[Troy Murison]

I have used PPro recently for projects with hundreds of individual clips, but the
timelines aren’t too long (10-ish minutes) without any hardware assist (DV).
My experience is mainly w/1.5, not 2.0 yet. I found that, in general, the number
of clips didn’t slow it down TOO much (except for loading the project on startup)
but the more versions I saved as seperate sequences, the more sluggish and more
tempramental it would get. After working for a while and producing several
versions of a cut by duplicating the sequence, then continuing in the new one,
I would get predictable crashes when either beginning to edit or trying to render
in the new sequence. A restart of PPro using it’s ‘copy’ of the project usually
righted the ship, but once this had happened in a project, every time I duped the
sequence and moved on, crash. This happened on several different projects.
But, I have to say my experience wasn’t too different (other than the crashes)
from other systems I have used (sluggishness-wise) given my particular project type.
Maybe slightly more sluggish than FCP, but I haven’t used 5.0.x for this type of
project. Avid systems on similar projects seem to be slightly better than FCP.
I found too that a regular (twice-ish daily) restart of PPro really helped if
it hadn’t already crashed from the ‘duping’ thing. The last project I did, I tried
deleting old sequences that weren’t relevant any more and that SEEMED to help a
little too (not with the dupe crash though, just sluggishness). The dupe crash
I mentioned is repeatable on different systems too BTW (at least for me). It may
be that a longer timeline with the density of cuts I have may get more sluggish
too, but I don’t know.

PPro’s bin structure with that many source clips really is limiting though for me.
Not being able to open more than one bin window is very frustrating,
especially when browsing bins as thumbnails. Just my .02!

-Troy Murison
Flyingspot, Seattle

[Troy Murison]

Yeah, that would be bad…

It seems like there should be a way to get a tabbed list out of ALE
and then import that into PPro, but I’m not in front of either system
right now, so I don’t know if the list from ALE will be formatted
right for PPro. I know each needs a certain order (ie: reel name,
source in, source out, name, comment, etc.) but I can’t remember
what that order is for either system or whether they’re ‘compatible’.
I’ll try to look into this later today….

-Troy.

[Troy Murison]

Not that I know of. If you have a Avid around, you could make bins
then lay all the offline clips onto a timeline in ascending TC order
then export a CMX EDL though. That would give you a list to conform
in PPro. What was the ALE created from? If it’s really just a tab
delimited (?) text file, PPro may be able to import it as a batch list.
Look up batch list in PPro help. There are specific formatting
requirements that I can’t remember for it to work right. Good luck!

-Troy Murison
Flyingspot
Seattle

[Troy Murison]

The above postings all bring up good points. Another point is that if you
are planning to use the variable frame rate recording capabilities of the HVX200
then PPro/Adobe does not offer a solution as of yet. FCP does via a plug-in
which allows the flags in the user-bits to be read and the appropriate frames
to be discarded after a capture via firewire. Then you edit natively in the DVCProHD
codec at whatever frame rate you’d like (24 or 30) with the over or under cranked
material playing back properly. Adobe doesn’t offer this kind of a workflow yet.
There are a couple of hardware solutions that will get you into the variable frame
rate workflow w/PPro, but not from BM or AJA. Matrox and Leitch offer solutions,
though the Matrox is not currently reading the flags for variable speeds.
They are also uncompressed, compressed with their own codecs or native
DVCProHD. If you don’t care about the variable frame rates for now, PPro w/the
appropriate hardware buffer card could work well. You just need to account for
mainly the drive speed as these solutions are all working with very high data
rates vs. the native DVCProHD’s pretty mild rate. The drive config you mentioned
will not keep up with either 4:2:2 or especially 4:4:4 HD as noted above
by others. It should be more than fine for native DVCProHD.

So, if you indeed want to use the variable frame rates offered by the camera, FCP/
Mac may be the way to go. The Mac will cost more, but you’ll save by not having
to buy the expensive arrays needed to do uncompressed HD plus you’ll have the option
of using the Varicam to it’s full potential.

I will say that, from personal experience, if the highest quality post is required,
you are okay to do the editing in the DVCPro HD format natively, but when you start
to push it in color correcting or keying or ANY kind of manipulation, it falls
apart pretty quickly. It recompresses badly. So avoid re-encode generations at all
costs. This may or may not become an issue in your case, just pointing it out.

These are not really easy questions to answer as you see. It really depends on how
you expect to use the footage, who it’s for and what the budget is. Ideally, you
don’t want to back yourself into a corner or go down a road so far throwing money
at something that might not do what you need it to only to find out later (too late)
that you should have done something else. It’s interesting and hard all at once
right now to build these kinds of solutions on a budget! This new camera is forcing
us all to re-evaluate how we serve this kind of budget HD with the current crop of
tools. I am fortunate to have a Quantel eQ at my disposal which is brilliant at
handling all of the varispeed stuff, but I also didn’t have to pay for it myself!!! 😉
Our ‘everyday’ clients are starting to use this new camera and are balking (rightfully so)
at the rates we need to charge to make money with these systems and some have built
their own more cost-appropriate-for-their-situation sytems (given the ‘cheap’ camera
and tape costs). For some that has been fine. For others who expect the kind of
workflow and flexiblity available in high-end HD or even low-end SD systems, it’s
a painful lesson. If you are shooting a lot of footage that’s variable, know that
any software solution currently available (read: FCP) requires all of the captured
footage to be rendered to read the flags after capture via firewire (flags aren’t
transferred via BM or AJA cards). That takes time. Also, those files then do not
have any reference to source TC or reel name or any other metadata associated with
the original file. That’s fine if you are staying within that system for the finish,
but if not, it kind of puts a kink in the whole operation. Not to piss on the
Panasonic/FCP parade, but it is a serious issue in the world I’m currently working
in, especially the first time some unsuspecting producer learns of this fact after
planning to finish in a eQ or *smoke!

Sorry to ramble, hope this helps!
Good luck!

-Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Troy Murison]

Wow, that’s truely a bummer. Sorry I don’t have any good answers.
Have you tried opening the project on a machine w/o the media
and exporting a EDL from that? I’ve seen that work on occasion with
Avids. Just another stab in the dark…

-Troy.

[Troy Murison]

CMX edls only support 4 tracks of audio. That may be the problem.
Try deleting one audio track and re-exporting just to see if it works.
Or try exporting without any audio tracks or go one by one just to see
if one audio track is fouling it up. Only guessing here, never seen that
error.

-Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Troy Murison]

Here’s another way: Deselect all of your tracks, make sure they’re all unlocked. Set your in and
out points, then perform lift or extract. This will affect all the tracks. If you have only
one track as target track, it will only affect that track. Very similar to Avid style, only
all tracks deselected instead of selected.

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Troy Murison]

So if I cut a sequence using multicam feature in PPro 2.0, can I generate
a EDL to take to a online conform or DaVinci session easily? Will it be
a proper EDL that could be conformed? I ask ’cause it looks as if each
camera ends up in a sequence of it’s own? Or maybe I just don’t understand.

Thanks!

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Troy Murison]

Try it and it still works as you would expect it to. But I too
would rather that it not appear to mark the clip in the preview window
back to the head. If there’s a in point that you did mark though,
that’s when it will perform a four-point edit and pop up the dialog
box if it’s not exactly the same length as your destination i-o.

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Troy Murison]

It doesn’t seem to matter too much what the comp size is in my case.
I do a lot of both and I don’t really see too much difference between
the 480 v. 486. They both are kinda bad looking.

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle