Will Eccleston
Forum Replies Created
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Awesome!!!!! It has been in Motion since the very first release, and I used it a TON. It would cut the number of layers in some of my After Effects comps almost in half, and make so many things soooooo much easier. I’d Precomp a lot less too.
Thank you!
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films
https://vimeo.com/album/132368 -
After being a lifelong Mac head, I helped convince a client to make the leap to Windows a couple of years ago, mainly because we would occasionally work in some pretty hefty After Effects comps, and you can build a Windows machine that is much more powerful for that sort of work than ANY Mac. However, it was ultimately a nightmare. They/we have hundreds of terabytes of projects from the last 10 years on Mac formatted drives — projects that we refer to regularly — and there has yet to be an elegant solution for dealing with that material on Windows. Yes, you can use MacDrive (sort of) but we never found it to work very well, and it created many problems of its own in Windows. Or you could have a shared storage solution and transfer all of your old projects to that, but at the size we would’ve needed, it would’ve been a massive investment. Ultimately, they are back on the Mac, and happy.
Note that the highest-end iMacs are VERY capable, and may be suitable for you. Plenty of posts on The Cow about what their capabilities and limitations are.
Good luck.
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films
https://vimeo.com/album/132368 -
Or the super-easy way (if you are on a Mac) – use Motion to create your counter. Essentially automatic, with nice kerning in any font. Within Motion, go to: Library/Generators/Text Generators/Numbers, and apply the Numbers Generator to your comp. Set the start and end value and the font, making it bigger than you need. Render with Alpha. Done. Bring it into AE and place it. For several years I used Motion extensively, but had to give it up, begrudgingly, for AE, since no one else knew how to step into my Motion projects for revisions. There are a ton of things that it does better, faster, cleaner, and easier than AE. A number counter that doesn’t involve programming and rigging seems like such a fundamental thing that AE would have. But there are tons of those things…
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films
https://vimeo.com/album/132368 -
You can select a transition and Cmd-C to copy, select another edit and Cmd-V to paste. This is a brand new feature. You can select and paste to multiple edits if they are on different tracks, but not more than one edit on any track. No option-drag as of yet. I always found this to be buggy in Final Cut though. It always shortened my transitions when I option-dragged them.
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films
https://vimeo.com/album/132368 -
Jason,
In the interest of being able to update Premiere, you might first try manually downloading the latest Creative Cloud app from Adobe’s website. For some reason they can’t seem to make the Creative Cloud updating process work worth a darn. Many of us have to download the Creative Cloud app manually to ever see updates of other apps. It’s super frustrating.
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films
https://vimeo.com/album/132368 -
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE fill out the Feature Request form for this and all other features you’d like to see. Adobe is listening, and, in my opinion, really knocking it out. But the missing “Fit to Fill” shortcut is one of a number of glaring omissions that annoys the crap out of me on a regular basis.
Feature request here:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films
https://vimeo.com/album/132368 -
Some possible answers here.
1. Choosing the default curves for keyframes of various types would be nice, or at the very least, shortcuts like After Effects (F9 for Ease, etc). Feature request here (and they ARE listening)
2. Can’t save multiple FX as preset, but you CAN copy all or selected FX from one clip to another (or multiple selected clips). Directly select a clip in the timeline which has your FX cocktail applied. Choose “Copy” (Cmd+C or Ctrl+C). Choose “Paste Attributes” (I have this mapped to Cmd+Opt+V, like it was in Final Cut). Check the boxes for which of the Motion and FX parameters you’d like to paste, and whether or not you’d like to scale keyframe spacing for clips of different lengths (which may also answer one of your later questions). The checkbox choices that you enable within this dialog will persist until you change them again, which is really handy. Again though, if you’d like to save a set of FX as a preset please use the Feature Request form.
3. Not exactly what you are requesting, but a really handy workaround: Select the clip for which you are about to adjust duration. Choose “Copy”. Adjust the duration of the clip as desired. Choose “Paste Attributes”. Tell it whether or not to scale attributes. I did this a million times a day in Final Cut, and it transferred to Premiere as well.
4. Should be covered by “Scale to Fit” in the Paste Attributes dialog, unless I’m misunderstanding you.
5. You can Ctrl+Z in the titler to undo.
6. There is a button in the top-left of the titler editing window that looks like a filmstrip with a “T” on it. This is “New Title Based on Current Title”. It is essentially “Save As” (or really the reverse — it stops editing the current title and saves a new one to which you are now applying edits)
It’s worth noting that, to me, the Premiere Pro titler is far and away the best titler EVER in an editing program. Also, your signature says you’re on CS6. I had to use CS6 again recently at a client’s place, and I felt like I was taking a several-years-step backwards. The degree to which CC is better cannot be overstated. Hope some of this helps.
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films -
A couple of years ago, when I was furious with Apple, and felt like they were leaving us behind, I helped steer a client towards a ProMax One (monster PC built for pro video). The rendering performance in AE was predictably amazing. However, this was a small shop that has always been Mac-only, and no one really wanted to be a Windows administrator. We had all sorts of issues, but many of them stemmed from the fact that they have over 100 TB of footage and projects on Mac-formatted external drives, with no affordable (for them) solution to put all of that media onto Windows-compatible storage. We used MacDrive to mount those drives, but it was EXTREMELY problematic, with no real solutions offered. In the end for these and other reasons, everyone hated the machine, and they got rid of it and bought another Mac Pro. Worth considering.
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films -
That’s what I thought you meant at first, but then I second guessed myself and thought, “no, he means he’s hearing folks singing the praises of AVID like I’m spewing about Premiere”. Thanks for the clarification. I think there were (and still are) a TON of AVID folks who always thought Final Cut was a piece of ship. I certainly hated it when I first started using it. But then I grew to love it, although there were a few things I always missed about the AVID. I am quite certain there are a billion AVID users who will for a long time, if not forever, think that Premiere is a piece as well. What can you do? I do realize that if I’m going to keep spraying about it I need to spend some time playing with X, but that’s tough to envision doing. I’d rather spend my time trying something new with AE or learning C4D.
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films -
Simon said “Premiere is a non-starter for all its attractions because no-one in our industry uses it and it holds no advantages over Legacy for the work that we do.”
I would contend that it is everything you love about Legacy plus everything it was sorely lacking. But I can’t help you if no one in your market knows how to run it. You could be a pioneer though : )
Will Eccleston
Kinetiscape Films