[Tim Kolb]

I think that the 500 pound gorilla in the room is that Windows users do not seem to run into many of the issues that Mac users run into.

There is a huge Windows user population for PPro and we find ourselves unable to assist those coming over who are running Macs because of the different ecosystem and conventions.

We have a bit of the eternal divide between Adobe and Avid resurfacing…deck control and video I/O. Avid was first on the scene and their entire mission was based on replacing conventional VTR-based editing systems, and they started with all the critical factors needed in that environment…timecode, accurate deck control, etc.

Adobe Premiere started life as a video media editing application. The original idea with Premiere was editing QuickTime video inside of the computer. Over the years, this has been a traditional obstacle to many in our industry christening Premiere/Premiere Pro a “professional” tool.

Over time, the industry has sort of circled back toward PPro’s strengths in that cameras that shoot data result in a direct transfer in…no deck control needed. Suddenly Adobe has some real traction as all this time they’ve been working on enhancing their capabilities with more kinds of data…while Avid/FCP stayed in the “transcode to the house format” mindset for quite a long period.

Whether this window of opportunity ends up passing Adobe by this time or not, I’m sure part of the excruciating decision that has to be made by Adobe is whether or not to place considerable resources into:

1) …building up support for a fading technology. Tape has no future of growth obviously…no disprespect to those who are still dependent on it…but that’s the fact. It won’t result in future sales growth for any large player in our industry to enhance their VTR controls in this decade.,

2) …troubleshooting a platform and OS that doesn’t seem all that cooperative (NVIDIA display options suddenly go ‘poof’ on Mac Book Pros just as the way Adobe uses CUDA starts to give them traction on the Apple platform…interesting),

3) …with a media architecture that isn’t cross platform any longer (QTX has not been rushed to Windows where QT7.x is still 32 bit),

4) …amidst the deliberations of that company regarding dropping the hardware product line that is best suited to run PPro in the first place (Mac Pro workstations).

I’m not anti-Mac, but I can sympathize with the potential no-win situation Adobe faces here. I know they are concerned about these issues as Al Mooney the new product manager spent time with Avid…he knows the landscape.

While I know none of this is any consolation when you have to use the machine you’ve invested considerably in far in excess of the hardware purchase price, to make a living… I do think there are market forces that can’t be ignored here, and Adobe is a business that needs to be thoughtful about their development investment long-arc as well as short-arc, and make choices that make sense in ROI terms as well as supporting the widest variety of customers possible.

Adobe makes a product that has certain strengths, Avid has theirs…FCP had theirs pre-FCPX…and has different strengths now. As Avid and Adobe both try to listen intently to FCP7 refugees to accommodate them in the best way possible, neither one is Apple, and their applications aren’t FCP.

Those of us who decided against FCP years ago want to help those moving to Adobe or Avid all we can, but both companies are not Apple and the prospect of either of them building an app that is as “hand-in-glove” as FCP was on Mac seems unlikely unless it’s something that Apple decides they want.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

If the text was typed with the Shift or Caps Lock key engaged originally, the text should come across that way.

If the text was typed into a document where the formatting determined the use of caps, that formatting won’t transfer.

The closest thing you could do would be to select the pasted text once you’ve released it in the titler, check “small caps” in the text attributes, which will change everything into Caps and will make the “lower case” letters smaller to the percentage value specified. If you want all the letters to be full size, specify 100%.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

The bottom line is that you are working on a system that is fundamentally limited in what it can do with PPro CS5/5.5, which is the reason for the transcode time projection.

I think Jon’s suggestion is a good one, but for this software, most of us who use it would recommend 4 core processing and 4 (I usually urge people toward 8) bare minimum and I mean absolute bare minumum….particularly for processor-intense decoding of H264 formats like AVCHD or DSLR footage.

In any case, adding RAM will definitely help a bit at the very, very least.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Times change and every business is under stress these days…production people are among those who have gone through some of the tightest times lately…

Many people had good luck with Roscor…it’s a shame to see all those people lose their livelihoods. On the other hand, not all of us found doing business with them to be pleasant…

After a three hour drive for a system demo, they had double-scheduled us with another company by mistake and they treated myself and my colleague as if our sale really didn’t matter. They were the only VAR for Media 100 systems in the region, so I bought exactly one Media 100 system from them and even the delivery was so incredibly botched that Data Translation heard from me repeatedly. After several months of just trying to just acquire the correct manuals, I have never bought anything from them since…and we’re talking 1996.

The big customers are great, but if you drop the ball with enough little ones, each big sale becomes critical to survival…extending a year for terms on a large international transaction for instance.

While I’m sure that the closing/reorganizing of any business has a variety of factors…I had one of my own about ten years back…I think that it can be easy to forget to treat your smaller customers with respect, even after you have some larger ones. It’s income in smaller increments, but the risk is also spread over a lot more transactions. One slow/no pay isn’t fatal…and little customers can turn into big ones, happy or not.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I wouldn’t mix them myself…I’d put the bigger Quadro, and add a smaller, less expensive one…then run them under one driver installation.

That’s my Windows approach anyway…I run 4 displays.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Symantec needs to be yanked off your computer…their software is very intrusive and it affects all sorts of applications, but I’ve found video editing apps to be particularly vulnerable.

I switched away from it some years ago after I switched to Windows.

You might try McAfee…that seems to work well on all my editing computers

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Have you talked to the Black Magic guys about it?

You’re designating the proper outputs, etc, right?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I’m not Todd, but this is a workflow that I’ve recommended to various editors for a myriad of purposes…

I’ve recommended using a KiPro for cross-platform compatibility to certain PC editors (including some Vegas users).

The KiPro was all alone as an HDSDI replacement for some time there…

Now there are other devices that you can use in similar fashion in cases where ProRes isn’t the center of your workflow, but as long as your preview files are set to be a high-quality format (such as ProRes or CineForm, etc), this works well.

The biggest item would be to make sure that users are setting up the custom sequence setting that includes the re-targeted preview format.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

depending on how you’re going about this…you can either edit inside PPro at the portrait screen size (and obviously fill whatever non-video areas you have with graphics, etc or crop the video), or the video could be dropped into an html document that you have designed like a website with stills, graphics, and videos playing back in designated player frames, etc…

…but PPro may be one of the easiest video editors to use for non-video screen dimensions.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I get email on my edit machine frequently…download software and updates…etc.

I think having email on a web client like gmail can help some of the anxiety, but overall it’s been some time since I’ve seen a virus/malware/whatever that comes from a source that anyone who uses email wouldn’t recognize…

I’ve seen more people with Windows machines cause themselves pain by loading up shareware and free software…including some free anti-virus apps…than anything else over the last 5 years.

Mac users know about Norton’s…I was a Mac user who absolutely trusted Norton and when I went Windows, Norton was a debacle…no question. These days I run McAfee on everything with no operational impact that I can see…and it’s quite aggressive when the web browser is open if that’s a concern.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor