[Stephen Eckelberry]

That’s a great tip, thanks. One month free trial is all I need! The only reason to go back to Premiere is to mess with graphics and manipulating images. I make templates In AE and export them as graphics I can use in Premiere Essential graphics. Lower thirds, etc.
although I must say the new color matching feature in Premiere is a great tool.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

Thanks guys for the input. Shane I agree with you, in my world too online and finish are the same thing. Just not in this case, as I am doing a pilot which will have a lot of temp shots in it and I want a good looking presentation. Hence the desire to work in Premiere after an offline cut.
I love premiere, been using it every day for 4 years, and before that went back and forth beteeen FCP7, Premiere and Avid. I have cut 5 narrative feature films on Premiere, so I speak from experience when I say I prefer Avid for large projects. As this project grows I will be hiring other editors, and the ones I want to use are Avid guys.
Oliver, I will probably do it all in Avid. Or DaVinci/Avid.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

Can’t speak for DaVinci. The question with any software is not is it the best, but what is everyone using? Because you don’t want to be in the sandbox playing alone.
Regarding Avid.
I find Avid clunky and use Premiere on short form, because the short pieces I do (trailers, spots and corporate) are graphic intensive.

Having said that, Avid is the only game in town for long form. And that has to do with it’s media management. A bin in Media Composer is also a folder on the hard drive. When you close a bin, Avid doesn’t think about that bin anymore until you open it again. Which means that you can have an insane amount of bins and media and work on a relatively slow computer. Not so with any other program. The bigger the project in PrP and FCP X, the more computing power it needs. In Avid when things start slowing down, close all the bins you don’t need.

Documentaries, reality shows and big budget features use a lot of media and have many sequences of various kinds. The need to share it with others, and they need to access everything. So Avid is king – for now.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

Try deleting all render files in all sequences. This fixes most PrPro CS5 freezing and slowing problems for me. Subject of much discussion on the Adobe PRPro forums, there is apparently a fix in the works. I stopped doing renders unless I have a lot of effects and want to check how a particular section is working. Once I finish that section, I delete the render files.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

I know that Color recognizes DPX images sequences, which is easy to export out of PrPro. I seem to recall that Color can also auto detect cuts, but you would have to get a confirm from someone else about that.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

– Or on FCP, hold F7 or F8 down, then press a number for what track you want to assign the source to. Shortkeys are important, I try to avoid as much mouse work as possible, 10-12 hour days 7 days a week take their toll on the fingers and wrists.
Just a few functionality issues away from taking on the big two – CS5 already has the best workflow.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

agreed.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

“In your keyboard shortcuts, under application (scroll all the way down by default), you’ll find track toggles. From there you can easily add a shortcut to select / deselect each track. You could use ALT + [Track #] for example. ”

Thanks for that Vince. I have actually assigned toggles for video & audio target tracks, doing what you described, but I still have to use the mouse on the source box to the left of the target track boxes to assign what track the audio or video goes to. That’s what I would like to have as a shortkey.

It would be nice if Pr did that automatically. Why, if I want to put a sound effect on track 4 do I not only have to assign track 4 as a target track and also move the audio source icon to track 4?

Happy 4th,

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

Well Alex, I understand now. Since I am not really working in a true workgroup environment, i.e.: with one set of media for everyone to use, I can’t ultimately answer your question. But I am working in a workgroup environment in that several (7-8) people are working on the same project. We will have a master computer that will contain the most up-to date PPro cut with a folder with the most up to date AE projects. We will end up by doing some manual replacing of the DL files simply because they will have been changed offline.

Stephen Eckelberry

[Stephen Eckelberry]

Sounds like 2 questions. “Replace with AE comp” seems to refer to working in Pr, while “Copy in PPro & paste in AE” sounds like work in AE. I did neither – though I should have tried “Replace with AE comp” – that’s probably what I was doing wrong in PR.

Instead when working in PPro I went to File>Adobe DL>import AE comp, and the same when using AE.

In any case, I am sticking to the one way method, as I have several interns at the University I am working with that are doing rotoscoping for me on their laptops, some of them using AE CS4. So I transfer one clip at a time to each student on their laptop, give them the in and out points and have them go to town. Then all they have to do is email me their AE project for that one clip and I re-link it on my system.

Stephen Eckelberry