[Tam Perl]

We have a Mac based studio, and our staple is Premiere Pro CS4. We’ve had tons of problems. But based on following complaints on the COW I don’t think PP on the Mac has any more, nor less, problems than on a PC. Whatever you do, make sure you have loads of computing power and RAM.

The bottom line is — there’s no guarantee you’ll get away from the problems by switching. (You will have more fun on the Mac, so in between tearing your hair out, you may have a small amount of comfort!)

I doubt you can transfer your license, though.

Tam

[Tam Perl]

We have a small studio equipped with Macs, and we use the Adobe suite, current version is CS4. Believe me, there are tons of issues with Premiere, and every time we hit a serious snag — which has been often — we “swear” we are switching to Final Cut. We have FCP on one of our machines, and we’ve done some testing. On balance, our decision has been to stick with Premiere. Because ultimately every Adobe problem has a workaround, and there is one major advantage to using Adobe — and that is dynamic link. In our particular workflow we have a lot of “back-and-forthing” between Premiere and After Effects, and the ability to do this via dynamic linking has been the clincher which has kept us with Adobe.

My bottom line advice to you is — stay with the app / system that you’re familiar with. If you’re starting from scratch as between FCP and Premiere — I think FCP has the edge on the individual program Premiere, but the dynamic linking is (for us) the decider.

Important — if you’re setting up a new system, make sure you have enough computing power, with plenty of RAM.

Good luck

Tam

[Tam Perl]

We use Macs exclusively, so take this comment with that in mind. I think there are two separate problems here. The “stuttering” as you call it is something we have experienced on the Mac, with Adobe programs. I think it’s a screen redraw problem when the RAM is kinda full. That’s my guess. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, a computer restart fixes it.

The spontaneous reboot is something we just recently had on one of our Macs running Windows under Boot Camp. It was diagnosed by the Mac Genius as a motherboard problem. We chose not to fix it. I guess we’ll never know for sure. The word “virus” comes to mind…

Cheers

Tam

[Tam Perl]

When a company such as Adobe goes public with a product, you expect it to perform. The advertising, the website, the general hype at all the demos (if any of you go to user group meetings) — everything about CS4 has been “sold” to us as a product that does x,y, and z. The fact of the matter is, it does NOT do the things it was cracked up to do. I’m not talking about some speed loss. I’m reading all over the forums about apps crashing, sticking, hanging, output coming out pixelated, and a general bugginess — and there are a lot of unhappy people out there. And the reason I’m looking at forums, is that we are experiencing all these symptoms on 3 separate Macs. We upgraded from CS3 — where we had zero problems. The same footage, the same effects, the same everything, does not work on CS4.

Now don’t tell me about Adobe’s careful wording and marketing, and license agreements which seem to absolve them of everything. We are not beta testers. There are a whole lot of professionals out here who make our living using Adobe products, and we rely on the company to deliver a working product. We rely on the demos and the claims made by the company. Because every feature that doesn’t work, and every bug, costs us in time, money, and aggravation. And I’m starting to sense a grass-roots movement of people who have just had enough.

And my question here is — what do we need to do to make Adobe aware, of just how desperately they need to allocate every possible resource, to fixing these problems NOW, and not in next year’s CS5 upgrade?

[Tam Perl]

In CS3 I would export from Premiere using a quicktime format to a non-compressed file – set the codec to “None” in the same drop-down menu where you would choose Animation or anything else similar. Compress later using a specialized compression app. The problem with CS4 is that the “none” option now greys out many of the options, so that it does its own thing that is too low a bit rate to give you any sharpness. If anyone has the fix for this problem, I’d like to know it.

[Tam Perl]

Update – someone on the Adobe forum suggested I activate the bitrate checkbox and change the number. It’s grayed out by default. I think that is the solution. Busy testing. But initial results are encouraging.

[Tam Perl]

Thanks for your response, Jon. I rendered another two samples, just to make sure. I have labeled them “settings 1” and “__2” respectively — each has a screen capture of the settings dialog box, the rendered movie, and a screen capture of one frame of the movie (because the movie itself is very large. I left it at original large size to demonstrate that I have not compressed it. It won’t take all that long to load though, depending on your connection.) The variations are all numbered so as to clearly show which output came from which settings.

These files can be found together with my original samples, in this directory — https://www.tamotion.com/sample/ In the DV version, I also left the pixel aspect ratio at the default — again, to demonstrate how the app handles the file without my changing anything.

Response to your comment re the install — this is happening on THREE computers.

Both I and two colleagues are getting the same results. So even if I don’t know what I’m doing — THREE of us don’t know???

I suspect there is a basic preference or other setting that we may have not set correctly. Or perhaps we are missing the point of just how to export in the new app.

One last set of information that you may find helpful in trying to help us. The projects contain a mixture of dynamicly-linked AE projects, some quicktime movies (photo jpg), and original dv footage shot on a 3-chip prosumer Sony VX2100.

We have been successfully using this combination of input for about a year, and we get very clear and sharp results — the only loss of quality comes from our upscaling the dv to 125% – but we’ve never had anything like this before.

Although you are seeing only a small sample of the output, I have tried to isolate the problem by rendering various combinations — the part with an AE project, and/or the DV, and/or a whole sequence, and/or a small work area. I have tried checking the checkbox for max. bit depth on and off, at various bit depths when this option was presented. I tried so many combinations, I can’t recall them all at this moment, but it doesn’t matter — point I want to make is that the problem occurs all the time, except the DV preset without any customization.

Thanks for listening. Any suggestion will be welcomed.

[Tam Perl]

Yes – I’ve left a message for Boris – still waiting for response. But I was hoping someone out there in cow-land might have a fix… I’m really quite desperate to find some some workable solution for greenscreening inside of Premier. Any comments?? Thanks

Tam

[Tam Perl]

Thanks for your input, and I’ll check out the other forum. I’m going to try your method.
Thanks again,
Tam

[Tam Perl]

John – you make an excellent point about “idiot-proofing”. I’m going to take your advice. And thank you for the recommendation. I’m taking your suggestion on that too.

Tam