Premiere Pro CS6 and 6.0.1

OK. So I’ve been on CS6 for about 5 weeks now.  I like a lot of the new features: better trimming, adjustment layers, Warp Stabilizer built in to Premiere Pro directly.  When up and running it’s great.  But in the last week I’ve had some issues with my tower stuttering and freezing.  I called Adobe last Friday at the end of the day and tried to give them a detailed explanation of the issue – they were very kind but kept passing me around from department to department… Frustrating.  Well I did a little more digging on my system and found a few more answers on my own.  Then, low and behold, I got a phone call from one of the lead tech support guys this morning following up as they could see there was not a resolution to the issue yet in the report.  VERY COOL =)

Well the tech spent almost an hour with me on the phone and went through all the nooks and crannies of my Mac Pro to determine where the problem might be.  We tracked it down to a probable conflict with some behind the scenes apps interfering with the PPro performance.  (Keep in mind that this system is an 8 core, 2.93 Ghz box with 24 gigs of RAM and separate GPU and GUI graphics cards, RAID 5 @ 200MB/sec — not a sleeper)  We set up a ROOT account to log into and ran PPro 6.0.1 with no problems.  This means it must be in the building of my main account – not the Boot Drive or the system.  Good, I don’t have to blow the drive —  bad, I have to pluck out the offending sub apps or slowly bring across my prefs from the old account to the new one and the delete the old one when I’ve got a solid new one… Tic Toc – but doable.

I’ve been testing 6.0.1 on my 17″ MBP and found it really nice, fast and friendly.  The issues were only with the big tower.  PPro 6 seems a lot like FCP 7 (or 8 =)  I think Adobe is really coming along with this product.  Very happy about that!!!  I’m moving almost 50 percent of my work into DSLR territory and the file size and Xfer/conversion time is a killer on fast turn arounds and on-set reviews.  I love just dropping the native files into PPro and going.  Hoverscrub and JKL functions really help to speed up the process of logging and picking clips on set.  I’m waiting for PluralEyes 3 to come out and everything will be in place.

The majority of my work these days are talking heads for docs and sound bites so being able to turn them quickly is important.  I cut a series of interviews with CS 6.0 and was very pleased with the adjustment layers and the sound control.  I was prepared to got out to Davinci Resolve and Audition if I needed to but instead elected to stay in Premiere the whole time and make a go of it.  The client was very happy and didn’t need a second round of changes – Yay!!!

Overall I think Premiere Pro is moving forward quite nicely.  Probably by 6.5 we’ll be in a place that feels a lot like where we left off with FCP7 – Sorry Apple… Still love the computers =)  I’m very happy with the openness of Adobe to listen to our needs and then do there best to get us the updates ASASP.  I think letting Apple do what they want to do – computers and mobile devices and letting software developers work on what the really want to work on will give us the best result in the long run… Too wordy???

Well that’s it for now. Until next time, good shooting and good editing.

TDTrey.com

Lovin’ Premiere Pro 5.5

Well we are coming up on a year since Apple decided to improve Final Cut Pro for us… And while there are several sites and sources dedicated to the training needed to learn FCP X, it is still lacking in many of the features that we use every day as editors.

Like many video professional last summer, I decided to give Premiere Pro (PPro) a try. I figured that if I was going to have learn a new NLE anyway I might as well make it one that is going to be around for a while. Plus Adobe was giving us that really great deal if we were switching from FCP. Who could pass that up?

So just a couple quick notes on my progress.

  • I like using the FCP keyboard shortcuts. I feel right at home. I hope that they will bring even more of the shortcuts over as the app improves.
  • Bringing in all of my footage with out transcoding is awesome.
  • Knowing I’m using all the horse power under the hood is also great.
  • Dynamic Linking is real handy for moving from app to app in the suite.
These features along with many of the improvements that are coming down the line are going to make PPro an editing force to be reckoned with.
That’s just a quick look at Premiere Pro 5.5 from my perspective =)
Until next time, good shooting.

TDTrey.com

Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 for the Mac

Well it’s a whole new world… FCP is, well, X’d… Like many others I’ve been clinging to my FCP 7 but with the announcement of Apple shutting down any future support or development for Color and many of the short comings of FCP X I am looking to other NLE possabilities.

After looking into many options I decided I wanted to find a “bundled” package similar to Final Cut Studio – Enter Adobe’s Production Premium Bundle: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and the list goes on and on. I had been waffling because I didn’t want to spend the $1500 full street price and just then Adobe dropped the crossover price to $850 – Yeah!!! So I downloaded the 30 day free trial. (If you do this, make the time to give it a real good try. I was put off the first afternoon because I didn’t give it enough time to set in to my way of thinking.) I can officially say that after 3 weeks of testing and learning I have made leap and bought the bundle.

The cool things for me are round tripping with After Effects, Photoshop and Audition. Also the importability with many different CODECs and formats. I just dropped a bunch of footage from my EX3 in after choosing the right sequence settings and there it was in realtime – pretty nice.

I’m using mine on an older MacPro (2006) tower 2.66 Quad Core with a Black Magic Design Intensity Pro video output card. I just upgraded the driver to 8.2.1 and it seems to work fine. I’m going to upgrade the CPU soon and add an NVIDIA FX4800 GPU card to activate the Mercury Engine features of the package. I hope to have more info on that soon. For the mean time I am putting it up against my FCP 7 package and working through the similarities and differences. So far so good.

Until next time, good shooting or editing

TDTrey.com

Oops… I might have been wrong… FCPX??

OK, so I might have been a little off in my speculation about Apple buying Adobe – or not – just backwards. What if instead of Apple trying to buy Adobe, Apple is thinking about selling it’s Pro Application Division? I didn’t come up with this – it’s been rumored on the web about Apple maybe wanting to sell it’s Pro App division. This would make sense then about the current state of FCPX.

Lets just suppose Adobe were the intended buyer… FCP and Premier Pro are almost even on the playing field – you can’t have a company with two stellar editing platforms – one needs to be elevated and the other brought down a few pegs. Does Adobe have a prosumer editing package anymore? So now there would be iMovie Pro for the consumer / prosumer and Premier Pro for the full time editor. Audition to replace STP and After Effects for Motion. Color could stay around as a stand alone grading tool and compressor would / could get absorbed by Adobe Media Encoder. All at 64 bit.

At least this would make more sense than the idea that Apple just didn’t follow though on the re-development of Final Cut at this stage. The re-design took a long time and they had input from industry professionals. There has to be another reason… Then again this is just all speculation. However, I am taking another look at Premier Pro CS 5.5… Could be fun.

Just another thought

TDTrey.com

Apple…Brain Fart??? FCP X ???

OK. So I have to ask the same question that every other editor is asking – WTF???

A quote from a director friend of mine:

It looks like the Amiga Toaster Flyer mated with iMovie and gave birth to Vegas Prosumer.
–JL

Not to be rude – Apple has always been a mile ahead of the rest of the world and maybe it is so this time as well… but, really. At first blush FCPX seems a little FCP’d Up. Too harsh… Sorry, I’ll tone it down.

So, like everyone else, I have seen the footage from the “SuperMeet” at NAB and the speculation sites and finally the pieces starting to float up on the web by new owners. I have to say it looks very attractive at first but then you start to look at the list of missing features… These are things that everyday editors use – regularly… I just read another report of how Apple is working hard to add these features back into the next update — but I would ask, why weren’t they in there in the first place?

As I said a minute ago, Apple is always ahead of the curve. So once the missing features get added back in this could be a pretty stomping app — but it looks a lot like “iMovie on steroids” right now.

Lets keep our fingers crossed =) Go Apple

—————ADD ON——————–

OK, so I have to ask… Is Apple planning to buy Adobe?

I’ve spent all morning reading various posts about a definite migration from FCP to either AVID or Premiere CS5.5. It started to dawn on me that one possible reason Apple would gut FCP so badly and call it “professional” is to create a stampead to another NLE — Premiere, their closest competitor. With a very similar history in development and timeline it would make since. When Premiere left MAC it was still clunky. Now after it’s return and apparent growth spurt it seems to be the new “BIG kid on the block”. I’m wondering if Apple realized it would take far too long to re-invent FCP 64bit from the ground up as a professional application and that it made more since to stake a claim in another company… So, Apple creates “iMovie Pro”, calls it FCPX for a legacy tie in. Then buys Adobe later in the year. Adopts CS5.5 as the new FCP studio collection. Adds Color and Sound Track Pro / Logic into the collection to round out the total production environment and poof… SMOKE for under $3000 bucks…

Just a thought…

TDTrey.com