[Tim Kolb]

I have never used the preference to force scale media as I work with various size assets and scale them myself quite often.

What I don’t like is the size that the asset is scaled to becomes the 100% scale factor. If I imported some 1080 material into a project where I intended to use it in a 720 sequence, and the media force-scaled to size, I would like to see the motion-scale setting tell me it’s scaled to 67% (approximate) instead of 100%.

To be honest, so many of my projects have multiple sequence types that I wonder what the preference would actually scale to? The last sequence I touched before I imported the asset? The first sequence I created in the project? I’ve never had time to test it.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I think Robert means the levels are actually reduced to zero…not that the audio level is low in the clips themselves. Audio gain won’t help a clip that has its clip volume reduced to zero.

You might try to select all the clips (you can drag-marquee select in the sequence, or use the CMD-A to select all)…

…then right-click and select “Remove Effects” from the menu and select “audio effects” and check only “Volume”…

Does that accomplish what you need?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[William Terrio] “My co-worker is saying that we shouldn’t edit with these MP4s because they aren’t as efficient and as high quality as the mov versions. Also, when dropped into the timeline, it says Conforming [clip name] in the corner to all the MP4s. He’s saying that’s eating up a ton of data, but according to a different discussion on here, it’s apparently just doing the audio, which I would think is very minimal.”

Exporting the clips as .movs just rewraps the file…so no quality change, no real difference if you aren’t transcoding to ProRes or something like that. And even then, you’re creating a 10 bit file with an 8 bit image inside…and Premiere Pro will decode either format into 4:4:4 32 bit float on the fly anyway.

…and as confusing as this sounds…XDcamHDEX files may have an “mp4” extension, but all XDcam derivatives are MPEG2 payload, so they aren’t tough to cut at all.

…conforming varies on different formats and in different circumstances, but typically conforming is making a separate audio file that is not embedded in the MPEG2 file for easier handling, yes.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

How many clips are there? If there are only a few, I’d just go in and use the “Motion-Scale” parameter in the Effects Control panel and scale them up.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

“YUV”…or really “Y’CbCr” is the structure of all video types save just a few special cases, usually at the D-Cinema level.

VHS material is already pretty hashed…I would at least make sure I was capturing from a pro SVHS deck with a timebase corrector and a noise reduction filter to at least present the cleanest signal to the compression process.

VHS doesn’t have enough level to justify using log…you’ll just create archive video that will have to be used with a look up table to get the grayscale to look right.

v210 is already pretty beefy…you’ll be making huge files with that, and there will be more than enough juice to store everything that you have preserved on a VHS tape. really, even an 8 bit codec should be just fine as the color fidelity of VHS is pretty low…though I understand you want to archive the best possible product. You may want to test some of this but I think that there is just no way you’d ever need RGB for this purpose.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I know the Kona 3G will do this with Premiere Pro.

Does that answer your question? You were asking which NLE will do this using a Kona card, correct?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Is this on a different machine than the CS6 project was on?

I’m wondering if you cleaned your media cache database (in preferences) and brought in the project and relinked the media? It sounds as if the application believes it has some cached previews someplace.

Are there preview files that come up missing when you launch the project?

And…not to be insulting…but you do have all the video tracks in the timeline turned ‘on’ and visible, right?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Mike Jackson] “I generally expect new software on a slightly beefier machine to be able to at least match the performance of older software on a slower machine. That’s not so unreasonable is it? 😉 And also, keep in mind that Avid ALSO plays back just fine on my current system, so I’m not just comparing the latest version of Premiere to legacy software.”

What you’re comparing however, is 2 legacy workflows that convert all sources to some uniform format before editing…and unless I’m mistaken, they’re both 32 bit applications…they can’t even address more than 4 GB of RAM maxed out…and with QT 7.x being 32 bit yet…they don’t have to run the adaptation to make 32 bit codecs work in a 64 bit editing environment like Adobe does. Again…the applications. media structure, OS and hardware are a fit for those programs.

Adobe takes everything you throw at it, flops it on an edit timeline, and if you have the torque…doesn’t have to render anything. Neither Avid or FCP are designed to do this. Even AMA isn’t really the same thing.

Adobe’s edit sequences aren’t even tied to a codec (you set the preview codec independent of source formats)…they’re just frame rate, frame size, and pixel aspect ratio…and I’ve even mixed those together along with mixing codecs and color subsample structure…

Premiere Pro just decodes it all to 4:4:4 32 bit float and plows through it. Non-video framesizes? No problem, just make up settings…portrait? Web banner? Whole number non-video framerates? Easy. (Do you know how much screen-grab FCP training is edited on Premiere Pro? 🙂 )

However, this capability does require some hardware power and that’s why FCP7 and ProRes will run beautifully on a Mac laptop that will choke and die editing much smaller, but far more intense-to-decode DSLR h264 video in Premiere Pro.

The system demands are just vastly different for a 64 bit application and a “decodes anything and cut it” workflow. I have 16 GBs RAM and a 2 GB Quadro card in my Lenovo i7 laptop…and I cut RED R3D on it with out much bother at all.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Was this footage transcoded?

Are there files of certain types that can’t be seen?

Do you see some camera footage clips, but not others?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Snow Leopard was introduced in…2009? CS6 is 2012 software. (I know…Adobe lists the 2011 10.6.8 patch as an acceptable OS…)

I suspect that this, combined with 8 GB of RAM are contributors. While I agree that Adobe’s printed minimum system requirements are optimistic…it’s very typical across the board for NLE manufacturers to look at scenarios where a school might use the system to teach editing and utilize very low overhead media types, and to try to be conservative. FCP7’s minimum RAM requirement was also pretty unrealistic for heavy work when I compared them one day…

All that said, I agree that ProRes should run like butter (on a Mac)I think that you have to consider what else is running on the machine as it sounds like there is a fundamental conflict there somewhere.

With the inconsistent performance you note, what background apps are running that may be fluctuating in how they are interacting with the system? Is QT updated? (I don’t know how the QT versions tie out to the OS versions, so maybe 7.6.6 or later is already in there automatically?) How about the iStat app you mention? Have you tried to kill some of this stuff and run PPro?

I know that a FCP user would say that PPro should run the same on their system as FCP does, but FCP7 is basically 32 bit, 2007 software with some updates in 2009.

Premiere Pro CS3 was current in 2007…Premiere Pro has released 4 major versions since then and 3 significant release versions since going 64 bit. If your OS version can’t even run the Black Magic drivers released for this version of PPro…

I think even if you can get some of these issues cleaned up, you have to grant that it would run better on the newer OS versions and hardware drivers which would be contemporary to its release.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor