[Tim Kolb]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “Way back in CS3 it worked… I don’t know when or why things went south. “

I think the main issue is that while the rest of the universe was working to advance their software, QuickTime was left to go to seed…

MP4s play in QuickTime on Macs last I knew…are there web applications where a “mov” wrapper is mandatory?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I’ve built countdowns of various types in AE…it’s pretty easy.

You may or may not need it to be something in motion, and I realize it may seem a bit weird, but depending on how many you need, setting it up in AE and then just sliding along the comp and saving frames out as PSDs might be the fastest way to get them done…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “Which is why Premiere runs multiple instances of the decoder (On windows it’s called ImporterREDServer.exe) “

Right. This is a good example of what I was alluding to, though I rarely throw RED out there as an example as it can’t be encoded and also has any number of unique aspects that often makes it an exception instead of a rule…

I typically see about 16 instances running when I run at full decode. They all shut down and go away when i quit the session, but they stay in RAM and use about 10MB a piece during the session, even if I’m no longer handling RED files. Like many pieces of software, it sounds like a corrupt file messes it up.

Nobody can encode RED files of course, but since we are usually exporting and creating frames as we go on a timeline export to long GOP format like H264, maybe the encode itself creates the speed ceiling so a faster clock helps more than adding cores beyond the render/export processes ability to use them…? All I know is that another system with dual Quads was exporting test files notably faster than my dual Hex core system and the main difference was CPU clock.

The way Adobe has been going however, I suspect many of these processes will continue to use system resources more effectively. It’s a matter of time.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Ryan Holmes] “I am running a Quadro FX 4800 card in this Mac (I’d recommend the 4000 as it’s more powerful and cheaper).”

Since the 4800 is typically a second-hand purchase these days, it may not be a bad investment if the price was right…memory access/speed is a touch better than the 4000 (keeping in mind that the 4000 is the descendant of the 3800, the model below the 4800…which updated to the original -non-Kepler- Quadro 5000)

One advantage to the 4000 is that it’s a single slot wide, whereas the 4800 covers (not plugs in to) 2 slots.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[josef brett] “The response I got from the Adobe forums was that the Project Manager shouldn’t really be used with AVCHD projects as it doesn’t copy the complete File/Folder structure that is required for the AVCHD files to function properly.”

Interesting…I thought I had done some trimming in the last year or so with Panasonic AVCHD files…but maybe I need to test that again.

Was the response from someone from Adobe, or another user?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I assume you’re on a Mac and trying to capture via FireWire?

Final Cut had the only FW interaction with Panasonic DVCProHD decks that I’m aware of…

Premiere Pro actually was the first to be able to use P2 files directly/natively…

So, if you can capture with FCP, you’ll probably be OK.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I suspect since Premiere Pro is cross platform and it can’t write ProRes on the Windows side, this may represent the limitation at the moment.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

The key to this (even when a shooter is actually shooting) is that a “wiggle” or a shake is typically not what you want. The language used in my circle is “float”. It’s a matter of the camera moving while staying focused on the subject. In other words, the variable tends to be that the shooter moves their body to keep the person (or whatever) in the foreground fairly stable, but the background will be moving slightly. It’s usually employed to add a bit of tension to a specific scene in cases where the rest of the project may be rock-steady.

Actually a less experienced shooter intentionally “shaking” the camera, or shaking the shot ends up usually being something that makes the entire composition shakes and our focal point in the shot “shakes” or moves about erratically, making the material hard to watch…for anyone.

There are camera shake plugins (Digieffects Damage has one), and usually a very subtle movement, as Ann suggests, or using it as a specific “event” that represents an impact in the scsne is what can be done at that point. Anything more active gets pretty dicey because of course, you can’t do a “float” in post where your background is sliding about behind your focal point to show some motion without jarring your viewer loose from where they’re looking…so all you can do in post is shake the entire frame.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

If they were unsupported by PPro, you wouldn’t see video…

When you bring the file(s) in, how long are you waiting before playback? The audio from those files has to “conform”, meaning that Premiere Pro needs to cache some data nd create some preview acceleration files and that may take a bit depending on how long the clips are. Until the conforming is finished, you won’t get audio playback in the timeline.

There is usually a progress indicator running in the lower right bottom of the interface that is visible while this is happening.

I have a feeling this may be what’s happening while you’re trying to use the clips immediately after bringing them in.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Yes, Adobe does bypass the QT wrapper for several codecs, and H264 is one of those…(BTW, thank you Adobe!)

…and Adobe does do some innovative things with different media handling to be sure. I know there are certain circumstances where they do some creative things with different decoding schemes and they may have something they do with H264 in the way of utilizing multiple threads…

However, most of the stand alone H264 decoding schemes are pretty serial, and I know that during the testing I was doing during an assignment with NVIDIA during the CS6 development cycle, the computers that were faster H264 encoders were always based on clock speed over core count. (RED Cinema’s decoder is a single thread wide too…keeps those RED Rocket cards selling…)

During some training I did with CS6 for the US Military, we found that dual core 13″ MacBook Pros that clocked out over 3 GHz were doing pretty well editing DSLR and GoPro footage (both H264 derivatives)in Premiere Pro CS6… that said, I don’t think I’d recommend cutting a feature on one…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor