R. Hewitt
Forum Replies Created
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That’s exactly right Tim.
If only Adobe had started earlier and with a professional workflow in mind, they may have been sitting right there where Avid is right now.
Integration is an absolute boon for Adobe as are the hardware accelerators and encoders. Software MPEG encoding will always be slower than dedicated hardware but the software will probably continue to have the edge in it’s ability to do higher quality, multi-pass encoding. And it can be easily updated.
Realtime MPEG encoding in hardware is a requirement for the majority of digital TV transmissions and the poor results and limited bandwidths used by the broadcasters are sadly the way we’re going in a bandwidth starved UK.
It’s frustrating when Adobe are so close to getting the product ‘just right’ in a professional sense when they don’t provide a genuine open channel of communication to those of us out here – feature request aside. I got the same frustration with Adobe GoLive, which I eventually ditched. Premier on the other hand will be a product I’ll continue to use primarily for the good integration it provides & the support of my Matrox RTX100 card.
C’mon Adobe, you’ll nearly there.
Richard.
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Couldn’t agree more Tim.
Adobe dominate the broadcast and professional markets with After Effects (Photoshop too). Many broadcasters have dropped Quantel’s HAl in favour of After Effects. It’s massively cheaper and more powerful in the right hands. The fact that its format independent is a huge boon as is its dual platform capability.
Adobe have the creative potential to do to Premier Pro what they have done for After Effects but I think they have left it far to late to compete. Better that they get the workflow issues sorted and drop the ‘Pro’ moniker – it’s a bit dated in marketing terms.
There is still a big enough market for it in the serious amateur and corporate market sector.
I just wish they’d listen rather than pick and choose the bits they think people want.
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Absolutely.
Stereo tracks should only ever be used for output. If you need a stereo track it’s easy enough to lock two individual tracks together. The vast majority of the world’s professional and broadcast editors work this way.
As has been said many times in this forum, Adobe do not understand the way editors work and this is just one of the reasons they haven’t made a dent in the UK and european market for broadcasters. They also cannot provide the level of customer support demanded by the professional market and this is why Avid and Quantel have made such big in-roads. Not to mention the university education market here, which is dominated by Avid. The students can use Avid FreeDV at home for no charge and it works in exactly the same way as the pro line of applications. Adobe’s nearest option is Premier Elements – it’s not free and it’s aimed directly at the consumer.
Don’t ge me wrong, I love Premier Pro and will continue to use it for my own use and often sing its praises to friends and colleagues but when you can get the version used by the broadcasters and professionals for free…
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If your external drive was set as the next available letter and you plug in a USB thumb drive etc, it’s not unusual for the drive to be bumped along one. It shouldn’t but XP seems to behave that way at times.
I set all my external drives starting at M.
Richard.
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That’s about normal Erly.
Depending on if you are using a CRT or LCD display, pictures will always look ‘different’ compared to playing the video on your TV. The TV is the least accurate device in the chain.
Most TV’s when manufactured are setup to a standard test pattern with colour bars and a pattern known as pluge to set the contrast and brightness. The later are effected by the environment you view in. Any changes that you make to the settings on the TV will change from the way it was setup.
Computer CRT displays use a different phosphor coating on the screen, whic responds slightly differently to that of a normal TV and that is also assuming your computer display has been calibrated. The LCD display again displays differently to a CRT and will appear more grainy and often less saturated when viewing video. LCD displays also suffer from smearing caused by the slow response of the pixels changing from light to dark.
The brightness and contrast changes from black to white of the CRT display aren’t linear, it follows an s-shaped curve. This contrasts with the LCD display, which is linear. This will also change what you see on screen. The TV transmission system and ALL cameras are set to work with the CRT display in mind and as such produce an opposite s-shaped curve in contrast and brightness. This cancels out the effect on a normal TV screen. The latest LCD TVs are adjusted to work in a similar way to a CRT TV.
All professional editors use a TV monitor connected to their edit systems that has been accurately calibrated. This is the only sure way to see what your pictures are really like.
As Aanarav says, make sure you have the high quality option set on your Premier monitor window to get the best that can be displayed. You will however need a powerful PC and graphics card to keep the quality at it’s highest while running Premier.
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Interesting days indeed.
One of the main reasons for the lag in broadcast technology in te UK is the cramped airwaves. For such a small country there is an enormous amount of radio spectrum in use. Just think how close our airbases are together!
As channel space has become available the technology has been quickly implemented – Freeview digital channels for example. The majority of UK viewers use terestrial services unlike the cable and sat in the US and many other countries around the world, which compounds the airspace issues.
Hi-Definition is a case in point. It requires far greater bandwidth for normal terestrial broadcast and the space isn’t currently available. HD sat services start early next year and as the analogue transmitters are slowly switched off, the channel space will become available.
Things can only get better. Slowly but surely!
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Do you have realtime scanning switched on in your antivirus software?
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Much as I love Premier Pro, it’s not the tool of choice in the UK broadcast sector.
What the broadcasters are looking for is an end to end solution. For ITV that was Avid – used from ingest/edit through to on-air playout. For the BBC (News) that was Quantel.
Documentaries is a different matter and it’s not unusual for editors to work on laptops to do rough cuts. Many used Avid when it was Mac based and it’s not suprising that the editors using Macs would want to go down the FCP track.
At the end of the day compatibility, experience with existing systems and cost all come into play. Premier Pro in the UK fits largely into the corporate market place and Adobe appear to stand little chance now of moving into the broadcast world.
As a side note: Until Adobe realise that broadcasters and professionals use single audio tracks and not stereo pairs, they will struggle to compete with Avid.
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Are you using an LCD or CRT monitor?
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What is the spec of your laptop?
Let us know and we may be able to pinpoint the problem. It’s unlikely to be the firewire card causing the problem.