[Tim Kolb]

[hunter beckmann] “Also, since day one of installation… “

When was day one of installation? i5s are a bit newer than CS4…

“Droverlord” is a memory error…it’s not a virus. Is the RAM all solid? There are certain peripherals that conflict with certain software packages…you’re certain your sound card isn’t a known offender with CS4?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

There is one version of Quadro drivers that completely prevented me from opening a timeline is PPro CS4… I can’t remember what version that was, but I winder if you were to changer the NVIDIA Quadro drivers one version forward or back…?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

So…are you opening a new project or an existing project? have you tried reinstalling the application? Has there been an OS or peripheral driver update to the system lately?

…all the usual troubleshooting…RAM check out?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Keith Moreau] “I think it really behooves Adobe to address these performance issues with the Mac version of Premiere Pro. …

I think Adobe programmers use an abstraction layer to allow their Graphic Interface and middle layers to be the same between Mac and PC platforms…the low level layers that are OS specific need expert programmers in their platform, and these deal more closely with the hardware idiosyncrasies of the platforms. I think Adobe needs to make this a top priority, “

Um…a couple insights from someone who was all Mac (I had 9 of them in my office) until OSX arrived…and a few other Apple related items forced me to move on…

1. To have a software product work well on a host platform, it does take some contact/interaction with the host platform’s folks from time to time. While I am not an Adobe employee, it’s not my perception Apple goes out of their way for any outside video editing manufacturer…hell, how long has the QT gamma problem existed?

2. For Adobe to be somehow “not expert” on the Mac makes me think you may have just showed up in the video industry in about 2002. The reason Macintosh was -sold- through the 90s was due in no small part to Adobe software for the entire decade…video is one thing…print dwarfed the numbers video used, and Adobe had that segment well in hand. Through the 90s there were probably a quarter of the creative industry across all segments that was under the impression that Adobe and Apple were the same company as you never saw one without the other.

(Premiere (not Pro yet) 6.5 ran on OSX the day it showed up…did FCP even run on OSX before Puma?…I know we had to stay dual boot for FCP and ProTools early on…)

3. Adobe is seeing proportionate performance from both platforms to hear it from engineering…but keep in mind that they are working with software that is brand new and they are running on Macs that are also new, configured to do the job, and are running the display card choices, etc that the software is written for.

Many FCP users lose track of the idea that while FCP has been stagnant for 4 years so that all the drivers for peripherals as well as for system components haven’t needed revising, Adobe’s had a major release every year while they’ve been making huge changes. You say you’d like to see Adobe pick up where FCP left off…I’ve been an Adobe user for a decade and to pick up where FCP7 left off you need to go back to about CS2 (released in 2006…when PPro got its 32 bit float internal image processing pipeline, which FCPX introduced in 2011).

The tradeoff is that PPro requires a really beefy system to do its thing. And most FCP systems more than a year or two old might not make the transition very well as converting everything to QuickTime was a great way to get a responsive edit experience out of a 32 bit NLE 10 years after the company that makes it went 64 bit with the host OS…but very few of these systems are really up to the spec that is required to get the same responsiveness from a 64 bit edit program that mixes formats on the timeline and reads nearly every camera format available natively…

All that said, I am not telling anyone that Premiere Pro CS5.5 or any other editing system available is perfect. Talk to those who have taken my classes…I point out the obstacles and the areas I’d like to see improved.

I would just like to see FCP users give the same troubleshooting patience and configuration consideration to CS5.5 as they did FCP.

Check your display card’s capabilities and make sure the drivers are up to date.

Got an I/O card? PPro doesn’t work with it? 2, 3, or 4 year old FCP I/O card drivers on your Mac probably won’t work with edit software that’s had four releases in as many years…check on the drivers before you post here and say “PPro doesn’t work with my Serial Monkey 9000 card even though they say it does!”

Got an ATI card? Many Macs do…they’re good cards…but you get CUDA support using NVIDIA CUDA cards. If FCP was in a similar configuration, FCP users would run right out and get the right card for their systems…if you don’t want to switch your display card, that’s great, but then don’t complain about performance because there will be a substantial difference if the roles were reversed, FCP users would be the first ones saying “…if you can’t afford to play in this league…”.

On the Windows side of the fence most of us who have been around this block a time or two are telling users they need at least four cores and 8 GB of RAM to just launch the program, dual quads and 16 GB is best for pro use…if you have an older workstation that is on the bottom end of that…again, doing performance trials on that system will be disappointing.

Honestly…in the last handful of years, Adobe has been working to develop this product and taking over in places like BBC and CNN and has been working with RED R3D footage natively for 3 releases, has the most versatile DPX handling capability of the mainstream edit systems with CS5, and has been loading preceding versions files back 6, 7 and 8 versions as well as loading FCP7 projects when Apple’s own current product won’t even do that…

Please… Once you’ve tried it and see the tools you need are in there…take the time to design a current, clean system to run a PPro/CS5.5 system in 2011 in the same way you did FCP in 2006…THEN tell us how the software performs.

Remember, there are quite a few of us over here helping you guys adapt who made the choice to use Adobe instead of FCP long ago…there are reasons why we did that.

Nothing personal intended toward Keith here as I think he wrote out what many are thinking.

I just felt like some of these posts are passing a lot of judgement with very little experience with the product.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Plus, if the NLE accepts P2, they don’t have to update QT, which they would have to do to get ProRes. From an IT standpoint, this started my thinking.”

Ah-ha…so this is a point that I didn’t think of since I don’t live and die by QT in the adobe/Windows world…(though I remain concerned about what will happen to ProRes with the FCPX migration seemingly under way.)

Thanks for that Jeremy…we need to do this over beers…harder to end up talking past each other.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

This is not the first comparison I’ve seen justifying the FCPX re-posture using Photoshop as an example…

Both were completely non-applicable.

What’s with that?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeremy Garchow] “You brought up something about the confusion of clip naming, I said you can use P2CMS to modify the metadata to give it a meaningful User Clip Name. If not, simply name the enclosed folder that stores the CONTENTS.”

I mentioned the clip naming as to someone looking at the media who can’t read all the metadata, the clips will look like standard P2 clips as they’re written from Media Encoder.

I agree that P2 should be a very good exchange format, it’s just that manually changing all those names after the fact could be a pain…if the software you’re importing to doesn’t read the file names the same way PPro does. Each clip inside the CONTENTS folder still has it’s “P2 tribal name” right? (I’m not picking a fight here…I’m really asking…just so we’re clear.)

I know that P2 clip naming conventions are something that Panasonic has set up for the cameras and I’ve never seen a P2 clip that has a word name on the single media clip file in a browser…PPro sees the word name from its Media Browser as well as showing things like the audio and video clip as if it’s one.

However, since the whole conversation started regarding transferring media to another house that hasn’t updated their codecs recently enough to deal with ProRes…(and I’ve had a few of these guys myself so I’m feeling Bob’s pain)…I guess I hope they can deal with camera formatted associative data like P2 MXF files.

We agree that P2 files should be a good transferrable file.

I do like XDcamHD422 MXF files which are a bit more intuitive to use for someone who isn’t used to dealing with camera data formats that are multiple directories deep.

I can take pretty much anything anybody shoots and just run it…so this whole conversation is pretty theoretical for me…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Can it write/encode AVC-I files?”

Yes.

In CS5, the AVC-I importer had a bug where it truncated color precision to 8 bit, which is fixed in CS5.5…

Both CS5 and 5.5 could output AVC-I files in all flavors…

So CS5.5 is completely native AVC-I 10 bit in/out.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

In the short term, you could render the timeline and export with the “use previews” box checked. That has cleaned up certain items with third party plugin software that doesn’t seem to behave as well for Media Encoder as it does for PPro…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Interface lag always makes me look at display card drivers first. When you’re flipping from FCP to PPro CS5.5, you’re moving from a 4 year old program to a 4 month old program…FCP will run beautifully with Kona and display card drivers that were released around the same time as CS3…a lot has changed, so you need to check all the surrounding ecosystem on the machine.

I have heard from more than one person that Windows runs faster on a Mac than Apple’s OS. I have no idea why that is.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor