Production update: Premiere Pro Long Form Performance

I promised to get back on this since we've just finished editing on STINGER for Shoreline Entertainment. PPro is performing ok on large timelines. But not great. It's still far from the Avid but equal to FCP. I've also discovered a few AAF bugs going in and from PPRO and AE. Some of the Pro bundle plugins stops working now and then when I've imported a timeline from PPro into AE. I still find our PPro setup less "buggy" that our FCP setup.

Format wars!

I predict an uneven battle between HDV and DVCPRO HD in the coming two or three years on the below $10K systems. And I predict HDV will win. Looking at the release of FCP4 I cant stop to think that Apple underestimated the HDV craze that's going on right now. There's nothing wrong with editing DVCPRO HD over FireWire. But the format do have one gigantic flaw that pulls the rug under Apples marketing feets here in Europe (and in places like Australia)...DVCPRO HD is a 30p format running on 29,97 clock. There is no possibility to edit DVCPRO HD in 25p in the 50Hz world and integrate it into a regular post production workflow. My suggestion is that Apple stops marketing DVCPRO HD and FCP HD in PAL countries until they have integrated HDV in the workflow (Hey, FCP has been HD since version 1.5). It's a waste of time and money and resources and the users have better things to do than discover the truth the hard way... HDV however has no problem anywhere in the world. It's 25p as well as 30p.

PPro: Link

Check out Digital Media Nets dedicated Premiere Pro site.

PPro: More expensive solutions for PPro!

Matrox announced the Axio on IBC.

Matrox Axio makes Adobe Premiere Pro the foremost realtime HD and SD editor for demanding broadcast and post-production environments. It features no-render HD and SD finishing in compressed and uncompressed formats, superior color correction tools, advanced realtime effects, and a full range of analog and digital audio and video inputs and outputs. It incorporates Matrox Flex 3D and Power of X technologies to leverage scalable CPU power with the explosive performance of dedicated 3D graphics hardware to provide the ultimate SD and HD editing environment.

The Matrox Axio family builds on solid expertise gained over several generations of Matrox DigiSuite and RT Series products. Well over 200,000 users worldwide currently enjoy the amazing value, stable reliability, and superior productivity of Matrox based realtime nonlinear editing systems. Close collaboration between the Matrox and Adobe engineering teams throughout development ensure the tightest hardware/software integration.

The Matrox Axio software and hardware components are integrated into an approved workstation and sold through a network of Matrox authorized resellers. These resellers also provide installation and training services to customers worldwide.

It's probably good. Still a bit pricey compared to a DeckLink solution. The HD configuration is $12,000.

PPro: The new HDV plugin from Adobe.

There has been some speulation regarding the soon to be released HDV plugin from Adobe that will let you edit HDV in Premiere Pro. The news about the Adobe plugin hit just when Sony showed their new HDV consumer camera (the FX-1) that will probably be used by a lot of independent filmmakers like myself. The rumors say the plugin is written by CineForm. If it's true it's great news because I don't think Adobes current collaboration with MainConcept is going anywhere and CineForms visually lossless codec is awsome. The HDV solution Mpeg Pro coming from MainConcept leaves a lit to be desired in terms of workflow and over all quality. I personally thing that goes for all of MainConcepts Mpeg products. That's sad because MainConcepts are CHAMPS(!) for bringing Non Linear Video Editing to Linux with MainActor. One of the few NLE's available on Linux.

I'm back!
Been gone for a while shooting a new movie...and it was a very tough shoot. This one was shot in a studio in Stockholm and we used a Vaio P4 2,8GHz as an off line suite in a corner of the place. The Vaio was hooked up to a LaCie Extreme BigDisk and a Sony J-H3 HDCAM player that downconverts to DV25 on the fly and outputs through a regular FireWire connection. Very cool.

In the next couple of weeks I'll be able to report how well Premiere Pro 1.5 does on a feature length project. This is my first one using Premiere Pro. The others have all been Avid or Final Cut Pro.

PPro: Where are my DeckLink HD PPro drivers?
Blackmagic Design just announced a $1000 dollar price drop on the DeckLink HD card. I need PPro drivers now.

PPro/FCP: More NAB.
Apple introduced the free update FCP HD. If you've got the new Panasonic DVCPRO HD machine you can edit DVCPRO HD (1080i/720p) over FireWire. Even on a Powerbook. Let's hope the codec is OK. The new update also introduced the coolest thing yet - something everyone on Avid has been spoiled with since the early days of NLE's - Digital Cinema Desktop. Preview DV, SD and HD content full screen on your monitor. No need for additional software. That's the way it should be done. Apple also introduced Motion - a motion graphics app - a bit like LiveType on steroids. And no - it's not an After Effects killer. I'm only guessing but it seems to me like Motion could as well be integrated into FCP. Let's wait and see what happens.

On the PPro side there is a new cool product called Prospect HD from Cineform. It uses an AJA Kona HD card and regular IDE drives and Cineform's own wavelet algorithm to capture and play out HD in a visually lossless fomat. It can do nine streams of RT. The downside to this product is that it seems to be extremely over priced. Disk drives are not that expensive these days that we can't live without the Prospect HD wavelet algorithm.

RT = Don't believe the hype. IMHO most RT effects are highly overrated and totally unusable.

Blog update:
Since I'm currently a 50/50 user of PPro and FCP I've decided to cover as much as I can for both editing systems. Mostly a way for myself to keep track with the two NLE's and the hardware world around them.

PPro: Matrox announces HD support at NAB.
Built around the "power of X" engine found in the lower end DV25 solutions coming from Matrox. I'm not sure if this is a HDV solution or actually uncompressed 4:2:2. It's supposed to do both 720 and 1080 formats. Check it out.

PPro: Premiere Pro 1.5 is here.
There are some major cool features added to release 1.5.

Project Management Tools:
Remove unused media. We've been missing that one.

24P/A support:
Support for true progressive footage.

Effect Favorites:
The first thing a noticed where missing when I started using PPro.

More AE integration:
Support for using clip board data. And cross reference use of AE plugins.

AAF and EDL I/O:
This my friends is what's finally making PPro a truly professional application. Move over all else.

This is a really nice upgrade.

PPro/FCP: Blackmagic Designs AGAIN.
I just got a mail from Grant Petty. He's introducing the new DeckLink Pro HD at NAB. It's dual 4:4:4 1080 HD uncompressed. The most quality you can get within the SDI broadcast specs. He's giving it away at $2,495. The mail doesn't mention WinXP support but I'll bet they're working on it. He' also got a neat product called HDLink that turns an Apple HD flatpanel into an editing monitor for full screen HD previews. Very cool indeed. The Apple flatpanels are awesome.

People are WEIRD!
You think bringing the price of uncompressed 4:2:2 SDI editing down to the cost of a Sony Playstation would make people happy? Wrong! There's been a lot of hateful bashing in forums regarding the DeckLink cards and Blackmagic price policies. Some folks express anger because they loosed a couple of hundreds when the DeckLinks where lowered even further. Of course; If you've been in the business for a while that's ludicrous. What about the guy that invested hundred of thousands of dollars in the same type of hardware just a few years ago and now he has to sell it at DeckLink prices on eBay? For some reason that guy is not complaining.

People are also bashing DeckLink because it has 8-bit D/A analog monitoring. Phew! Get real people. When did 8-bit stop beeing a professionals choice? Digibeta, DVCAM, D-9, SX, D1...it's ALL 8-bit.

I'll end this post by quoting Niccolo Machiavelli:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,
than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

PPro: What's happening in Matrox land?
I've never been really impressed by all these DV RT solutions like the ones coming from Canopus and the other from Matrox. RT effects are highly overrated and they give the word "cheesy" meaning. RT effects are also impossible to integrate into the beautiful AAF workflow. But from what I've seen the Matrox Digisuites are awesome hardware. Why do they still only support Premiere? And why would you use "non Pro" Premiere (version 6.5 and earlier) in the first place? I really hope we'll see some drivers from Matrox this NAB. I'm starting to get the feeling that they have abandoned the Digisuite family. Sure hope not.

PPro: Missing something like Pixars Pixlet (MacOSX) with Premiere Pro?
Pixlet is a brilliant wavelet codec that let's you playback and edit large aspect files with minimum loss. Pixlet let's you playback (and edit) HD on very slow machines with a minimum of visible quality loss. I've been looking for a good wavelet codec for my Premiere Pro setup and I found the very promising PICVideo Wavelet2000 codec from Pegasus Imaging. The Wavelet2000 codec is designed to work within Premiere Pro. However I found a few small glitches (the source window doesn't play back satisfactory) but it can be edited and it's RT in the timeline. And the image quality is excellent. At the highest setting in Standard Definition it has a data rate of 1,8MB sec and I can't tell it apart from uncompressed visually without looking really hard. Keep in mind that DV that's compressed 5:1 produces a rate of 3,5MB/sec so the Wavelet2000 stream is really tiny in comparison.

PPro: Quiet Case - I like it.
I've just bought two Antec Sonata cases. They produce very low noise levels. I upgraded both with an extra disc fan and I'm not running them in quiet mode since they'll be doing a lot of heat generating video editing and rendering. The Sonatas can be run in silent mode and regular mode. So far highly recommended by me...

PPro/FCP: Holy Moses. I'm blind!
Blackmagic Designs also introduced new low prices and I must have missed them when I wrote my last DeckLink post. Uncompressed SD via SDI is now $298. My jaw is dropped. This is a dream - don't wake me up. Thank you Monsieur Grant.

PPro: ScenalyzerLive + PPro = No Go.
I've read so many positive comments in different forums the last couple of month regarding Scenalyzer - a very smart capture tool that let's you capture with scene detection using both the typical date/time information available in PPro's own capture function and optical detection. Since most of what I've done is shot on 35mm and 16mm film I have no date/time codes on my tapes and PPro can't capture my material using scene detection. So I tried the trial on for size and it works great. It recognizes the cuts and turns every cut on a tape into a separately captured clips with all the log information. This of course saves a lot of manual log/capture labor. But as I investigated further it turns out that Scenelyzer has no built in function to save itself as a "project" so you can never recreate a capture batch. All you can do is export an EDL. But PPro can't import EDL's so the two can't be used together unfortunately. Let's hope that there will be a change in the future because Scenalyzer is really awesome.

PPro/FCP: AAF (Advanced Authoring Format)
When I started using PPro I found the lack of EDL export frustrating and limiting. I didn't realize that AAF is supposed to replace both EDL's and OMF. There's a lot of interresting stuff at the official AAF Association website. It's nice to see that Adobe is one of the key companies behind it.

After all; EDL's where created to be used in digibeta tape-to-tape suites. We're past that and AAF is a much more flexible format that can hold a lot more information then just in and out points and dupe reel/dissolves.

PPro/FCP: Adobes Primers.
I hope you've all had a chance to take a look at Adobes Primers. They are neat little .pdf documents that goes through the basics of digital video, audio and streaming. Great resource. You can download them here.