Petros Kolyvas
Forum Replies Created
-
Are you using any plugins?
We use several plugins (from different vendors) authorized via iLok and Premiere is pretty crash-happy when they’re on the mix buss(es). Without them (or any plugins) it’s far more stable.
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Just wanted to chime in here again, in case anyone is listening, iZotope launched Insight today, which is an even more detailed Meter Bridge including BS-1770-1/2/3 support, and it’s free for Ozone 5 advanced users.
The price for the standalone version is, however, higher than some other plugins because it includes surround-sound support. Once that’s considered it’s on par with the rest!
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
I’ve been using Ozone Advanced in PrPro for over a year now (the advanced version lets you use the plugins independently).
One other reason Ozone is a good solution: the meter bridge offers ITU-spec LUFS and K metering which can alleviate the need for yet another third party metering plugin when trying to conform deliverables.
The bridge and metering isn’t as fine-tunable as other metering plugins, but for most work it’ll do.
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
[Chris Borjis] “files/cache/previews should all be on your fastest volume.”
I would qualify that just a little bit by adding: your fastest non-shared volume.
For example, the fastest volume on our highest-end workstation is a RAID-5 volume, but it’s shared amongst the other stations and contains primary footage (which requires massively more space than previews or caches). So media cache goes onto a local, unshared spinning-disk RAID-0 volume, and preview files onto another local, unshared RAID-0 SSD volume.
But yeah, the OS-disk slowdown is surprising and I loathe (seriously loathe) that Premiere defaults to a user directory on the system disk. We should be able to set a default. But I loathe filling out the wishform even more (Adobe needs user profiles ASAP so we can help them without wasting our time).
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Just to address the “partitioning” comment. This may come off as ornery, but it’s not meant to be.
The ONLY (yes, that is all-caps) reason to ever use the words “Partition” and “Performance” in a conversation about NLE and/or DAW workstations, when discussing spinning disk drives is if you intend to partition disks in order to “short stroke” them.
Understanding the physical nature of a spinning disk is essential to understanding what’s going on with your system. A set of flat, circular platters rotate at high speed (7200 RPM or more if you have the right disks). These disks actually have tracks – many many of them.
A head (or actuator) moves across these platters to read and write data. The farther and more frequently a head has to move between the tracks containing the data a particular operation requires the “slower” the drive becomes. Partitioning a single spinning disk in the hopes of gaining performance across the entire disk surface is a way to ENSURE the disk will slow down more quickly over time.
On the other hand, using a partition to short stroke a spinning disk by using only the fastest outer edge of each platter, will work, provided you don’t create a volume or filesystem on the unused space. This will reduce the available space, but also ensure that the maximum distance between tracks of data is dramatically reduced and in situations where read and write operations are not at all sequential (say like reading 10 audio/video tracks or jumping between them), short stroking can dramatically improve IOPS.
And you don’t have to take my word for it a search will net you the performance information you speak of.
Some References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning#Disadvantages_of_multiple_partitions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics#Short_stroking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Can you use disk utility to verify the disk even if you can’t mount it?
Or run ‘fsck_hfs’ from the command line/terminal on the block device to see if that works?
It would be something like “sudo /sbin/fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk1s1” where “disk1s1” is the Disk Identifier in the Information window in Disk Utility. You should be able to glean this information by clicking on the volume in question (not the parent device) and clicking the info button.
Sometimes the command may need to be run more than once when problems are found.
Filesystem faults, rare as they may be, do happen and it’s important to remember that the RAID controller will not report filesystem errors and although filesystem errors can be related to RAID issues it is possible the RAID-level layers of the system are running fine and physically the disks are ok.
If you do get it up, even in read only mode. It’s time to make a complete backup if you don’t have one already as awful as finding 12 more TB of hard disk might be to both one’s sanity and wallet.
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
You can set the preview files to higher-quality if required under your sequence settings. You could, for example, create 10-bit ProRes 422 HQ preview files if that suited you.
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Currently there is no way to rename AVCHD MTS files without loosing the link to the metadata – it seems that utilities like Clipwrap are our only hope at the moment. The new version of Clipwrap claims to be able to re-wrap the files but maintain their “fast-track” priority in Premiere. I have not tried to evaluate it yet but once wrapped, those files can then be re-named since they’re self-contained.
I’ve recently asked Clipwrap/Divergent for a built-in rename feature and am hopeful they’ll do so as I believe the market for such a tool is very, very, very large (and growing!)
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
We have three edit stations all working off the same SAS-based storage array all running CS6. No problems whatsoever and it’s not even XSAN, it’s running over GbE.
Currently all project data is on the shared storage and each station keeps it’s own Preview Files and Media Cache to keep things speedy. We have no problem passing projects around this way.
Perhaps of interest to you: one of the caveats we’ve discovered is that if Edit Station 1 is working in Premiere with assets that are dynamically linked (like an AE comp) which is being actively worked on on Edit Station 1, the station 1 editor has to close a project to see new comps (but existing, already-imported comps do get updated).
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Often when we’re struggling with sound there are two issues to deal with first (these are some of the big ones and they apply to all audio production, not just sound-for-film):
1. Frequency overlap: One frequent issue is that the “meat” of our sounds overlaps with the “meat” of our music. Using an equalizer to notch out some “space” in the music can make a big difference. The same goes for the SFX, we want to fine tune them against the music (and other sounds) as well. If you’re not familiar with EQs in general I would do some reading to start. You can work with complicated systems like a side-chained multi-band compressor (almost like a dynamic equalizer) however, start with EQ: it is the most fundamental audio tool after the fader/volume knob and compares well with the 3-way colour corrector in many ways (high, mids, lows vs. white, greys, blacks, etc.)
2. Headroom: A common behaviour is to try to often “turn things up” when the opposite should often be the first move. You can make things louder, or you can make them louder than other sounds by making the other sounds not-as-loud. If we keep turning things up, eventually we have nowhere to go.
Don’t be afraid to play around – just make sure you save a few versions of your project along the way!
—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger