blown away by Adobe Premiere CS5.5

[jake blackstone]

Not to mention, Smoke, Resolve for Mac or Color being Mac OS X exclusive applications cannot take advantage of 10-bit output (it's not available on Mac).

Resolve with SDI or HDMI output from Decklink is 10 bit and so is AJA with Smoke.

 

[Scott Crawley]

It seems i will be spending some time in this area, so I thought i would say hello and offer a little bit of an intoduction.

I have a lot in common with Alexander. My first editor was Premiere 4, back before I could afford enough volume and speed of disk space, or CPU processing power to do too much with it. I was already working with Photoshop and Illustrator so it seemed a likely place to get my feet wet. When FCP 1.0 was released I was off and learning, later adding After Effects to my arsenal, and then rushing out to get a copy of Shake much later when it was EOL'ed. (I've yet to spend enough time with Shake to get comfortable with a nodal structure, but that is talk for another area.) It has been a great ride and one that enabled me to change professions, but it seems FCP and I are quickly coming to an impasse.

I won't get into Apple bashing because that isn't how I do things and that ground has been covered, but interoperability, camera support and monitoring are key reasons why I am taking another look at Premiere so I'll be looking intently at those areas. If monitoring is an issue it would be tremendously helpful for me to find a quick but thorough reference on the subject. I'll be looking on Adobe TV and Steve's links. Thanks for those.

I hope to get to know those of you in this area whom I have yet to meet and I will be reading from the archives. Please bear with me.

Greetings.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Resolve with SDI or HDMI output from Decklink is 10 bit and so is AJA with Smoke.

Right, of course, but that is additional hardware. Steve was talking about 10-bit support with the GPU - the whole point being "without any third party card", to quote him.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

I'm not sure I follow you. I don't get how you can talk about Shake and Nuke in one sentence then talk about Motion and FCPX in the Next.

Well first off I didn't mention FCP X in the same space where I talked about the compositing applications.

I talked about Shake, Nuke, Smoke, After Effects and Motion.

Why are they together? Well ... they are all compositing tools.

Its important to understand that they all are different takes on how to do the same job.

The only thing that strikes me as odd is that all of them, with one notable exception, can play back a 1080p 10 bit uncompressed file in real time.

So, in that category at least Motion 3, which is generally considered the weakest compositor I mentioned, is a better choice than After Effects.

I said that in specific support of my assertion that After Effects had poor performance. Which it does.

I note you had nothing to say about that, which I went on about for like 600 words ... you did decide to instead talk about the one line where I mentioned that Shake was used on a lot of projects - including some I worked on.

Since you don't understand my position on After Effects, I'll state it directly. After Effects is a powerful compositing tool. I think it has a bad interface, and it has the poorest performance of every compositing application I have ever tested.

As a result, despite your claim that Shake is dead, I'll keep using it together with Motion. I'll fire up After Effects only when I think it has a capability that neither Shake or Motion have - and that's actually pretty uncommon.

I'm more likely to move to Nuke or Smoke than invest significant time or money improving the After Effects experience. The built in schematic viewer is useless. I don't need to see a node based interface to understand my comp, I need a node based interface to work efficiently in my comp.

The main thing I see in Conduit (the node based compositor plug in for AE you are probably referring to) is that it has GPU acceleration for both previews and rendering.

Of course it works in Final Cut Pro and Motion as well as "Conduit Live" a standalone node based compositing application- and it has direct in application support for Black Magic cards. Plus ... I can use Conduit to build a comp in one application and move it to another application ... that may be worth a trial.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

You do know that you can get accurate color on a monitor full screen in Premiere without any third party card? Simply go to the program window and choose output. Then select playback options and choose any monitor you have hooked up to your video card. You will now get a full screen display on that monitor. As long as you are using the HDMI or display port output and an accurate monitor you'll get an acurate display, I am getting very good results with my HP ZR30.

The problem with your assertion is the use of the word accurate.

You can get a calibrated RGB display ... and that is great if you are doing RGB delivery. So if your target is YouTube or Vimeo go to town- that workflow will rock!

Larger facilities use a workflow like you are describing as a cost savings measure. They put a system like that on every artists desk, and then spend the money in edit, coloring and finishing suites to make sure those have quality reference monitoring.

They also have careful LUT color management end to end.

The idea is that if the artists have a known and manageable level of error, then you can apply a custom 3D LUT in your reference monitoring to understand what the artists intent was while still being able to properly monitor and evaluate the image.

Let me put that in simpler English: You use that sort of system because you know that someone better qualified and equipped to evaluate the image will be evaluating and correcting your work after you are "finished."

Now I am a small studio. If I want to output finished work ... then I have to use quality monitoring that is up to the standards of my delivery.

That means that the Decklink Card or an AJA Kona is already in my studio.

So, why would I choose to spend extra to get inferior reference monitoring?

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Resolve with SDI or HDMI output from Decklink is 10 bit and so is AJA with Smoke.

Actually Premiere Pro, FCP 6 & 7, Motion, After Effects, Photoshop and most everything else that can be used with these cards directly supports 10bpc color via HD-SDI and HDMI with the Black Magic and AJA cards.

Notably a tool that depends on the "Extended Desktop" feature of Kona cards ... like FCP X, will get a mish mash of both worlds. Yes they get 10 bit support, but the output is RGB and addresses the display as RGB - so its not correct for broadcast - but its a damn sight more accurate than just using a computer monitor output. Also, while the display may be driven at 10 bit ... the application won't be able to address it as 10 bit.

 

[Steve Cee]

The problem with your assertion is the use of the word accurate.

You can get a calibrated RGB display ... and that is great if you are doing RGB delivery. So if your target is YouTube or Vimeo go to town- that workflow will rock!"



You obviously did not look at the links in my message. You can get very accurate readings using displayport output and a calibated monitor. While my work is not for theatrical release, it is almost all broadcast. My spots are national and regional (4th largest market in the US) and I have never had any issues. I have also done work using this setup for some pretty big corporations. So you might want to do some more research.... By the way I was using a decklink card but it just isn't neccessary now.


Does Premiere CS5 achieve the “impossible dream” for critical evaluation monitoring?

Anyone who has ever read the seven articles I’ve published so far about critical video evaluation —be it with the HP DreamColor monitor, or any other brand and model— knows why this process has traditionally required a professional interface to do this properly. Even Apple has warned about this, both verbally at NAB 2005 when announcing the Digital Cinema Desktop, as well as in writing, in Apple’s support article TA27705. This situation has affected other professional editing programs too. This situation has convinced many video editors —even those who now deal exclusively with tapeless footage— to buy a (seemingly) otherwise unnecessary professional i/o interface from manufacturers like AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, or MOTU. Has this situation changed with Premiere CS5, together with 10-bit/30-bit DisplayPort or HDMI connections on computers?

Read the rest here:

http://goo.gl/1DFqW

 

[shashbugu]

I wont go back and forth Adobe vs ......


I still welcome you to the CS family. If you take your time to learn the applications in the suite, you will find out as a Red camera user Adobe has your back.
CS5 and Resolve complement Autodesk Smoke very well, if you do decide to move to a smoke platform.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

I wont go back and forth Adobe vs ......


I still welcome you to the CS family. If you take your time to learn the applications in the suite, you will find out as a Red camera user Adobe has your back.
CS5 and Resolve complement Autodesk Smoke very well, if you do decide to move to a smoke platform.

Well, that's good.

As a suite I like the Adobe products. I'm glad circumstances conspired to make sure I could get my hands on it. Adobe has really pushed innovation and they deserve some rewards.

They aren't flawless - but what is right?