Stephen Abbott
Forum Replies Created
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Oh, nice Andrew, that will work well.
Eric, it seems you’re on a Mac. It’s quite easy to write an Applescript to automate repetitive keyboard-only tasks such as this. I did one for creating subclips from individual edits on a timeline. You can write a crude loop plus call each keystroke—essentially you have a fragile ‘programme’ that can run on top of Premiere.
Shout if you’d like to see my subclip script, I’ll try dig it up.
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Stephen Abbott -
Hi Eric,
Premiere writes clip markers to the source video file. That way—the thinking goes—you get the markers in all Apps (from Prelude to Premiere etc.) without any further ado. But of course the markers don’t then live in the project file, and can’t be easily shared. Sorry you had to discover this the hard way… 🙁
This freaks me out, as I don’t like *anything* editing the size and modified date of the video files I’m working on—proxies or not, they shouldn’t be touched by the NLE. I tend to lock the source files, which breaks Premiere’s clip marking feature but keeps my video files untouched. I get most of the marker functionality back by marking in sequences rather than on the clips themselves. This serves the way I edit (from selects sequence to assembly sequence, rather than from clip/bin to sequence) so I’m not too grumpy about it.
A solution for you could be the straight marker export from Premiere. From https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/whats-new-7-2.html
Export markers as a list
Premiere Pro lets you export markers from a single media asset or sequence to a CSV or HTML file. The Export Markers feature works with the asset whose markers are loaded in the Markers panel.
1. Load the markers of the required clip or sequence into the Markers panel. To do so, select the clip or sequence in the Project panel, or set focus on the Source Monitor, Program Monitor, or Timeline.
2. Select File > Export > Markers.
3. In the Export Markers dialog, specify the file type, output destination, and filename. Then, click OK.—
Another solution could be XML export. I’m not sure whether Premiere’s XML export includes markers, but if it does then at least you can get all the marking work out into a small, shareable file. After that, some scripting *could* get you somewhere, even if it’s just a marker list in a spreadsheet. Quite likely a lot more work than the first option…
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Stephen Abbott -
Hi Scott,
This sounds like two separate problems:
1) Display inconsistency at the hardware or OS level:
It’s hard to know what’s going on without a step-by-step description of the problem and fix. What happens when you “lose the image”—is this just for Premiere or for the entire Mac? What steps do you have to reattempt a random number of times—and what are the failed and successful outcomes for these steps?
My experience of Mercury Transmit is that it’s rather tolerant of resolution changes and display disconnections—all it usually requires is a trip back to preferences and it’s working again.
2) Premiere full-screen playback:
From my tests it appears that toggle full screen only activates for the screen that is displaying the program monitor. Does Premiere insist on sending the toggled full-screen playback to your laptop screen, even when the program monitor is moved to the external/HDMI display?
3) Blackmagic and Premiere:
I haven’t used Blackmagic devices with Premiere, so can’t comment on that separate problem…–
Stephen Abbott -
A pleasure! FCP is very civilised in what it exports: you can hide and re-order the metadata columns for a neat custom export for less text-bashing down the line…
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Stephen Abbott -
Hi!
This is a Classic Mac Pro, right? You absolutely should get a RAID. For your budget, consider just doing an internal RAID on the SATA2 bus — either 3 or 4 drives. You can RAID1 or 0 them in software using AppleRAID, or spring for SoftRAID and get some more options.
Then, if you need more SATA connections beyond the two disc bays, get a PCI to SATA card. Macrumor’s Mac Pro forum has some good info on what cards work well. Most are bootable. Some are surprisingly cheap!
These two upgrades should be easily possible under $1000, depending on the size of the RAID you’d like.
What editing software are you using? If it’s FCPX or Premiere, consider a newer GPU, though the 680 is still pretty good, depending on what you’re doing.
It’s definitely not worth upgrading the CPUs. You can only put in the 3.46 GHz Xeon X5690s (your 3.33 GHz are X5680s, I believe), and the performance difference will be negligible.
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Regarding the RAID internally: I’ve opted to go for a RAID0. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the RAID0 every few hours to an external drive, and then I keep all the other files that are changing more rapidly on an SSD. I do run the risk of catastrophic failure on the media drives, but I can keep working on the external media backup and rebuild the RAID (probably minus one disk) overnight. (Of course, I also keep the media backed up more seriously, offsite.) I consider this worth it for the nice speed increase: you can expect roughly linear scaling of drive performance: my 4* WD SE 2TB drives give me a RAID0 that does 600MB/s sustained reads and writes, which is roughly 4* the single drive performance.
Edit: a little crazy, I know! As I get older I’m considering moving over to RAID5 from SoftRAID and leaving everything else as-is. Also, do note that you really need a hardware RAID controller to do things properly. This will almost certainly send you over $1000.
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Stephen Abbott -
Hi,
You can run a fullscreen playback in two ways:
1) Using Mercury Transmit. Plug in the screen, then hit Preferences > Playback > Enable Mercury Transmit, and select the monitor.
2) Using Toggle Full Screen command. I recently discovered this command, and it’s one better than the tilde ( ~ or ` ) key that maximises any window you’re hovering over. Hit Ctrl-Tilde and whatever screen that has the Program viewer will full the screen. Esc or Ctrl-Tilde gets you back out. Less controls than Mercury Transmit, but neat in a pinch (and can be used in conjunction with Mercury Transmit).
Not sure of the PC shortcuts, but you’re on a Mac and it should be easy to look up.
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Stephen Abbott -
Hi Eric,
I recently pushed out a lot of subclips into a spreadsheet. I’m also not really XML-literate, so I imported Premiere’s XML export into FCP7, then used the batch list export options to get a simpler text list. A bit of text bashing and it was spreadsheeted neatly. I realise this will be useless if you don’t have FCP7/Mac. In that case, send me a trimmed project as an XML export and I’ll sent it back in text.
(Edit: I’m in South Africa / GMT+2, so depending on where you are this might take a little time to round-trip.)
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Stephen Abbott -
Well, I went to check for a new Wacom driver, and instead got the older one… 6.3.11w3 from Jan 2015. So, it seems that Wacom has pulled the newer driver for now, and I’m back to being able to click-n-drag things in Premiere, whew!
@Brad Courtney, I don’t have the same timeline scrubbing problems you’re describing—that behaves pretty much as I expect (though Premiere is pretty choppy when scrubbing in the program monitor).
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Stephen Abbott -
Hi!
Not sure whether you’re referring to the footage codec or the sequence codec.
Footage codec:
I’ve had mixed results using camera-native codecs. Transcoding to ProRes or DNxHD before offline is definitely snappier, but for small-ish jobs I often just bring in whatever MPEG2 or 4 the camera recorded in. This depends on your machine, of course—the CPU, GPU and disk(s) speed.
Sequence codec:
I always use either a flavour of ProRes or DNxHD. I render as I go, and then when it comes to exporting, I select ‘use sequence previews’ and the export is pretty much as fast as the disks can handle it. This is analogous to the old FCP7 ‘export as FCP Quicktime movie’ option.
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Stephen Abbott -
Oh no! I updated the Wacom driver to 6.3.14-2, and Premiere’s slider response is back to the old madness…
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Stephen Abbott