Filmmaker’s open Letter to Adobe.

[Nick D]

Hi shashbugu,

I agree, AE could definitely benefit from better color correcting tools. If you could be more detailed about the type of color correcting tool that would be useful to you that would be helpful. This is something that is on our plate every cycle and we weigh it against other features.

A little secret, if you dynamic link a ppro project that has a three way color corrector in it, and bring it into AE, the effect will in fact show up, however it will not have any pretty Custom UI (just controls for each parameter). Would it be sufficient to simply upgrade this effect with better custom UI, or were you looking for something different?

Mark,
Why do you say AE on mac is broken? Please elaborate if you are having a problem. Hopefully CS5 should fix your reliability issues. With 64bit, expect less out of memory issues; the limits for out of memory issues to much much higher, as AE can now use all of your system ram (instead of just 2GB limit imposed by a 32bit application).

Thanks for the feedback, it is always welcome,
Amir
Adobe After Effects Developer

Hi Amir,

For working on 4K Red footage with optimum performance on CS5 and taking advantage of Mercury, what minimum hardware specs (ex: CPU, RAM, storage size / throughput and type (SSD or is 7200rpm esata drives ok?) should we be using aside from the Nvidia GPU?

Also, does Mercury work equally well with the Mac Platform, or am I better off upgrading PC hardware...

Many thanks.

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

Hi Amir,

For working on 4K Red footage with optimum performance on CS5 and taking advantage of Mercury, what minimum hardware specs (ex: CPU, RAM, storage size / throughput and type (SSD or is 7200rpm esata drives ok?) should we be using aside from the Nvidia GPU?

Also, does Mercury work equally well with the Mac Platform, or am I better off upgrading PC hardware...

Many thanks.

it should work fine for the Mac..
for hardware nothing special than a good powerful machine.. David Helmly said just a quad-core cpu with 8-12 gigs of ram and a compatible CUDA card (GTX285, Quadro 3800, 4800, CX and 5800)..
people says fast SSDs runs CS4 without any crashes... I think fast SSD would add up to your performance and stability..
for storage.. you'll need a fast raid array to handle the bandwidth of your footage..
that's all.. just simple powerful machine.. of course you'll benefit if you got dual quad-core Xeons and 24 gigs of ram.. its up to your budget..

 

[Peter John Ross]

* premiere is a nice thing, however for real world processing quite useless. Hard to imagine doing some advanced secondaries in there.

Secondaries, as in color correction? I agree. "Real world processes", I think it can edit just as well as AVID or FINAL CUT PRO.

To me, I've been a professional Adobe user for nearly 10 years. The thing that seems to keep Premiere Pro from being a professional application is the lack of independent audio timecode. I can't export an EDL of original DAT timecode for a professional audio engineer to deal with it.

 

[Stepan Kment]

... a request list ...

... a request list ...

Secondaries, as in color correction? I agree. "Real world processes", I think it can edit just as well as AVID or FINAL CUT PRO.

To me, I've been a professional Adobe user for nearly 10 years. The thing that seems to keep Premiere Pro from being a professional application is the lack of independent audio timecode. I can't export an EDL of original DAT timecode for a professional audio engineer to deal with it.

Of course, by "real world processing", I meant color grading in this context. We finished a feature film in Prem+AFX, so I had to establish some functional workflow.

1/ premiere with external SDI playout can be used for primary grading already, there is a color corrector plugin that works.
2/ for anything else than PAL/NTSC or Rec709 HD as a target, a problem arises as Prem lacks color management... in my case, I have HW calibrated Eizo on a DVI as a primary display and use ICC profile in AFX, this is missing in Prem.
3/ secondary correction is really needed, too. At least simple masks. It is very typical one needs to brighten a face, too often used. Of course, ideally with some tracking and selective feather: feathering is really needed, for every progressive footage, long shutter times cause lots of blur.. optimally not only feather radius, rather two curves for selective feather radius like other software offers.
4/ for grading, color decision library is needed, that is a library of presets with thumbnails.
5/ And... in fact, whole GUI would have to be adjusted for this work. Combustion has a specific CC mode of UI, I guess, so something like that? No need to invent anything, all the apps actually work and I am just asking for some functionality they offer... esp. because AFX + Prem offer all the functionality, just it is hardly accessible or there are various glitches, eg. color finesse as a separate GUI, which effectively makes it unusable or hard to use, out of AFX color management, hard to use in real world where continuity grade must be achieved among clips..
6/ Prem has a vectorscope and various level monitoring (RGB parade per channel needed), which is great and severely missing in AFX, on the other hand!
7/ correct overbrights management. AFX does this mostly, Prem... don't know. When I am forced to grade in a narrow gamut like sRGB (Rec709), overbrights and float processing are important. in AFX, noise removal isn't 32bit comp compatible and rather slow (not sure if all CPU cores used when this is applied, but that'd be a speculation)
8/ and DPX export. Or export of anything with more than 8 bits. Even for HD encoding, 8bit RGB is not enough and may cause banding.
9/ r3d adjustment dialogbox accessible among common panels of the interface. It is really deadly to enter that panel esp. in AFX for hundreds of clips.
10/ stability, speed... in AFX, rendering 2K out, I noticed the performance really changed over time, in the beginning, AFX rendered like 30 frames per minute, it dropped to 15+- after hours of rendering. 64 bits, please..!! These parallel rendering processes now are certainly better than nothing, but it seems there are still various boundaries.
11/ not exactly my area: sound engineer complains broadcast wav with timecode embedded for sync of audio and video tracks support missing(?). It is possible to record with timecode, both red and audio, however it must be handled properly by the editing app, too, I guess, otherwise manual sync based on

I'd continue here with more and more issues, however if I'd get some reasonable environment solving CC on 95% of typical easy takes, I'd be perfectly OK as the rest can be finished in AFX, which... can do almost everything, but it takes a time there.

I am not asking for Scratch or these ultra great and expensive systems - I expect realtime from these and extra comfort that must be paid. What I ask for as a basice set of tools most used in real world with easy UI, color managed (how otherwise one can do color correcting, when not in managed environment??), stable and able to work in 32bit mode with overbrights (incl. plugins handling overbrigths correctly). Real time playout in 1/4res or so would be perfectly fine with me, single stream OK, no problem - that is why pro CC tools are expected to be expensive, for high quality grading, realtime 2K playout really is a must, however I ask for much less here, I believe. And again, Adobe actually *has* all the algorithms available, I ask for their integration into a package that works together. [I know, not easy anyway.]

If color worked on Windows and was stable, maybe it'd be a choice, but I don't have apples and any other fruits here :huh:, just ugly big black loud case from Intel full of disks in RAID-6 and Core i7, vista 64 sitting on top of that. :blushing:

 

[shashbugu]

its been over a year Adobe....

 

[jake blackstone]

Copy Discreet's Color Warper.

Please don't. It's awful...

 

[David McGavran]

We have been testing 2k DPX sequences as an example in CS5.5 quite extensively. Are you having problems in CS5?

 

[David McGavran]

Works great on the mac... You would want an NVidia card however.