success with Lagarith. A 10 second animation comes in at 240 MB, and it plays without stutter in PP on top of DNxHD 8-bit footage.

I’m guesssing this will never be supported on Mac, but the codec is GPL, so it may still exist in 5 years, as will AVI. So if I’m OK with the project never being openable on a Mac, then I think I have a solution.

Thanks for suggesting it!

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

If I were on a Mac, ProRes 4444 would be natively supported.

Separate note, it appears that ALL of Quicktime is deprecated, and will stop being pre-installed on Macs in 1-2 OS versions. That makes relying on Quicktime a bit dangerous. I need to be able to open this project for a revision in 5-7 years. Of course there will be some work to do that, but I don’t want to make it worse.

That said, I have a plan B that works, which is the 36 mbit DNxHD with uncompressed Alpha, wrapped in Quicktime coming out of AE. The quality on the titles only takes a negligible hit, but the uncompressed alpha channel means that I’m spending 36 mbit on the RGB, and 400 mbit on the alpha channel. But Premiere doesn’t choke on it. But this solution doesn’t sit well.

This is frustrating.

Thanks,

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your post. To be clear, I wasn’t blaming Adobe, I understand that Apple is not doing 64-bit for whatever reason, and Adobe has to work around them.

The pity is that After Effects has no way to export a direct MXF. The only MXF support it has is for a couple of specific XDCAM codecs. There’s not the same kind of MXF support as in Premiere.

All my other footage is 10-bit DNxHD from Resolve, and it plays beautifully. In fact, I can play 4 streams of this in real-time with no problems.

The problem with PNG is that it doesn’t work for large graphics. Decode is too slow, and encoding is glaringly slowly. I’m going every single format one by one to see if I can find one that works. The other Quicktime codes (e.g. Animation) are deprecated, and also produce huge files.

It’s a conundrum how to export motion graphics from AE and play them in real-time in PP. I need movie clips as opposed to mounting AE projects directly in PP because this is all lower-third and title stuff, and it saves me from re-rendering a million times while I edit, and it allows me to do the timing on the Premiere timeline in real-time, rather than editing keyframes in AE and re-rendering in Premiere. This project is too big, if I go that route, I’ll be altogether spending a month looking at the computer render. But it’s a month in 5-minute increments, so I have to sit and wait for all of it. So I have to find a clip solution.

Thanks,

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

It appears that I might have a different kind of problem, which is the encoding of the alpha channel.

DNxHD allows either a compressed or an uncompressed alpha channel. Compressed didn’t work, so I had gone with uncompressed.

Well, even on a proxy 36 mbit/sec DNxHD, having an uncompressed alpha channel pumps the bit rate up to 448 mbit/sec. Now it makes more sense why the RAID was blinking all blue. I thought it was just some Premiere preloading stuff. It was apparently crazy-large clips.

So I think I need to locate another format with an Alpha channel that I can import easily and play in real-time in Premiere. It seems that DNxHD with alpha channel is broken.

Best,

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

You, my good sir, are a genius!

I don’t know how I missed that. Searches came up empty, and I assumed that this particular feature only unlinked it.

Beautiful! Thanks!

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

I have terrible news. I just tested “replace with After Effect Composition”, and it doesn’t work for CinemaDNG.

This means that there is no way whatsoever to access the RAW tonal range of CinemaDNG imported into Premiere Pro. No way at all.

This blows my mind. I’m not completely convinced that Adobe understands why anyone shoots RAW.

Editing CinemaDNG in Premiere Pro/SpeedGrade is functionally the same as if you had shot the whole thing as ProRes to begin with.

Yikes. Well, CinemaDNG in 7.1 is dead and buried. Does anybody have experience with the Ginger workflow?

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

I have to admit that this is a curveball for me. I’ve actually checked for upgrades 5 times a day since October 15, and suddenly, it’s dead on arrival.

The marketing didn’t mention anything about this. This is kind of a mega deal-breaker, since the only reason anyone would use RAW in the first place would be to access the full tonal range.

But why have you locked it out completely to access the tonal range? All you’d have to do in SpeedGrade is give the ability to upgrade the clip to non-real-time rendered footage that accesses the full tonal range. I think anyone who uses CinemaDNG would happily pay that non-real-time sacrifice until it one day becomes real-time.

But instead, you’ve designed it to stay forever locked into the arbitrary video tonal range that Premiere auto-decided on import, with no possibility of changing it, not even in SpeedGrade.

I think this defies logic a little bit. You’ve done all this amazing work to make CinemaDNG play in real-time, but then you’ve disabled the one thing that would make anybody use it.

The CinemaDNG workflow is a complete non-starter for me. I’m already done with it. I’m exploring the Ginger workflow, perhaps there’s something there. But the 7.1 CinemaDNG workflow I simply can’t find anything to use for.

Believe me, I love your software otherwise, I’ve converted away from Avid MC because Premiere in general is more powerful. But this CinemaDNG workflow is perplexing. I’m way bummed.

Best,

Per