[Tod Hopkins]

I have many criticisms of Adobe Premiere, but it’s handling of still images is not one of them. The biggest issue you face is the quality of the original image. I must admit that I have never seen Premiere noticeably degrade an image. In fact, it is remarkably good at scaling up so never dismiss a low res image until you’ve seen it in the timeline.

Things to keep in mind:

There are limits. Premiere will have problems with images greater than 5000 pixels in either dimension. This is not a hard rule and varies with image format, total pixels, and available VRAM, at least.

That said, you can work with very, very large images. I’ve worked with images as large as 10,000 pixels, but it wasn’t easy. You will first loose the ability to preview in the source monitor. Then you will have trouble with playback in the timeline. And eventually, you won’t be able to render the clip at all and rendering will lock up. My rough understanding is that this is tied to the limits of the available VRAM to hold the uncompressed image canvas for rendering.

I work on Macs and generally have better luck with PNG than TIFF or JPEG. They all work, but for a variety of reasons, PNGs work better on Mac. I don’t convert unless I have problems.

Aspect. Images tend to be vertical. Video is landscape. If you plan on filling the frame, realize that many images, like standard studio portraits, just don’t work.

Size. You will have a devil of a time convincing people you need really big images! You are always going to need to crop and move. Your images should be at least 50% larger than your finished resolution. I always ask for the highest resolution available and pre-crop and scale for Premiere if necessary.

DPI does not matter! Pixel dimensions only. 2500+ wide or bigger. If people are asking you about scanning, your answer is 1200dpi for a photo and 6000+dpi for a transparency or slide. And they will say they can’t, and you’ll have to compromise at 600dpi (for the photo) and you’ll say “okay” and they will feel like they’ve won.

The motion tool is great but it is a bit limited. Don’t forget other effects like Basic 3d (z-rotation), crop (with softening), drop shadow.

A mild Guassian blur can do wonders! If you have a face, place a soft edge mask around the eyes. This will dramatically increase rendering, so do any blurs or soft edges last! You can, of course, do this work in Photoshop first and in many cases that’s better, though less efficient.

Vignettes are incredibly useful for still images. A subtle vignette improves almost any still. Do not use the “Vignette” tools though. Instead use a “Brightness and Contrast” effect with an oval mask. Much more powerful. I have one saved as a preset.

I have other questions, reach out. I work with still all the time.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Note that two blank lines will stop the import even if one of the blank lines is logically part of two line captions. That is, if the second line in a two line caption is blank, acting as a visual placeholder for line 2.

1
00:00:08,440 –> 00:00:11,000
And we went through the door

2
00:00:11,080 –> 00:00:14,040
which nobody seemed
to know about at the time.

Some caption tools will do this routinely.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Caveat: Based on limited experience.

DCP picture is JPEG2000 compressed and it is an image sequence, which is quite different from motion codecs. In some cases it can be extremely efficient. In an image sequence, there is no practical minimum frame size. Your net bitrate is 0.26MB per frame. My gut says that does seem a bit small, but if your program is “easy” to compress and you did not deliberately set compression to a very high quality, I can imagine that this bitrate is possible and acceptable.

One of the difficulties of DCP is setting up a reference quality playback to evaluate. You need to get a true playback to the size you expect in order to evaluate the resulting quality. You don’t need to playback the DCP to evaluate picture quality. You can pull the image sequence out of the package and re-wrap it, or just use a player that can play an image sequence directly. This doesn’t check the DCP package, but it’s useful for evaluating the compression quality when you don’t have a proper DCP player.

Cheers,

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Jon Chappel of Digital Rebellion wrote one of the simplest and clearest posts on this subject that I’ve read.

https://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/thoughts_on_32_bit_codecs_being_phased_out_in_macos

Cheers,
Tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

These are oral history exhibits for the National Museum of the Marine Corps. The clips are running in a simple interactive interface built in Unity and running on Ubuntu Linux. Historically such an exhibit would run on Windows, but Windows has always been hard to keep stable in fixed exhibits and Windows 10 introduced new problems for which no one had solutions, so we decided to work with Linux.

The scales may have tipped in favor of Linux for long-term fixed installations like this, but the jury is still out. I am not entirely happy with the performance of the h.264 video in the application (Unity Media Player). Playing in VLC or Ubuntu looks fine. Within the app we are dropping some frames. It’s a bit of a puzzle why UMP is not working as well as VLC or Ubuntu since all the apps leverage FFMPEG.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

I also edit on a CPU upgraded 2009 12-core with Radeon card. While it’s a screamer as far as benchmarks are concerned, it was immediately clear to me that this power upgrade did not improve Premiere timeline performance as I expected. Very disappointing and cautionary if you are considering this upgrade. Changing from nVidia to Radeon RX580 helped, but not as much as I had hoped. On the upside, it is faster than my stock 2010 Mac Pro 12-core.

I’ve already seen a lot of good advice most of which I can second. Avoid MP4 formats because the old Xeon architecture is not optimized for MP4 the way Adobe expects. Cut on 1080p timeline. But also…

Audio can definitely be a major problem. I don’t know why. Multi-track original slows work way down, even if you only have one track in your timeline. I’ve found that converting my eight-track originals to stereo proxies helped more than anything else. More than down-rezing even. In fact, I recently tried to work with some AVCHD home video that had been recorded with surround tracks (not me!) that choked Premiere on an older Xeon Quad. The quad could barely play it even though it was merely 1080p AVCHD! The 12-core could handle it, but it was clearly a drag. I converted to ProRes stereo and the problem was solved.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

[Shawn Miller] “If you’re talking about video editors and others who we typically think of as “video professionals”, then you’re probably right – but for multimedia, web, streaming and others who work with audio and video for a living but aren’t traditional post professionals, then no.”

It’s great to get outside one’s box every now and then! That’s exactly right. I am definitely speaking from the point of view of a post-production professional. From a general multi-media point-of-view, I agree that the balance has shifted fairly dramatically towards Windows in the past decade as traditional video post and computer applications merged and Apple’s model shifted more towards consumers and away from professionals.

And now Linux. My current production is video delivered via a Unity application running on Linux.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

I’m not slamming Microsoft or DirectX. I like both. I’m simply making the case (maybe poorly) that Apple has historically provided more comprehensive support for video professionals than Microsoft. I’m kind of surprised I would have to provide evidence as it seems self-evident to me. For the first decade of my career, one bought PCs to do the office work and Macs to do video. Avid did not run on Windows.

Quicktime and DirectX are two different technologies with different intent. DirectX is a great technology which made modern video games possible but it’s very different from Quicktime.

I must say that giving Microsoft credit for h.264 just makes me ill. VC-1 exists because Microsoft wanted the future of video to be based on their proprietary WMV foundation and not MPEG. They fought that battle hard. They forced VC-1 into the Blu-ray spec. In the end, they reluctantly supported h.264 because they really had no choice.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

[Dom Silverio] “What they are actually doing is not allowing THIRD party codecs to be installed via AVFramework without their approval (no approval has been given to anyone AFAIK).”

Apple is a closed environment, and they are trending towards being more closed. I don’t love it and I think Cook is heading in the wrong direction, but it isn’t a change. AVFramework exists to support media. If it doesn’t support media better than DirectX, I will be shocked. AVFramework exists for media professionals. DirectX is for games.

Did you see the list of Mac Pro software “partners” at WWDC? It was a who’s who of top end video software companies. How many of those companies will stay friendly if Apple denies them access to AVFramework?

We are in a transition. Apple will try to exercise control. They always do. But they introduced the Mac Pro because their “media” image has slipped badly. The Mac Pro is 100% for the high-end media market. It is useless without deep support for media in the Mac OS.

I won’t be buying a Mac Pro any time soon, but it cheered me up more than anything Apple has done in several years because it means Apple wants us back.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

[Shawn Miller] “You don’t think of VC1 or DirectX as extensive video CODEC support? How could the most popular gaming and multimedia platform not have video and audio support as an integral part of the OS? They even helped develop the H.26x standard…”

Extensive? Not at all. And certainly not historically. First, DirectX was built for gaming because MS is a gaming platform and it is neither a video codec nor a file standard. It provides api support for third parties, not direct user support. VC1 and h.264 are standards that Microsoft championed but did not create, and only after WMV failed to get widespread acceptance.

I’m not trying to argue that Windows can’t do video or that the Mac OS is inherently better. I’m simply arguing that the Mac OS has historically provided more direct support for video professionals and video codecs than Windows. This is still true today, and even after the “conversion”, I suspect it will continue to be true because video professionals matter to Apple.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC