[Stephen Abbott]

Hi,

Same here, I’m sad to report. I’ve tried all the same settings changes, no luck yet.

Mac Pro 4,1 running 10.12.6, Premiere 2017.1.1
MacbookAir 6,2 running 10.12.5, Premiere 2017.1.2

Hey Adobe: bugs and slowdowns like this make me reconsider the expensive annual fee for Adobe CC. The fundamentals should Just Work.

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Here’s a link:
https://youtu.be/QkPBam3qO34

You can do something like this in After Effects. With some pre-comping it could be relatively flexible. Motion-graphics-wise, I would call this sequence ‘not too complicated’ — it’s more about the technical work of getting all the shots across correctly. Of course, Vice did a cool job of coming up with it: nice one Vice!

I would probably make a test case, then make a simple timing ‘mock-up’ in Premiere for use on the timeline that allows an editor to make shot selections based on content, then import the final selected shots into AE for adding into the pre-comp system. Not too elegant, but Essential Graphics is far from ready for this sort of thing. ☺

I’ve not used Apple Motion seriously in years, but it might also work well. Any Motion-ninjas out there…?

–
Stephen Abbott

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Stephen Abbott]

Is that layer called ‘blur’ an adjustment layer? I’ve seen them misbehave with all sorts of strange effects, especially when Mercury Playback Engine is set to OpenCL. Try setting it to Metal or CPU-only under File > Project Settings > General…? This might change render speeds, of course 🙂

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Hi Zach,

1. BluRay is a good choice — the quality is pretty good if you encode an MPEG4 (rather than MPEG2), and it is at least kinda predictable: if it plays on one player, it’s quite likely to work on others. So you can ‘bank’ that option as they’ve said they have BD playback.

2. Make a 25+ Mbps MPEG4 — if there’s any kind of PC play back it should accept that.

3. If you’re on a budget then DCP out of Adobe Media Encoder might work … but it is a bit unpredictable as Brent said.

4. I wouldn’t send them a more exotic Quicktime like the TIFF format you mentioned. This sort of file is likely to be less supported, and a 6-minute 28GB file is ~80MB/sec which might well tax a slow hard drive for realtime playback. You can include a ProRes or DNxHD if you want to cover all bases, but most festivals don’t seem to like to screen (or request) these ‘editing codecs’.

To be extra fancy, you can put the MP4 and DCP on the BluRay Disc as files, that way someone would (almost) always have something to play, provided they have a BD-ROM drive.

I have delivered a number of films like this and sent them to festivals around the world, and have never had a problem. I normally just throw 2 and 3 on a memory stick, then 1, 2, and 3 on the BD. It’s not high-end, but it works.

S

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Did the camera have any optical stabilisation turned on? The GH5 can do lens or sensor, or both. Anamorphic means no lens stabiliser, but perhaps the GH5 sensor shift was active? That looks to me like what’s going on.

Unfortunately, that kind of second-order (corrective) shake will affect the lens flaring separately from the scene shaking. The software stabiliser looks like it’s done a great job on the scene, but the flare shake will be mostly remain. I doubt other stabilisers will do much better.

The up-side: I agree with the others, it’s hard to see on the first few viewings…

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Hi Cratin,

FFMPEG is one good way to go. You will most likely need to use it via terminal, but it’s very powerful and one of the most tolerant of things which *should* work but are not commonly used, like odd frame sizes (or frame rates, for that matter).

I’ve also experienced embedded WMV-only playback devices being very picky about the flavour of WMV you give then. FFMPEG will give you decent control over that, too, though it will take some learning of the intricacies of a not-so-simple command line tool.

If you do go for FFMPEG, you can download a binary for Mac from a site like this: https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/

And you’ll need some terminal instructions to get the binary installed for proper use from the terminal: I used the instructions under #2 of the answer here: https://superuser.com/questions/624561/install-ffmpeg-on-os-x

—

More generally, FFMPEG is a great Swiss-Army-knife for encoding and decoding all sorts of exotic codecs and formats. Lots of apps are built on top of it, but I like to use the terminal version for the more challenging tasks … it’s slower than click-n-drag, but you get a lot of fine control. The only downer: I haven’t had much luck with GPU acceleration on the Mac, so any heavy lifting transcoding goes via other apps.

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Hi Antonio,

You could try adding some noise to the gradient. If you generate the gradient in After Effects, the Ramp effect has a Ramp Scatter parameter that does just that, otherwise you can add the noise in PS or in Premiere.

Delivering an 8-bit MPEG4 will show up the worst banding, but you should be doing this even in a 10-bit depth — if the gradient is too ‘clean’.

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Same here, a little irritating!

Premiere 2017.0 and 2017.0.2 both have the problem for me (I recently upgraded).
Mac OS 10.12.3

I’m also running Premiere 2015.4 — works fine there.

Sigh… lots of bugs.

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Hi Frank,

I use chapter markers on a Premiere timeline, then merge these markers as chapters in the final (MP4) output video.

To get the chapters across, I use Subler (for Mac). This allows you to pull the chapter stream out of a Quicktime export from Premiere, and include it in an MPEG4. You simply re-save the MPEG4 and you’re good to go.

You get different results from different video players:

– QT7 has a nice text list next to the playback controls
– QTX has a nice list with thumbnails next to the playback controls
– VLC has a text list ‘Chapters’ under the Playback menu
– Youtube and Vimeo both don’t honour these chapters

None are nearly as nice for user-control as a DVD menu, I’m afraid. If you want real control, you will indeed need to look to an HTML5 player, or stick with Flash…

Hope this helps!

–
Stephen Abbott

[Stephen Abbott]

Hi!

In Premiere 2015.4, it’s under “Enable Transmit” in the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences. Not sure about 2017 just yet.

–
Stephen Abbott