[Tim Kolb]

This should not be a problem, but some ProRes is not full raster, so check out what the real clip resolution is…and you may have to do this by looking at it in Bridge and viewing the metadata.

I have found that the Inspector in QuickTime sometimes tells me that a clip is “1280×720” as that’s what the player is mapping it to, but on further examination in Bridge it may very well be 960×720.

This is important to making the most responsive timeline in PPro possible as remapping pixels can take up system resources that you could be employing elsewhere.

The format is solid, it’s quite solid to edit in my experience…you just can’t export your master cut to ProRes from a Windows machine…or from a Mac without Final Cut for that matter.

…though if you have an SDI I/O card, you could feed an AJA KiPro the master timeline and it would write a ProRes file…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

While I am not Todd, some oof your assertions deserve some comment.

1. Todd probably has the ability to interact with folks on the team who would manage these relationships, but from what I know about his role, I don’t believe his primary focus is in this area.

2. As a former product mgr for a plugin manufacturer, I can tell you that makikng effects plugins for Adobe is a far easier scenario than making te same for Apple. These manufacturers who are only developing for FCP are first focusing on unit sales, and if you’ve done your development as fxplug (Apple’s proprietary plugin architecture because having a plugin architecture that was originally based on AE and was therefore universally compatible wasn’t very Apple-like I guess), I’m not sure how easy it is to port…I know porting in the other direction wasn’t a snap.

3. There are no “contracts” with the host app company unless you’re making some agreement to place an effect “in the box” so to speak. Any of these manufacturers could port their poducts tomorrow and they get the AE and PPro customer base all in one shot. It’s up to the plugin manufacturer, the SDK isn’t exactly hidden in a mountain cave or anything.

4. On speed… Sapphire and Boris are very powerful and diverse effects libraries and they are GPU accelerated. I’m not sure what your system configuration is, but unless you have a substantial GPU in the machine, these effects are just very complex and high quality and they may be slower on older systems. If you have a newer system with a CUDA card, currently no 3rd party vendors have access to the CUDA pipeline, so traditional GPU effects have to “share” with CUDA effects and if you have them mixed on the same clip, that switching can affect speed rather substantially in my experience.

Basically I would wonder why companies like you mention are neglecting the rather substantial market of Adobe users more than I’d wonder why Adobe isn’t begging them to address the most substantial plug in market segment available (AE and compatible apps). Adobe products have the absolutely largest library of plugin effect support there is…why certain companies desire to restrict themselves to a specific niche probably isn’t a concern for them quite honestly.

We’ll alll probably know more about FCP’s future in less than 100 hours…then the 3rd party vendors who have confined themselves to that host app will have to decide how they see themselves moving forward.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

The GoPro creates a file that CS5 understands under the heading of “DSLR”, but anything earlier will require that the media be converted to something else.

MPEG Streamclip is a pretty effective solution…with CS3’s last updates installed or CS4, you could convert it to XDcamHDEX and run it. With CS2 (soon to be 4 versions from current) I would recommend CineForm as an intermediate, but I’m not certain there is a compatible version available any more.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Actually “demosaic” and “debayer” are used interchangeably and they refer to the process necessary to “construct” the image from a bayer pattern sensor, which is of course, only really acquires a value for one of the three color channels at every photosite.

The debayer settings are in the RED ‘source settings’, where the metadata interface is with the exposure, color, and OLPF settings, etc.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Yeah…you can specify the framerate in the output file so it isn’t like you’re restricted to using 60fps in your H264 file.

I think most of the issue is that 720p really only has two framerates as a “video” standard…50 and 60 progressive. Panasonic’s PN modes are great as you don’t waste all the space for redundant frames (you save 50% with 30PN, but guys shooting 23.976PN save 60%…which is even more significant obviously). However, I think most systems are simply looking for that standard 720p video stream, particularly when it comes down to 30 vs 60 or 25 vs 50.

PPro understands it, so it’s not like you’re “recreating” wasted data…it’s just traveling down the pipe the way the next process expects to see it.

I suspect if there is a “glitch”, it’s likely that the “29.97” frame rate flag simply triggered the material to be read as standard def interlaced because there is no 29.97 framerate below 1920×1080 other than standard definition, which is typically interlaced. Hence the decoder probably goes through a sequence of assessment like: Q: framerate? A: 29.97, Q: Framesize 1920×1080? A: no, Choose: NTSC interlace SD decode parameters.

There was a similar hangup back when 24p/29.97i DV in the Panasonic DVX camera came out. You made a “24p” project and ended up with PAL diagnostics (waveform/vector) as it was a “framerate below 29.97 equals PAL” sort of instruction set. It was the first time that framerate was really addressed and it simply took some time to track down all the affected parameters.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Well…you may want to try to shut off automatic updates for Windows if that’s on…Microsoft seems to “fix” things with a toolbox filled with primarily sledgehammers from time to time. Then, attempt a system restore to a week ago or whenever it worked last…

You could also attempt to launch and dump the preferences…which I believe is still done by holding down “shift” as the app launches, but it’s been a few years since I’ve done it.

What was the last thing you were doing on it?

One thing about system requirements and video editing on computers…and Apple is as absurd as Adobe is when it comes down to the ‘spirit’ of what gets shown and what it takes to actually do what’s demonstrated to the customer.

The minimum system requirements for software in most industries is adequate to run the software in question…in the world of video where Premiere Pro CS5 is owned by people who work with standard definition DV footage all the way up to 4K RED RAW files and DPX and uncompressed 2K files for feature film work, the minimum requirements are what it takes to boot the software and look at the most minimal video clip in the timeline.

I have a laptop that is several years old and has a dual-core processor and 2 GB of RAM and I can get PPro CS4 to run (my system isn’t 64 bit so I can’t run CS5 on it) and I can even edit on it, but I am very aware of its limitations and I couldn’t edit every day on it.

Trade show demos are typically done on workstations using electromagnetic nuclear technology acquired from captured inter stellar spacecraft downed in New Mexico (not really…but the machines used for tradeshow demos need to have some serious stuff to show off all the features in a program like PPro CS5, particularly when using dynamic link.)

For those working in HD or higher on a daily basis, Premiere Pro CS5 runs productively on systems with 16 GB of RAM (compared to 2 GB), two 4-core processors that hyper-thread to give you 16 effective processor cores (your processor has 2 cores, no HT), and a CUDA-capable NVIDIA display card that can execute many effects across the hundreds of GPU cores on the display card.

If the machine will launch PPro CS5 and you can get things done, then I guess you’re good once you get this glitch figured out, but a word to the wise…most “IT guys” just don’t have the experience with video post production to spec a productive editing workstation system build. If this is the primary purpose of this system and your primary function within the company, you are grossly under-powered. If this is only a part of your job with the company and you aren’t editing video all day every day, it may be only annoyingly pokey and I would not pit this system against a hot deadline as that’s when an overachieving workstation will usually fall over.

At the very very least, I’d try to quadruple the RAM in the system and see if there is any chance you could acquire a CUDA card to help the performance.

If you should find that you have no ability to do anything with the system, at some point you may want to try out Sony Vegas as that’s an editing system that runs far better on limited hardware systems in my experience.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Where do you have your scratch disk targeted? Is it full?

1 GB of RAM? Is that right or did the ‘6’ that should be after the ‘1’ just not type out?

While determinig why the app stopped working will be a challenge, I’d have to say I’m a little shocked it worked at all on the system you’re describing. Are you only working with DV?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I could almost guarantee you’ve never seen a CS5 demo with RED 4K playing out in real-time for any serious stretch at more than quarter-res playback. RAW R3D files are computationally intense to decode and the decode itself is still CPU based, even though CUDA picks up lots of slack in the frame scaling and effects department..

Demos are usually…optimized shall we say?

The only recommendation I might make here is to check your demosaic settings and maybe back off the complexity a bit and see if you can get half res playback to endure for a bit.

The computer hardware is going to be there before we know it…Adobe is just a bit ahead of the curve on this one…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I don’t know what “glitch” would be there. I worked with 720p30 PN footage for a good part of my PPro training, and it was like clockwork on Windows and Mac…

What exactly did you customize on the sequence setting…and can you simply make a new, unaltered DVCProHD 72-p60 sequence and copy/paste the content over and try it progressive all the way from there?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

…um, RGB adjustment…

Well…this is not meant to be as flip a response as it will appear to be, but, yes there is…

That would be the “RGB Color Corrector”.

…or do I misunderstand your question?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,