Tim Kolb
Forum Replies Created
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[Peter Corbett] “I feel the interaction between CS4 and the Decklink card has been a major issue.”
Yeah, I think all the third party developers have had to re-tool significantly with CS4. I use Xena myself and have almost no experience with the Black Magic products, so I can’t shed much light in that area I’m afraid.
I’d agree that the titler in PPro is likely one of it’s most overlooked assets.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
You would have to make multiple passes…
render one…put it back on the timeline…render another speed pass.
Most people will do timelapse of this type in-camera as it creates a lot of media to roll at say, 30 frames a second when you know you’ll want one frame every 10 minutes…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
I’d do some edit tests with the two types of media to make sure you have some actual advantage…
FCP handles EXcam footage pretty handily. Keep in mind that a conversion from the highest quality file you can create in the EX3 to PreRes HQ will be a 6:1 data size jump (35 Mbits/sec to 220 Mbits/sec). Though it does end up being more like a 3:1 jump if you ingest all EX footage into FCP using log/capture as the assets will need to be duplicated and rewrapped if want the footage and it’s metadata.
(I believe if you dig down into each BPAV media folder and get to the MP4 video file only…it will load directly onto the timeline, but I’m not sure if there is then a way to access the metadata.)
With the kind of footage being accumulated in a reality television environment, I’d think the blow to your storage costs alone would be enough to give you pause.
ProRes is great, but sometimes I think the challenges of handling MPEG long GOP are overstated and not really up to date with current system capabilities.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Interesting.
Even on underpowered XP systems, I’ve found CS4 to be less generally unstable than CS3 was (particularly under heavy loads with big projects)…which was surprising to me as it seems like CS4 uses far more resources. I’ve only edited DV a couple times, otherwise I’m primarily working with EX1 footage and a little bit of ProRes, odd size screen captures, etc.
I’ve only had CS4 check out a couple times…when I first installed it I found out that Panda antivirus was simply fatal with PPro CS4 on XP 32, and the other day I did manage to accumulate a page file of better than 2.7 GB on a 2 proc, dual core AMD machine running XP 32 and it fell over… Otherwise there hasn’t been much to report since about 4.1.
My workstation has a Vista boot partition, but I have a unique display setup and could never properly configure the Vista 64 NVIDIA drivers to light up all four displays…so I’ll be leapfrogging to W7 due to non-Adobe issues on that machine and see what we can do with that.
I’ve had my share of complaints with Premiere Pro over the years…and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an NLE user community that would state that their app was perfect (other than the *edit people…I have heard few complaints about that piece of software…but of course it was gone before formats like P2, SxS and AVCHD even hit the scene), but with CS4 my experience has been OK.
…now my AJA drivers and various other third party relationships have all been CS3 until such point where I felt I had all the update issues worked out to move forward, so that’s one caveat I have. I keep all systems in multi-boot to preserve the last viable system until I’ve confirmed it all works together, and the OS is just another variable in that process…
What was the Windows configuration that was under your deal-breaker system Peter?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Did anything weird happen to the pixel aspect values anywhere in any of the project or encode settings?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[Joe Moya] “I didn’t know that CS4 used 64bit… I looked at the specs and don’t see any mention of it being a 64bit application.”
It’s not a 64 bit app…but running a 64 bit OS will give PPro access to a full 4 GB instead of what’s left over after the OS and all the background Adobe apps take their portion of even the 3.5 GB of RAM you can access with the hack… (Boxx and other reputable workstation builders do not recommend this practice for stability reasons, so I stick to the 2.5 GB available method on my XP systems).
A fast processor will run software fast…but more RAM will help it stabilize as paging that data on and off of a drive is simply not as easy as having it all in RAM.
On the HDV renders…again, I don’t even know if I have any HDV data around here to try, so I can’t troubleshot that.
As fast as your system may be, there are a lot of possible incompatibility issues in there…the memory hack, all the other components we’ve mentioned. I know it sounds like a cop-out, but I haven’t seen loads of this sort of feedback for PPro users working with HDV (to be fair, I have heard from some others however), so somebody must be making it work…somewhere.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[alex ezorsky] “Why is premiere exporting the same dimensions, same aspect, same, pixel ratio, same compression, at LOWER QUALITY!?”
Um…how are these two examples the same anything?
Per your initial post:
———————————-
AE comp settings 640×480 sq px (video scaled down)
AE export settings: FLV 640×480 CBR 480mbpsPremiere sequence settings: DV NTSC 720×480 (.9) (video scaled down)
AME export settings: FLV 720×480 CBR 480 mbps (crop 2 px on top)—————————————————
These may be the same approximate viewing size, but there is almost nothing else that is common between them other than the final bitrate of the FLV.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[Joe Moya] “This machine works fine with AVID (both MC and Liquid), VEGA and All Adobe software except Premier Pro. …Not to mention C4D and Blender.”
I haven’t done any HDV native in a long time, so I can’t speak directly to that. The EXcam stuff I’ve done seems fine and that’s also long GOP and higher data rate, but it’s an MP4 wrapper…
I will say that C4D and Blender are both applications that use up a computer system in a completely different way than an NLE will. Those two apps have so much less interaction with the various systems in your machine than an editing system will that you can’t really use them as a benchmark.
As far as Avid and Vegas are concerned, keep in mind that when you launch PPro, you’re launching a background app for Photoshop and a dynamic link manager, an importer, etc., and those are using resources. Most NLEs don’t have as much other stuff running in the background.
I’ve long been an advocate of giving the user a switch for the beginning of the session…(Dynamic Link ON/OFF) so that PPro could just run like an editor, but I’m guessing this isn’t possible.
How big are your page files getting during a session? This usually seems to be the catch on most systems…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Have you verified that all the settings for the encode were identical? I wonder if the update ended up flipping a proverbial switch someplace?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[Joe Moya] “As far as Adobe not working because of substandard hardware… I beg to differ. Below are my specs and I have NEVER been able to get Adobe to work well with HD files.”
You have an integrated sound card, a gamer display card, and even though you have 6 GB of RAM, 32 bit WinXP only makes available 2.5 at the most and PPro needs serious RAM…it just does. If you are not on a 64 bit OS with 8 GB of RAM minimum, you simply cannot say you have a powerful system in the context of CS4…or actually even CS3.
Even 32 bit PPro wants 4 GB of RAM…and no 32 bit system is capable of making that available, many can’t even make half of that available after the system takes its share. Open up Photoshop and AE for some dynamic linking (which each wants 4 GB of its own BTW) and now you have 3 RAM-heavy apps sharing a very limited amount of resources.
So even 32 bit CS4 and CS3 benefit substantially from running a 64 bit OS and more recognized, installed RAM.
As I said, (and I’m NOT recommending this…) I’ve been editing EX1 files in CS4 on a WinXP laptop with 2 Gigs of RAM (but a Mobile Quadro 2500 display card) and other than the computer being seriously taxed and external USB drives being a little sluggish to respond from time to time, I’ve had no issues to speak of (Panda Antivirus was a problem when I first got CS4, but that was easy to solve…switched to McAfee)…certainly no crashing or malfunctioning.
As I’ve said before…I think Adobe has made this software so inexpensive that it gives some people the impression they can run it on a relatively moderate computer platform. It’s a powerful set of applications (whether they are your favorite applications or not is irrelevant) and they need serious, serious system resources to operate properly.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,