[Tim Kolb]

[Chris Cea] “Adobe really doesn’t get the credit it deserves in the pro video world. “

There are a few of us that have been ridiculed for saying exactly that… 🙂

Sorry about the DNxHD thing…I inadvertently left that out.

I’m wondering about how Adobe is dealing with QT on the Mac platform. They had to create a 64 bit “frame server” type thing on Windows to get 32 bit QT to work with a 64 bit editing app, but I am not very knowledgeable on what they may be facing on the Apple side of the fence. I’ve wondered aloud in a couple other threads if QTX has some little glitches yet? Or…if third party codecs maybe need revision to be compatible with the new media foundation?

Do you have both QT 7.x and QTX on the machine?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Thanks for popping in on this one, Todd.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

The yellow bar is normal. Green only happens when you actually preview rendered something. Red usually indicates a native format mismatch…which still isn’t always a deal breaker. I’ve edited timelines covered in red for years…the content shows up and many workstations, it will also run at framerate. It’s dependent on your system.

As far as BlackMagic is concerned…these third party vendors keep advancing as the software keeps updating (relative to FCP, Premiere Pro has been upgrading/updating nearly non-stop for the last two years…).

You’ll need a BlackMagic sequence to use the BM card’s outputs. i know that AJA has recently updated their drivers and vastly improved the playback performance in AJA sequences, I’d have to believe that Black Magic is not sitting idly by…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Keep in mind that Premiere Pro is not like FCP. When you’re working with metadata-intense native camera formats like Panasonic P2 or XDcamEX, you can’t simply change the name of some part of the media file structure in the source media and expect it to function…it won’t.

With FCP, since so much of your media is transcoded to a QT file prior to import, changing the name of the one file is pretty low-impact.

You can trim the project and tell the mechanism to use whatever names you’ve revised on the edit sequence when it creates the trimmed project with many formats.

As far as transcoding formats like DSLR…whether that becomes necessary will have more to do with the horsepower of your workstation than any other factor since most of the heavy lifting there is simply getting adequate decode torque.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

There is a certain amount of this that is in the third party’s court as well. AJA recently refined how their card/software work with Mercury and CUDA.

Support and functionality in legacy FCP isn’t really a fair comparison as it’s been a relatively stationary target for so many years.

Premiere Pro’s engineering leaps since even FCP’s last minor upgrade have been significant.

Unless the third party PCIe cards move downstream from the display card, I don’t see how the performance can be made equivalent, though in AJA’s case, the gap is closing.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I’m not an expert on international excise tax, but Adobe has said that anyone having trouble getting the 50% off should contact Adobe customer service.

I’m not sure what else would be factors in this, but that’s been the official word thus far…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

This has been an ongoing thing between Adobe and RED Giant…

The text fields all function normally, but there is some small hitch in the way Colorista wants to do the graphic UI vs how PPro does it.

Many of us did a lot of complaining back when Colorista2 first came out. Last I had heard, Adobe did something but now it’s in RG’s court or some such thing.

The software is good enough to endure some inconvenience, but it’s probably high time it was ironed out…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Hi Robert,

…certainly glad you see some items to appreciate in Premiere Pro.

On the sequence question regarding Kona… HDSDI output does take a bit longer route through the machine so it typically won’t have quite the same sense of response that a sequence that doesn’t use the HDSDI output does. Most of us edit on a non-Kona sequence and you can simply nest the finished sequence in a Kona sequence, or even copy/paste the material from one to the other when it’s time to make a final assessment pass or master. It’s not really a “fix it” sort of thing…it isn’t “broken.”

On render files: Unlike FCP, PPro does not need to render an edited sequence before you export to one (or many) output formats through Media Encoder. The “preview” codec is just that…preview. It’s not the mastering codec for the sequence in the way FCP would set it up. Every sequence is actually completely codec agnostic…the presets are simply there for convenience. The preview files you generate while editing are not typically used as the source for AME unless you choose them to be with a checkbox. Many of us find Iframe MPEG2 to be easy, scalable and more than adequate to generate a full framerate preview…but we would not typically choose to encode form those previews.

ProRes is a very nice I-frame codec that is well engineered to run very fast and have a very high data rate. AVCHD or DSLR are long-GOP formats that are designed to look very good at a minuscule data rate. It takes more horsepower to run an H264 codec than a ProRes or say DVCProHD (also an I-frame codec).

The main advantage to being able to handle all the different camera codecs is to give you a choice.

HDV used to be a handful so most wanted to transcode it…these days MPEG2 Long-GOP (XDcamHD, EX, 422, HDV, Canon XF) all runs easily and MPEG4 (H264) is the current codec of question for some systems (not all…lots of RAM and Proc Cores does help).

So…PPro is a different animal than FCP in lots of ways…straightforward DPX workflow with the ability to handle out-of-gamut colors and log curves, RED R3D on the timeline, native workflows for almost everything, and very sophisticated audio capabilities inside the NLE itself…

In many ways, I think computer workstations are “growing into” Premiere Pro as it presents so many options to the user, but to remove some of the busy work up front, it does use more system resources later…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Did you try going right to the Adobe product page?

https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/switch.html

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I am personally partial to CineForm (disclaimer: I have an infrequent personal affiliation with them, I wrote/designed the First Light Manual).

Completely cross platform…wrap as QT or AVI…and rewrap if necessary for ecosystem workflow. Extremely high quality AND they have a RAW version of the codec which is the acquisition codec for the SI2K camera, and RED RAW can quickly be converted for those of us more partial to FirstLight than REDCINE….and the quintessential single-clip 3D format for easy stereo editing including 3D relationship manipulation from FirstLight, saved to metadata.

Avid DNxHD is freely available from the Avid website and is not proprietary. You can load it on your system and use it as you would any other codec. I’ve heard of people who swear by it, and those who swear at it…no doubt the truth is somewhere in between, but how can it hurt to have a codec that you can use to easily exchange material with Avid editors?

ProRes is an excellent codec, and if Apple decides to release it separately for 199.99 USD so anyone can use it to encode/decode, I think it may be a popular option no matter what platform you use.

Kind of a broad answer, but I’ve touched enough codecs to know that to pick a clear workflow winner, you need to take the entire ecosystem into account…what system are you using for effects? What for audio post? Are you editing for a client who requires a particular mastered format?

You have questions…I have…more questions, typically. 🙂

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor