[Tim Kolb]

…I’m going to go directly against the grain here and tell you that you were most correct to go to ‘interpret footage’ first.

1. Doing the math for the percentage speed control is rarely perfect and it’s not nearly as smooth as just changing the framerate in the overcranked footage in 99% of cases I’ve encountered.

2. Every time you use the clip in the sequence you need to apply speed control on the timeline vs. adjusting the framerate interpretation once…in the bin.

I’ve done an awful lot of this type of thing and I’ve never had a situation where the speed control was as smooth as fundamental frame rate interpretation. It’s one of Premiere Pro’s lesser mentioned but truly time-saving features.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Keep in mind with 4 layers of video/GFX, they all need to be decoded simultaneously…I suspect that your processor is maxed out if the drive is actually keeping up.

I would bet you’ll be able to preview render or export…real-time playback is probably limited by four layers of video compression heavy-lifting on the CPU and/or the drive speed trying to keep up…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

What happens if you leave the dissolve in place and save the project and look at it again?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

H264 doesn’t carry an alpha channel…you need a format that does like QT Animation or QT PNG.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

In the cases where it looks darker, you’re bypassing QuickTime I would assume.

QuickTime has an old, old…apparently never to be fixed gamma interpretation bug for H264.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Ryan Holmes] “Our workflow centers around ProRes (Proxy all the way up to 4444) and I don’t have any problems playing back on our Mac Pro towers which range in age from 2008-2012. All of our data runs off of a 10Gb Fiber SAN.”

That seems more predictable to me…I know that ProRes wasn’t snappy on Windows until CC and then, even with 32 bit QuickTime (remember that Adobe is cross-platform and AV Foundation is not), it’s improved markedly.

I know it doesn’t make much sense, but the behavior Bryan talks aboiut does seem like QT figures in as he has no issues with other formats…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Is Premiere Pro using 32 bit QuickTime on Mac like it does on Windows?

FCP7 is a 32 bit NLE that edits QuickTime so 32 bit QT codecs are optimal…Premiere Pro CS5 and later are 64 bit NLE applications that have to run a frame server to even use 32 bit QuickTime formats at all.

I would have thought on Mac that performance wouldn’t be as pathetic as QuickTime 7.x is on Windows as I assumed that Adobe might be able to use the new and spiffy Media Foundation for this sort of thing…but what you describe seems like a textbook case of Premiere Pro’s ability to crank through all sorts of media…until you get to a file type that can only be handled by QuickTime (unlike mp4’s for example, etc. which Premiere Pro decodes directly), which would slow things down on Windows…though the performance has really improved since version CC on Windows.

So, as odd as it sounds, it certainly sounds like QuickTime is implicated in the problem in some fashion from what you’re describing, even though that sounds odd on a Mac.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Joshua Weiss] “Unfortunately, I have done this step a couple times over the course of the past couple months. “

Each update does cancel it out…though it’s supposed to be fixed in CC 2014.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Nope…not useful.

…and I’m NOT a former FCP user.

🙂

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Shane Ross] “No WONDER it’s easy for you. You are running a machine from the future. How light are those 2103 models? Must be paper light!”

It’s a surgical implant…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor