[Ryan Holmes]

You’ll have to give more information. Are you exporting a master copy for long term storage, a DVD, a blu-ray, a YouTube copy, a Vimeo copy, an offline file, etc.

There are so many different ways to export a project, the fastest way depends on where you’re going to put the file. The fastest settings to export a DVD won’t help you at all if you’re trying to make a file to post on YouTube.

A good starting point are the presets already included in PPro. Those give you a pretty good guide for any given format – DVD, Blu-ray, YouTube, etc.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

Alison – I’ve switched over to PPRo as my primary editor. If you’re moving to CS6, you probably won’t look back once you move. It’s easy and as Jessica said, you can easily map all the keyboard shortcuts to be your usual FCP settings. But even if you don’t the PPro shortcuts aren’t hard to pickup. I recommend downloading the 30 day trial from Adobe and try kickin it around. I think you’ll be surprised.

As for FCP7, it’s dead software. Apple has moved to FCPX and they are not developing, patching, or supporting FCP7 any longer (or Color, DVD Studio Pro, Compressor 3, etc.). So there is no guarantee how long FCP7 will continue to work on an Apple machine. I’ve heard that FCP7 still runs on the newest OS Mountain Lion, but again it isn’t supported. So you’re only one Apple software update away from FCP7 failing to launch. Technically the last supported OS build for FCP7 was 10.6.8 – Snow Leopard.

I suspect that FCP7 will continue to be used for the next several years, but people will start moving to other software – Avid, PPro, Autodesk, or FCPX. Given the amount of choices right now as an editor you can pickup any NLE software from the big A companies and it will run on a current gen Mac.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

[John Heagy] “Which Canon records h.264 at 45Mbs? “

I believe that most (all?) Canon DSLR’s shoot @ 45Mbps. Both of my 7D’s shoot that when recording video. The 5DMarkIII I just rented shot around there as well.

Stephen – I generally transcode to ProRes422 as it holds up well through multiple recompressions – vfx, color grading, final export, etc. LT is pretty good, but it can break down quicker if you end up going through multiple generations of a file. However, if you’re just strictly cutting it and are done after that then LT might just be all you need to use.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

[Dennis Radeke] “The underlying point though is that Adobe is listening and caring and delivering right now “

Agreed. Adobe should be applauded for this. Avid doesn’t listen this well (maybe a bit better recently). Apple does listen this well. Autodesk doesn’t listen this well (though they are getting better as well). Adobe is easily leading the curve with listening to what we want right now today.

[Dennis Radeke] “We will continue to listen to our existing users and those specifically of our competition to make Premiere Pro the Photoshop of Video.”

I hope you can make PPro the Photoshop of video. To make it the hub of digital creation – excellent! Which is why I’ve long wondered when Adobe will (1) make it’s own XML language. Instead of having to export out the whole project as XML, how about just 1 sequence or a small group of sequences. When I move to Resolve for color grading I don’t need all 85 sequences. I just need the 1 that is prepped for color. (2) Adobe’s own native codec. I love that PPro is the honey badger of NLE’s. But when you ingest footage from RED, C300, GoPro, 5DMarkII, and a 7D other programs don’t handle all those codecs equally well in one timeline (I’m looking at you DaVinci Resolve). No sweat for CS6, but not everybody is so nimble.

So having the ability to move to 1 standard format is still important, I think. Granted we have DNxHD and ProRes, but there Adobe is stuck relying on outside companies to deliver a solution. If there was an Adobe equivalent that played equally well in PPro, After Effects, and Speedgrade (and the codec would be licensed to any and all third parties – Canon, Arri, RED, Atomos, SoundDevices, Blackmagic, etc for direct capture) that would be a game changer. Especially if when you log and ingest footage through Prelude it would convert to that format from the start. Then you wouldn’t have to mix codecs so much in PPro or AE. And you wouldn’t have to convert to DPX for speedgrade (unless you wanted to).

Just my $.02. Keep up the good work with Adobe. It is encouraging to see a company listen to its user base.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

[Dennis Radeke] “At the time, the overwhelming majority of our business was on PC and FCP was getting stronger, so we opted to go PC only for three versions (1.0, 1.5, 2.0).”

This underscores my point. There’s no guarantee that this won’t happen again. If Avid or Smoke or FCPX or eats into your Mac customer base and you once again decide it’s not worth it to be here you’ll leave. It’s not personal. It’s just business. You go where the money is. Currently it’s a good business decision to be on the Apple platform. That may not be the case in 2, or 5, or 10 years. Which is why it’s important for editors, vfx specialists, audio engineers to not be tied to one software that they live and die by. And I’m speaking as heavy user of CS6. However, it’s not the only NLE I use. I don’t want to get caught in a corner again like I did with FCP7.

And it may not even be that you leave the Mac platform. FCPX didn’t change platforms it just flat out didn’t deliver the features many editors were asking for. If CS7 or CS8 or CS9 fails to deliver then editors will indeed migrate. So it’s not necessarily the case that Adobe will restrict the platform, it may just be a poor release or a series of underwhelming releases (similar to what Avid experienced in the early-to-mid 2000’s).

For editors we’ve never had more choices in NLE’s than we do now. And most of them work cross-platform. I’m excited to see how much Adobe has listened to it’s users and how active y’all are on these forums. The CS6 release does indeed show that Adobe listened to what users wanted. I hope CS6.5 and CS7 continue that open listening trend. And please don’t read my above comments as strictly negative. I just want people to have their eyes open when doing this business. Adobe is a business. And the management will make choices for future products with regard to where they see the market moving – be it Mac, Windows, Linux, iPad, etc.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

[Brian Cooney] “And it looks like Adobe wants to hold our hand in this and walk with us.. That makes you feel confident about investing into the software.”

I would be careful about this. Putting your eggs into any 1 companies basket is a dangerous strategy. Ex-FCPers (of which I am one) got caught with there pants down thinking Apple would always deliver what they wanted. When Apple didn’t deliver the product many of us hoped for we got mad and some left. Hopefully June 2011 helped everybody realize the danger of expecting one company to deliver a complete end-to-end solution.

Remember Adobe didn’t even make it’s software available on the Mac platform between 2003-2007 (CS3 returned to OSX in July 2007). They pulled completely out of the Mac environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiere_Pro). So while I’m optimistic about Adobe’s direction, I’m also cautious. Learning other software (Smoke, Avid, FCPX?) in order to minimize my need to trust one company to always deliver the next latest and greatest NLE. Know all your tools and what one company does won’t impact you as hard if they decide to take away or change that tool.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

Similar experience here. My team migrated last fall after the FCPX launch. But it hasn’t been until CS6 that I have been able to move my entire workflow (ingest, edit, transcode, deliver) over to Adobe entirely. I still kept hanging on to some aspect of FCS3 – mainly Compressor. But the speed of PPro and the Mercury Playback Engine has been so far superior to FCP7 that it just feels slow when I have to go back there for an old project.

I think CS6 made some great strides forward, but there’s still plenty of work to be done (and I think Adobe is aware of that). Especially if they truly want to make PPro the Photoshop of the NLE world.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

This is the Adobe Premiere Pro forum. Use one of the Sony Vegas forums and you’ll get a better response:

https://forums.creativecow.net/sonyvegas

https://forums.creativecow.net/sonyvegasbasics

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

I’d recommend the Quadro 4000. You’ll need to check compatibility with your particular machine. Older Mac Pro’s (2007, 2008?) can’t run a Quadro card.

I use a Quadro FX4800 on a 2010 Mac Pro. Love the CUDA technology. But a 4000 is faster (and cheaper) than a 4800 – strange yes, but those the facts!

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Ryan Holmes]

I would second Chris’ suggestion above. Send them a Word .doc of the show. They translate it and send it back to you. Then you copy/paste the text into FCP/Motion and create the subtitles. That way you control the quality, you control the animation, and you control the final product.

If that’s not doable then I would probably go the h.264 route.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes