[Troy Murison]

Eric,

Glad to hear of your success with CS4 and stability. I will have to try it out in earnest soon. Third party input-output card support on the Mac seems to have some vendors stuck though, so I’m still waiting on that.

I hope when I do get to it that it’s smooth. And I really hope there’s a 4.1 update that helps more. Go Adobe!

Thanks for your feedback,

-t.

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

[Eric Addison] “I’d be curious to know from some FCP users if you work on something longform and put it all on one timeline, how’s the performance?”

Eric,

I have edited in FCP and Avid with long-ish and complex (sometimes either one, sometimes both) sequences in projects that may contain 100’s or even thousands of clips and many more subclips. Yes, in both, the projects’ load times go up as you add clips and media to the project. And in my case, both are stable, responsive, and workable. In general I’m cutting in SD (sometimes even DV) at this stage, but in FCP I’ve used XDCAM HD 1080i 29.97 (not proxies) for entire projects, offline to online with no problems. I mostly use FCP at this time.

I use shorter sequences (segments) as I go, but near the end I work in full-length sequences without issue. I use color corrections, other filters, speed changes, lots of audio layers with waveforms on all the time, etc. It’s only at the ‘full’ sequence stage that I start fiddling with color and filters, and it remains responsive and stable (knocking on wood now). It can slow down if I leave a lot of sequences open or start doing things with large stills, particularly .tif files. Or have too much other stuff open like PS, AE, Illustrator, etc. But so does Avid, Pr, or anything else I know of. I almost never use multicamera sequences for what I do though.

I’ve completed projects successfully in Pr CS3 on both Mac and PC (not to mention earlier versions) with many projects of many types, but none as long as what I mention above, which are typically 30 min – 1 hour. The ease of moving back and forth to AE, which I use a lot in shorter-form projects, is tempting. That’s why I keep coming back to and trying to use Pr. For the last year though, I’ve pretty much given up and mostly use FCP with Automatic Duck for those types of shorter projects. The most I’ve ever tried to do in Pr is 10 min, usually much shorter, and many of those projects begin to suffer problems seemingly related to project file size fairly early in my process.

It seems to me that Pr project file size reaches a ‘critical mass’ around 50 MB (at least on the machines I’ve tried this on which vary in RAM, configuration, etc.) and that anything much beyond that causes severe impact to load times (I’ve seen 15 minute + load times for a project), stability and responsiveness. It seems related to the number of source files, sequences and render files present in the project, which makes sense. Deleting renders on sequences I’ve abandonded helps as does eliminating unused media. The length of the media doesn’t seem to matter as much.

Neither FCP nor Avid suffer from these specific issues to anywhere near the degree Pr does. Avid’s project/bin structure differs from the project paradigm of FCP & Pr so it’s maybe not a great comparison. FCP’s project file size for projects with many, many more assets, sequences, etc. doesn’t even come close to approaching Pr’s project file size for much, much simpler and smaller projects. Even a complete Pr project with all it’s assets and sequences imported into After Effects is much smaller (sometimes 10X smaller) than the original Pr project. And it’s responsive, faster to load and will always relink files intelligently, unlike Pr. But that’s another issue…

It’s my personal opinion, based on my experiences and my complete, non software engineer view, that there is something inherently wrong with Pr’s XML project file structure/method and until that is overhauled, Pr will always suffer from these types of issues. Just my best guess, and overly simplified of course. I’m sure that’s not a easy thing to do for Adobe or it would have been taken care of by now. I haven’t seen significant improvement on this issue myself since the original PPro 1.0. I know others say it’s better, and maybe it is, but it’s just not good enough for me.

Again, that’s just my theory and experience, others probably differ. And of course, FCP and Avid have their warts too, it’s just that Pr has a few more (like this one) that affect ME and my workflow in particular, so I use the other options I have available. I would like to see Pr take over the world as it has some really compelling features and ways of working within the entire suite. But for me, it has too many other things like this that add up to too much of a liability to use daily and in full confidence in front of clients with deadlines. It is getting better I think, and lack of OMF export was a huge stumbling block for me. So maybe it’s time to re-evaluate and try again with CS4, but posts like these don’t give me much hope that it’s any better yet on so many other fronts.

Good luck,

-t.

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

I see them up today, but the readme seems to leave out Pr CS4 support. I’ll be trying them soon to verify I guess, but that’s either a mistaken omission or maybe not? Maybe Pr has been holding up the parade? I hope it’s a mistake, I’m sure not. I’d like to use the AVCHD and RED native workflows fully w/the entire suite, it works a treat on my laptop.

Any official word the BM folks would like to offer?

Thanks,

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

Great news Kristian! May I ask about drivers for Mac OS? I see they’re still at 6.8.8 on the decklink download area. Are you close? Any info is appreciated!

Thanks,

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

Hi Chris,

I haven’t used CS4 on the Mac yet. Still waiting on CS4 drivers for my SDI card. But comparing CS3.x and FCP 6.0.x, hands-down on my particular system, FCP is FAR more stable. I have had lots of hiccups w/PPro CS3 including ‘dropped frames’ warnings so recurrent and bad I can’t play back any footage (this is SD footage captured w/PPro on a system that is capable and does play back 2+ streams of 1080 30p HD footage in real time in FCP) to random crashes on scrubbing the timeline, rendering the timeline, importing/conforming footage or audio, etc. It’s so bad that I never took the time to troubleshoot much because I have too much work to get done to be farting around with it. I have reinstalled the OS and the entire Adobe and FCP suites twice due to other issues and the problems with PPro persist.

So I use FCP and Avid instead. I’d like to use PPro more ’cause I work a ton in AE. So Automatic Duck is my friend. And yes, FCP crashes occasionally and has it’s own quirks and irritations, but overall has been very stable for me. As an aside, I can’t remember the last crash I had on Avid (MC 2.8, 3.0).

I do run CS4 on a PC occasionally and the results are MUCH better, though I have to admit FCP is still less prone to crash for me (not a apples to apples comparison though- no pun intended!). I can’t complain about PPro with regards to crashing on a PC though. It’s been pretty good for me. So there may be something just plain wrong with my Mac and PPro. There are just too many other shortcomings in PPro for my particular workflow to make it worth my while to troubleshoot, even with the integration with AE.

FWIW, I’m still running Tiger 10.4.11 and latest BM drivers for Decklink HD card on a 8 core Intel with 16GB RAM. Everything else Adobe seems to run fine on it so who knows….

Good luck,

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

I don’t remember having any luck with them snapping to the CTI. I’ll try again though… thanks!

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

I haven’t found any ways around this, but I agree with you 100% that this is less than ideal.

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

It’s possible in both programs.

In Pr, when you cue your new clip in the source monitor, set your in point, then go to the timeline and right click on the clip you want to replace and choose ‘Replace clip’ from the context menu. It’ll ask you something to the effect of where your new clip is coming from (ie: bin or source monitor- sorry, not at the workstation to confirm) and then choose okay and it’ll do what you want, unless of course your new clip is too short and it’ll probably generate a error (I can’t remember for sure).

To do this in AE, first select the layer in your composition that you want to replace, then drag your new clip from the project window while holding alt (mac = option) and drop it on top of your selected clip in the comp.

Both programs’ manual & help docs explain better than I, so check there too.

A alternative approach might be to always use the same clip names and file paths for your source clips, that way you don’t have to go through the replace steps within the project. Just open it up and it should find the footage. I’ve done this in the past with opens, etc. and we just always renamed the old folder or moved it to a another location and then populated a copy with the new clips. May not be possible or practical in all situations, but is very efficient when you can pull it off.

Good luck,

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

Are you needing to mark in-out at regular consistent intervals? If so, then you may be able to import/Dynamic Link the entire timeline into AE and do some scripting to automate something like this. If you need the in-out points based on content, etc., I think you’re hosed and are doing as the folks above suggested.

I’m sorry I can’t help to write a AE script for this, I’m not very versed with scripting, but this should be possible. There are lots of resources on the web to help with AE scripting. Just search for AE scripting and you’ll find the big sites. Even Adobe hosts a AE scripting forum.

Good luck!

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Troy Murison]

Ross,

Glad to hear you’re in a better place right now! The ‘looking-correct-on-RAM-preview’ issue threw us for a loop too, I never revisited the problem to investigate further. “Moving on!” ‘ya know…

Thanks for updating us!

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA