[Samuel Frazier]

Thank you very much for that and yes, if you could let us know what you find, I think we’d all appreciate it!

[Samuel Frazier]

Thanks very much for that and for the workaround. I really wish normalization was not destructive. It would be very helpful to have that as a 1st stage of mixing but be able to turn it on and off as needed for experimentation and so future adjustments could be made quickly.

So, there’s definitely no other filter that would achieve much the same thing w/o compressing the track in some way?

[Samuel Frazier]

Thank you!! It was my guess that it worked that way, but I couldn’t find anything that said so specifically. Much thanks!!

And thanks for the story. I’d be a bit leary of a director who thought he can do something the audio folks can’t.

[Samuel Frazier]

I’m very sorry for the delay. Somehow, I missed this. But, I don’t have any still near that resolution, so that can’t be the problem. Things have gotten so bad though that even playing the timeline back at 1/4 resolution will crash if I let it play too long. Obviously, it’s almost impossible to get any work done under those circumstances. I’m almost ready to pack it in, transfer the project to Resolve, and go through the lengthy process of learning that software.

[Samuel Frazier]

Thank you very much for all of that!! Greatly appreciated!! Some thoughts and questions:

[Chris Wright] “longform projects should always be first rendered to an image format”

– the films is only 18min, but more importantly, what do you mean by “image format”?

[Chris Wright] “(it also shows you where it stopped)”

– I’m not familiar with this. All I recall seeing is a percentage meter. Am I missing something, b/c I would be curious to know which clips are creating the problem. This said, the whole project was unstable. Pre-rendering 30sec to 1min sections of the timeline showed me that. It wasn’t so much which clips it was pre-rendering, it was how large an area of the timeline. Anything over 1min was an almost guaranteed crash.

[Chris Wright] “check the crash logs and send them to adobe”
– I definitely sent them all to Adobe, but I did not attempt to read them as these things have always been either garble or just over my head.

[Chris Wright] “or try software render”
– I tried all the varieties of this and it made no difference.

[Chris Wright] “pre-rendering a h.264 to dhx/prores/image seq, mp3 to wave”
– I eventually copied my final timeline and pasted it into a new project. This speed up the waiting for each project to open tremendously. I then copied and pasted that timeline into a ProRes timeline, and that what was what finally worked, but again, only after a laborious pre-render of tiny bits of the timeline.
– there were no mp3 files by this point. I had exported the timeline to an aif file and was just working from that. It didn’t help or change anything.

[Chris Wright] “disable plugins, check computer temp”
– I turned the computer off several times to let it “rest”. No difference. There was only one plugin used, Neat Video’s noise reduction, and the crashes happened on my colorist’s iMac Pro long before this plugin was used.

[Chris Wright] ” there a few h.264 flavors that are incompatible with premiere, including wrong color gamuts and 8bit lines.”
– this is interesting. 1st I’ve heard. Can you tell me anything more about this?

[Chris Wright] ” I’m actually surprised when anyone tries to render a complicated timeline to a one-go streaming codec.”
– this is something you really should be able to do though. Adobe advertises that it can handle basically any format. My belief is that it just can’t handle a complicated timeline. I have none of these problems on my shorter projects, which are also w/ far fewer formats, frame rates, color correction, etc. But, a complicated timeline is a necessity for my films for their style and to make them visually interesting. I need a stable solution that allow me to edit this way.

[Samuel Frazier]

Thank you for that. (Both the suggestion and the commiseration!) Transcoding to ProRes was an option I considered, but yes, the file sizes were absolutely huge and that created a slew of other issues including:

1- how to get a portable solution w/ enough speed to edit
2- how to store the project long term
3- how to do both w/o breaking the bank

Unfortunately, this was not possible and I was kind of sold on Premiere’s claim that it could handle any number of formats in the same timeline.

[Samuel Frazier]

It’s 1080p24 ProRes Proxy. The two best cameras I had running were

1- a Sony FS700 in 4kp60 and 4kp24 in ProRes HQ
2- Panasonic EVA1 in vlog at 4kp24 and also 1080p108.

So, I figured my final online edit should in 1080p24 ProRes HQ, but thought it would require less of the computer if I did the assembly in 1080p24 ProRes Proxy. From what you wrote, I’m guessing that’s wrong though, huh?

[Samuel Frazier]

Sorry for the delay. I had to deliver the final exhibition cut of the doc and was drowning in sea of glitches and crashes. But, that’s for another post.

My specs:
2017 iMac 27″ 5k
4.2 GHz Intel Core i7 (4-core)
32GB Ram
4TB Oyen Digital minipro raid v3 (USB-C raid w/ 2 x 2TB SSD drives in RAID 0)

And yes, H.264 is the master of almost all of my files. It’s very mixed bag of cameras though. So, what’s the issue w/ H.264? If it matters, for the proxy workflow, I made ProRes Proxy files.

[Samuel Frazier]

[Shane Ross] “Never master with Proxy footage. Dropping that into a 10-bit sequence doesn’t magically make it full resolution.”

I should have described this in more detail, but figured it would be the tr,dr. Premiere is so buggy with this project on his iMac that even switching b/t the proxy and the master often crashed it. It’s still buggy and prone to crashing on my 2017 iMac, but not nearly as bad. So, it was a choice of having him either not do the color correction or to do mostly proxy correction. I believe he still braved switching from proxy to master as much as he could, but he’d always have to switch to proxy to actually get it to play back. I figured the only correct way to do it would be copy and paste the clips into a 10bit seq and switch to the masters. This just would not happen on this project though.

[Shane Ross] “Then transcode to ProRes HQ, or ProRes 4444. Many camera masters take a lot of system resources to play back natively. And even with a totally decked out high end system, some won’t play back smoothly, so you transcode to a high end, finishing codec.”

I thought about and tried this out. Unfortunately, the transcoded files would have been way too big for me to work from–especially as I was traveling a lot and working from a 4TB SSD RAID.

[Shane Ross] “Does it? I thought you had to click that one button in order to switch the sequence back to linking to the masters, and not the proxies.”

Yeah, it does. Very handy too!! I think Premiere gives an alert to this effect when you export from proxy files.

[Shane Ross] “But still, you really should do a proper online, relinking to the masters and grading those, or transcoding those to high res masters and grading them. Even color grading the proxies won’t show you what’s really happening.”

No doubt, that is the way to do it. But, I’ve now got the color correction from him and it’s definitely better than what I could do. Ideally, I’d take that see what I get when this is in a 10bit sequence and using the masters.

But, in the short term, I take it there’s not much point copy and pasting the clips into a 10bit timeline & exporting from there to H.264, right?

[Samuel Frazier]

Thanks for that, but this is the final export and desired format for a film festival. I would have moved the items in the ProRes Proxy sequence into a 10bit sequence via copy and paste long before, but we had problems along the way. My friend doing the color correction had incredibly poor playback (even on his iMac Pro 10 core) and so many crashes, that he was only barely able to work from the ProRes Proxy sequence.

I’m confused when you say it won’t be made from the masters though, b/c Premiere does automatically go back to the masters when you export. I’m pretty sure about that b/c my proxies had watermarks stamped on them when they were created showing they are the proxies and not the masters, but my exports do not have the watermark.