Premiere Pro CS6 - easy transition

Cut first short spot on Premere Pro CS6 - extraordinarily easy transition from FCP7.

1st impressions - the good

incredibly fast -- red render bars - yellow render bars - PP ignores them and keeps editing without a stutter on macbook pro intel core i7 8 gigs of ram.

virtually no transcode with anything you throw at it - just toss it in the timeline and edit (only caveat - it comforms all audio to whatever you've set the timeline to usually 48K so there's a slight delay if you are mixing audio rates on ingest

FCP7 Keyboard shortcuts -- it's like you never left FCP - they all work (just select that custom keyboard) and if there's something that's not in there - easily assignable

Skimming - track assignments - motion moves in the CANVAS or whatever they call it - just as in FCP7 - one thing took a while to realize -- you must double click the canvas window to get the motion controls inside the window ..or just do in the motion tab in the viewer window

Audio mixer -- must turn on write on the mixer channel to record the keyframes in real time with a mix -- slightly different than FCP - but useful and big timesaver over rubber banding in FCP x

THE DIFFERENT

this is the biggest difference -- you get the time hit on ingest with FCP7 - transcoding and re-wrapping video

with PP - you get the time hit on export - it doesn't use render files (if you chose to render in timeline - but it's not necessary) it basically transcodes everything on export to the format you want....this takes much more time than you are used to in FCP 7 --

This was just my first spin with this - but very impressive.

Yeah now imagine a half hour episode or a one hour documentary or a feature film. The render hits on those are going to be horrendous unfortunately.

Also at this point, they really need to work on the internal media management under the hood. I'm not ready to throw a documentary or even a series at it just yet.

MAJOR improvements over CS 5 and 5.5, but just need a few more tweaks and we'll be ready to move all our productions over to it. I'm looking forward to CS 6.5 or 7.0, whatever they release next year.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Totally agree. But they know this is a biggy, so I'm sure they're working on it. You save a ton of time during ingest and cutting, but you have to leave time for export, especially if you're not cutting native.

Audio is still a bit odd for me, but way better than before. I opened a copy of PP4 the other day at a job to quickly cut up an mp4, and was surprised at how much clumsier it seemed.

>you have to leave time for export, especially if you're not cutting native.

Unfortunately there is no "native" format in Premiere. On export everything is rendered via AME. You can't export "same as source" QT or any kind of wrapper or codec. Imagine cutting a 1hr documentary straight cuts and waiting 1hr to export instead of 15 minutes in FCP or Avid.



www.strypesinpost.com

strypes Wrote:
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Imagine cutting a 1hr
> documentary straight cuts and waiting 1hr to
> export instead of 15 minutes in FCP or Avid.

Exporting a 1 hour documentary full of formats in 1 hour is not going to happen. Probably more like 2 - 8 hours depending on what all you've got going on in that timeline. There is a HUGE render hit at the end of the editing process if you throw everything under the sun in your timeline.

That's definitely something folks will have to test on their own as this will vary depending on your system and whether you spend the bucks to put two or three nVidia cards in your system to cut down on the render time.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Strypes, I'm not sure if I'm following you here correctly. You can easily export 'same as source' by cutting in the same codec as your source, then clicking 'match sequence settings' in the export>media popup window, and then just hitting 'export'. If you queue things they go to AME, but not if you just export.

I dunno, Walter, here is where I disagree. I'm a big advocate of getting your pipeline right. It's horses for courses- use the right tools and workflow for the right job. And you get the job done fast and good. But then I think we also agree on this other point that we're not necessarily too sure if we'd want to offline/online in Premiere and other finishing apps.



www.strypesinpost.com

My bad there. So they added that feature. That's huge.



www.strypesinpost.com

strypes Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I dunno, Walter, here is where I disagree. I'm a
> big advocate of getting your pipeline right. It's
> horses for courses- use the right tools and
> workflow for the right job. And you get the job
> done fast and good. But then I think we also agree
> on this other point that we're not necessarily too
> sure if we'd want to offline/online in Premiere
> and other finishing apps.

You do NOT want to offline in Premiere right now. There's no good path to online. Batch Capture / Batch relink to online media, etc.... No good right now.

The thing today is we have to be so flexible with our workflows because we never know what's coming in the door or where we're going to have to download materials. So while it's very nice to be able to lay out everything at the start of the project, things change so quickly and new stuff gets thrown in forcing us to be able to move quickly.

And to interact with other systems out there, it's best to have everything brought to one format if possible. So we really need the best of both worlds. In that regard, FCP really spoiled us.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

I'm finding that the best part is avoiding all the render hits during edit. In fact, on a dual quad core machine with two Quadros and currently editing a job in 3K with 3K Scarlet footage and a mix of HD footage plus keys, titles and motion effects I've yet to hit return for a render. A quick export of my 5 minute sequence to h264 at 720p for client review takes about 15 minutes. Not bad at all considering all the time I saved pre and during edit.

It's a different world entirely. Doing the math very roughly: in FCP7 the same job would require a laborious ingest, constant rendering and then a reasonably fast export. In PPro it's no time for ingest, no or very little time for render during edit, but a longer playout. For me at the end of the day PPro wins hands down, one just has to plan one's time accordingly at the back end when it comes time for a master. For TVC's or corporates, I think that the somewhat longer mastering time is not an issue.

For longer format work, sad to say, but I would go with PPro on a big PC (sob, choke) with 64GB Ram and 4 Quadros.

Now, this part about render hits, I agree with Walter. The client comes back and wants to swap one of the logos. The event is in 2 hours. Exporting takes 4 hours. You scream in frustration, tearing your hair out, and you vow to do your next job in FCP 7 or Avid or God forbid, FCP X.

With long form, you want to finish the cut at 2, and send it out the network by 4. And I don't think Walter will buy the idea of having 12 machines all running 4 Quadros each. And if you were to get such a powerful machine, why not just do it in Smoke?



www.strypesinpost.com

>In that regard, FCP really spoiled us.

There is one feature which not many people talk about. FCP was a great database tool with a search function. Let's say I have 3 assistants logging the footage, and I want to compile a list of Brolls, I can easily do a search and compile them in a new project.

You can't open two projects at the same time in Premiere, and while you can import a project into another Premiere project, it just isn't as efficient.



www.strypesinpost.com

>And to interact with other systems out there, it's best to have everything brought
>to one format if possible.

Supposing you shot some stuff on RED and your main cam is DvcproHD with some time-lapse and Brolls shot on the 5D. What format will you go to?



www.strypesinpost.com

Whichever format you want to export, I suppose? I've seen someone mix r3d, dv ntsc, pal, AVCHD - can't remember exactly what he had going on, but I think he had seven different codecs altogether, including mixed frame rates, and it still worked.

<<The event is in 2 hours. Exporting takes 4 hours.>>


In that case, I'd just bring the master into a new sequence, fix the logo, and play out again. Media Encoder would race through that quite quickly. If I had mastered to tiff or dpx, which is very often the case, then something like a logo tweak would be quite easy.

Granted PPro, although very similar to FCP7 now, involves a different workflow as far as time management is concerned. What if that same client had come in at the beginning with a mix of RED, ProRes, Image Sequences, and assorted other codecs and said production timing has changed, we have to start editing immediately? In PPro, you can.

Smoke? Sure, but 12 Licenses? Ouch. Even at the new price as training will cost at least that much again. Plus some seriously hefty machines to run it on properly.

I've yet to hit return for a render. A quick export of my 5 minute sequence to h264 at 720p for client review takes about 15 minutes. Not bad at all considering all the time I saved pre and during edit.

Hi Clay

If you haven't looked already, you should maybe check out some H264 export hardware acceleration options ... I'd think you should be able to drop that 15 minute H.264 encode time (for a 5 minute sequence) down at least to realtime, probably better.

I ran a quick test last week (on a new PC based CS6 system ... quad core i7 3.6GHz, 16GB RAM) and was really impressed with how quickly the built in H264 export worked, without acceleration .. my simple 3 minute test sequence exported in about 4 minutes, maybe a shade under ... but when I sent to my accelerator (Matrox MXO2 MAX) it did the same in about 2 minutes, maybe a shade over, so even better.

Cheers
Andy

I think Clay is talking about exporting a mixed fomat timeline- full of 5K R3D and Arriraw. The h.264 encoding via AME is GPU accelerated, although the mixed formats would result in a longer export.



www.strypesinpost.com

Hey Andy,

thanks for the tip. Yes, it's a mixed format timeline with everything from r3D camera masters to .flv placeholder files and with motion fx, keys, composites and titles. 15 Mins for a screener playout is quite good, considering.


Btw, anyone had a chance to pop open SpeedGrade yet?

Keep in mind that sending your timeline from Premiere Pro to SpeedGrade will result in your files being converted to DPX. HUGE files and unless you have a very fast system, you won't be able to play the files in anything close to realtime.

Also you will require an nVidia card to play out your footage to a reference monitor. SpeedGrade does not support AJA / BMD / Matrox or any other products at this time.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

2 points to note. You can export an EDL and relink to them in SpeedGrade, which reads those formats, however I'm not sure if I'll trust that route though.

The Nvidia Quadro cards with SDI output... They are not supported on the Mac OS, so unless something changes, you need a Quadro and a new PC.



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