Premiere Pro/iMac Upgrade Questions

After a lot of deliberation and procrastinating, we've decided to upgrade our antique (2006) Mac Pros and FCP7. After some research I've come to believe that Premiere Pro is the way to go for us and despite the great debate over Creative Cloud, I think we'll cross our fingers and jump on board.
My first question is about PP training. We've been using Final Cut for about 6 years and by no means know it all but can get around it well enough to do what we need. PP on the other hand, we've barely tinkered with and although It's similar I think we'd benefit from some professional training. Sure we could open it up and fumble through it and likely figure it out, but I'd rather have someone experienced tell me how to get started on the right foot. Does anybody have any recommendations for good training? Obviously there's a plethora of online sources but I still see value in classroom training as well. Also want to take in consideration that PP CC is changing constantly and online tutorials from 6 months ago could be out of date.
Now for some much needed updating on the hardware side. We'll need to primarily run PP working with XDCAM, H.264,and AVCHD, mainly but who knows what next year brings. On occasion we'll be running AE and PS as well, not all together on a daily basis but I'd like to be able to operate all three at once jumping from one app to the other as needed. I see quite a few people using iMacs editing whit PP and I can see why, pretty good bang for the buck, but will it handle some mild AE and PS use as well?
I've read up on Walter Biscardis use of iMacs and it's got me thinking they are capable machines, however this is a a two man band, everything has to be done on these 2 machines, No 12 core Mac Pros in the back room for rendering if needed. That being said we're already accustomed to quite a bit of render time so any improvement is a plus.
The next big thing is storage. We currently work with a 4 bay OWC raid via eSata at each edit station, they're barely fast enough as is. I've just scratched the surface on researching this but would probably be looking for a similar set up only thunderbolt. I'd love to have a large amount of shared storage but really know nothing about it other than it seems very expensive. Any direction on what to do here would be great.
Tons of other questions floating around my head but this post is long enough, I appreciate any input you all have.

Thunderbolt is still fairly pricey. You can also consider USB 3 arrays for editing. USB now has transfer speeds of 5Gbs.

I'm not sure how well it will run the Resolve 10, though, as iMacs have a GFX card with 1GB of VRAM which may or may not be enough. And currently you cannot hook up GPUs via ThB.



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A lot of my workplaces that have gone to PP are using lots of iMacs and in general they're fine. Go for more RAM where possible though - the new machines don't let you do any more of your own tinkering.

I personally often cut with XDCam, H.264 source and the occasional AVCHD as well as M2T and sometimes R3D. All good on PP, and no transcoding beforehand required. You can even mix them in the same timeline and play back without rendering. Having said that, the most problems I see tend to be with M2T files going a bit whack, but hopefully HDV is on the way out anyway.

AE and PS even to a moderate degree (I mean, more than 'light' usage) are fine on the iMacs and very well integrated with PP.

Not sure where you are, but you can look up Adobe trainers here : [training.adobe.com]

However, a lot of the online stuff you can get for free, and CS6 and up are all pretty similar. Not EXACTLY the same - CC has a lot of improvements, but the basic 'get started' stuff is very similar.

When I switched I used an online set of sessions by Maxim Jago and they were very good. Thorough, clearly explained and not just for beginners. You can check his courses out here : [www.video2brain.com]

Or if you like freebies - check out AdobeTV : [tv.adobe.com] also get yourself a free trial download to mess with for 30 days to see how it feels in your hand.

I know a couple of local editors who had to do a multicam cut of a couple of live speeches shot on Mark5s overnight for delivery the next day on FCP7. In the time it took to transcode the footage and set up the multicam in FCP they could have been done and home in bed on PP. It's really the next logic step, IMHO.

Thank you for the information Jude and Strypes, I will likely be back with more questions as I continue my research on hardware.

If I were starting from zero today I'd be thinking seriously about going with Creative Cloud on a PC. I would also add DaVinci 10 to the package for grading and OnLine. It will coexist nicely on the same machine, just be careful with the System Requirements. Unless you're really devoted to the Mac like some of us are, myself included, PC's are at least worth a look. For example, Asus released a new PC motherboard with 2 Thunderbolt2 ports, 10 USB 3.0 ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 10 Sata 3 connections, 2 Ethernet Ports, 2x 16 Lane PCIe slots and HDMI. You can connect up to 12 external TBolt2 devices, run up to 3 4K displays and so on.

With TBolt2 now availble on PC's, I think that a lot new storage solutions are for sure coming to market by year-end. I wouldn't buy too heavily into external storage at the moment.

Or, if PC's are out of the question, then I'd certainly want to wait for the new MacPro before making any new investments in a multi-bay facility. Pricing on the new MacPro will make or break it. It will be interesting to see what Apple does.

Admittedly, all of the preceeding is total overkill for the codecs you mention and the iMac is an excellent alternative. Just go for a full load of RAM.

Keep an eye out for 4K though, it's coming at us fast. I would definetly talk to some of my key clients to see what they're thinking.


Cheers,
Clay

If you are looking at the Resolve 10, here's a little hint about GFX card requirement from Peter Chamberlain from BMD.

Quote
2GB will be listed as the minimum recommended in the new config guides with minor exceptions, e.g. for rMBP where you cant order 2GB.

[forum.blackmagicdesign.com]

If you do a comparison, there is a general price difference between PC graphics cards and the Mac "blessed" graphics cards. But then, you need to deal with Windows in general. Like the virus scanners, also the fact that you have 3 instead of 4 modifier keys.



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Thanks for the input ClayC. I'd like to keep all options open but I don't think I can abandon the Mac platform, they just work too good too easily. I'm also torn on waiting for the new Mac Pro but we would really like to upgrade before moving on to some big projects this fall, so how long do we wait? A week, 2 months? who knows. You're right though, the price will be deciding factor when it does come out.

16GBs of RAM is recommended for a good general purpose edit machine for native editing, as all that processing uses up quite a bit of RAM, not to mention you cannot swap out RAM on some of the newer Macs. Premiere also loves graphics cards, and it tends to like newer Mac OS's, because for the Mac OS, the updates for the graphics card drivers are usually bundled in the OS updates.

I agree about classroom training especially if you have a good trainer. In a classroom session, you can ask questions, whereas for online training, you can't ask Quicktime player when you have a question.



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Definitely leaning towards the iMacs, but will have them decked out with 32gb of RAM and the best graphics card they offer. I've been looking all day at external storage solutions. The Promise Tech. Pegasus looks like a decent unit, I just wish I could utilize all the 4tb drives I already have instead buying what they come with. Now looking into Areca Arc - 8050 8 bay units.

Yes, the classroom training has a way of sticking with me better for some reason. It is pricey compared to online tutorials but it's something I don't mind investing in. Looking at some classes offered by Future Media Concepts. Also looked into video2brain as Jude suggested, apparently they've been bought out by lynda.com so that's always an option.

Another question about Creative Cloud. Seems to be a lot of confusion/controversy over the licensing. People wanting to run apps on 2 computers at once. Never has been a problem for me in the past because I've used FCP, but I can foresee starting a render in PP at work, going home and flipping open the laptop to use PS…..and oops it doesn't work ??? Is that the way cloud operates?

This is from Scott Worthington, a staff at Adobe.

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Our software EULA and the activation limits are going to be the primary preventative measures in a lot of these scenarios.

If you leave a session of your software open at your office and lock the machine without closing the application, we're not going to prevent you from launching your activated software on your laptop when you get home, nor require you to go through some hoops to get it to transfer over your "Active Session."

[forums.adobe.com]



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One thing I have to say about the CC license, is that as a freelancer, I love it. I work at various production houses, and with CC, I have this set of tools that I can install, log in and use. Even if I'm working at a production house with CC, I can log in and instantly sync up my keyboard shortcuts.



www.strypesinpost.com

Seems like CC does have some advantages.

I'm a freelancer also. I can't live off of one type of media for work. CC opens the door to other avenues. Like Digital Publishing. Building apps right out of InDesign. I'm able to publish them at no cost to me. Before it was $400 a pop. There are many other apps and features you can only get if you have CC. Right now there are a lot of people that are reluctant to go to CC, so for me that means less competition. Like it or not, a lot of what and how we do things are changing rapidly, and for what I see, Adobe keeping up with it.

There are more advantages. There was already a 7.0.1 release that was packed with features. This would not have been possible under the previous perpetual model.



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