Premiere Pro stability and compression, and why I don’t use JPEG images or MP3 audio in my projects

 

Stability. Stability seems to be the thing most people complain about with Premiere Pro. I see all the time people complaining about it crashing.

AVID of course is going to have more stability if you do it’s normal workflow of importing footage, because you are compressing into an AVID format and of course that is going to be more stable, AMA of course, using external formats in AVID was not every going to be as stable.

To keep Premiere Pro stable I try to go for less compression, and pick a format and stick with that. Most of my deliveries are ProRES HQ, and if that is the case I want my footage to be be ProRES because it is going to be less compressed than many other highly compressed formats, especially formats like H.264. This wouldn’t apply if I was using a RAW format like ProRES RAW or Blackmagic RAW, which I would use with Proxy’s to speed thing up (though I would use ProRES Proxy and not H.264 Proxys).

So before import, I like to recompress my heavily compressed footage to ProRES HQ (or straight ProRES if that is the delivery spec). Yes this of course takes more time, but I have found that the stability that it gives me means that I save time on the back end, so the up front time is certainly worth it. And I use Media Encoder to it instead of using Ingest in Premiere Pro.

With Ingest you can Transcode, create Proxies, Copy or Copy with Proxies, and it is a great workflow when it works, but I have had bad crashes that have screwed things up and not finish the import or transcode process, so I tend to do transcodes myself before I import them. And yes this means I can’t start working right away, but I think the lost time up front is saved at the end when you don’t have any export issues.

I will talk about the Proxy workflow in another post, but I tend to do that in the program, but let it do it on it’s own, not while continuing to work because of crashing issues I have had. Best to let the machine go overnight, and if you can check it in remotely all the better.

And my compression issues extend beyond just you video files.

Since my early days of editing on Final Cut Pro 4-7, there have been issues with JPG images. Sometimes they are fine, and sometimes they can stop an entire project from opening, and it can happen randomly after working fine. Bad things happen with JPG images so I do not import JPG images into my projects.

Before using a JPEG I convert it to another format. Now I have seen people complain about PNG images causing problems in project, though I haven’t had that problem. I tend to convert to PNG, though the less compressed the better. And if you want to go even better you can go TIFF files, but they can end up being absolutely huge.

To convert images in a batch I use the $39.95 GraphicConverter from Lemkesoft. 

I use the Convert And Modify command to convert my images from JPGS.

Setting Convert on the let, and PNG as the format (or TIFF if you would like). The folder with footage to covert is in the middle, and you select hte ones you want to convert, and the to folder is on the right, and you press start selected function.

I feel the same about Audio files, heavily compressed audio files like MP3 or M4A I convert to WAV files using Adobe Media Encoder.

And yes this is all in the “Assistant Editor Stage” before editing gets started. And the net result has been that Premiere Pro has been very stable for me. Sure sometimes I have issues, but since dealing with highly compressed footage, stills and audio before a project the program runs much more stable for me.

Honestly if you think about it, it is like using Premiere Pro more like AVID. You think of it as importing the footage to an AVID codec. And then everything is the same, and so will just run better.

And I often get A & B cameras that are different cameras, and thus different formats. Think about the computer having to uncompress different kinds of formats at once. Of course it is going to do better if everything is all one format.

And more compression means processing power, so the less compressed things are the less processing power you are using, and that can help with stability.

Everything you can do to make the whole thing run easier will mean less crashes and things working better.

Your GPU is very important with Adobe Premiere, so control your monitor resolution with SwitchResX to save video memory, especially on an iMac or iMac Pro

 

When my MacPro 4,1 finally kicked the bucket I was devastated, especially since the new MacPro wasn’t out yet, and I needed a machine to edit on. The solution was the very powerful iMac Pro with the Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16GB. Now that blew my old video card out of the water, but video editing apps can use every bit of power you have and more, so you want to save as much video processing power as you can.

The problem is that the default settings or even scaled settings on an iMac Pro or even an iMac are made to make the screen look amazing, not save on video memory, and for a long time the OS X control panels have removed the important statistics on the display control panel.

Now if you hover over the choices it tells you what resolution it is like and that scaled resolutions might affect performance, but they don’t tell you what the default resolution is actually doing.

This is where the awesome SwitchResX comes in. The app is $16, or $250 for a site license. It takes a little playing to get it all set up nicely (especially turning off all the resolutions that you don’t want).

It runs in your menu bar, and you can customize to remove all the resolutions you don’t want, but when you go into the iMac Pro or iMac’s resolutions you see where I am going.

You can see I have chosen 2560×1440 which is the normal default resolution, but I have not chosen the HiDPI version. HiDPI is what Apple does to make the monitor look great, it takes your resolution and runs it twice to subsample and make it look better, but basically whatever video ram it is using for your primary display it is doubling it to make the display look nicer.

For a video editor this is a huge no no, don’t waste your video memory, it is precious! Make sure to set your display to a non HiDPI resolution so that you are not wasting your video memory!

Of course this isn’t all that SwitchResX can do, you can actually set different resolutions for different apps and have it change as you switch apps. Now I have tried that out and it worked very well, but I have realized I just like one resolution for my 2 monitors, and try and save as much video memory as I can, so that is why I use SwitchResX, and the less video memory you have the more important this is.

I am assuming this will be the same with M1 iMacs, but they don’t exist yet. If they stay like the current M1 macs and share memory with the mac, then it is even more important to use less memory for your display so that you can use more for editing!

Mac Performance Guide on Upgrading to Big Sur, all downsides except the Thunderbolt Hub support

  

Mac Performance Guide has as an article on how the upgrade to Big Sur has been nothing but negatives, except that you need to upgrade to it to get Thunderbolt Hub Support which was added in Big Sur.

I know this site is usually very negative on the coverage of Mac OS upgrades, but the upgrades do seem to add more problems than they add, and usually add hits to performance.

And I have personally held off on the upgrade to Big Sur, though I really do need the Thunderbolt hub support so I can have more drives connected than I currently do.

Of course I also can’t upgrade because where I am currently working refuses to upgrade past Adobe Creative Cloud 2019, and that version does not work on Big Sur, you need to run at least 2020 to run on Big Sur. Now when the built in Speech to Text comes out of Beta maybe I can upgrade, though I might as well hold off for now.

The first thing to try if there is an issue with Adobe Premiere Pro, is to reset the Preferences

 

So the first tip I can give if you are having something going wrong in Premiere Pro is to reset your preferences. This can be easily done on a Mac by holding down Option on the Mac or the ALT key on windows till the splash screen appears, you can also reset the preferences and the plug-in cache by hitting Shift-Option on Mac or Shift-Alt on Windows.

I find that this solves a good deal of problems that occur on in Premiere, and is a great thing to try first. 

 

This will reset a whole lot including your recent projects, and I usually then go to my Sync Settings to download my recent Preferences. You will often have to sign into your adobe account first.

To do sync settings normally you can find them in the preferences, they are near the bottom in Sync Settings:

And here you can chose what is synced, it shows your account, and the 3 settings, as well as to Ask my preference when syncing. I do this so I don’t accidentally overwrite any good preferences.

Now sometimes the preferences on the server can also be bad and you have to start fresh, but hopefully that won’t happen.

If you find that happens, there is another 3rd party solution, Preference Manager from Digital Rebellion, that can made backups and restorations for Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composter, Final Cut Pro 7, Lightworks and Pro Tools. I will post about that next.

Post Haste from Digital Rebellion to organize your project with templates is the perfect tool to start any project

 

So I am starting my posts on Adobe Premiere Pro with a 3rd party application called Post Haste from Digital Rebellion. This was the first product I remember from Digital Rebellion who also makes the Pro Maintenance Tools that I will cover here at another time.

Once you donwload and install the program, which is free, you need to spend a little time setting up your templates, this means not only setting up a folder structure for your projects on the hard drive, but also setting up a project template for Premiere Pro (and After Effects if you would like), and I have shared my current template on my site (you can download it here) and will be going through it a bit in this post.

This is the screen that opens up. You can select your Project Template. It will automatically update the project number. My Project name includes the client name, so I don’t update that, but you can easily do it that way as well

This the template you can download (and you put in the template folder that is set in the preferences which I show below), and it shows the file structure I have created for my projects including sub folders, so that every project has things organized the same way. Anything that is named [template] is replaced with whatever you enter in Project Name on the first page.

You can see that there is a Premiere Pro project file included here as well, and I have layed that out as well (the file is for Premiere Pro 2019, and if you need a newer version, just open it and save it in the new version with the same name).

I have shown my Premiere Pro project organization here. I try to match us many categories as I can, so that starting at number 04, the categories match on the hard drive and in the project. I have also included folders RENDERS and EXPORTS. I set the scratch disc for Audio and Video to the RENDERS Folder.

And I export all my cuts to the EXPORTS Folder.

Now this is the first Preferences page, and here you can see I have moved my Template location to iCloud, so I can access it from anywhere, but otherwise it will tell you where your templates are located.

Here you can see the preference for Strict Naming and to automatically rename Template to the Project name, which actually means [template] will be renamed to the Project Name you enter on the first page.

The Parameters page of the Preferences deals with the settings in the first page and how you want the renaming to go into the folder and file names, as you can see I have set to just include the Project name in the template (use in path). I don’t use a date or editor name, and I include the client name with the project name it is just easier for me, but you can do it any way you would like. and you can also see the auto increment for project number.

For my filenames you can see that I use [template]_MASTER.prproj which is my premiere pro file and [template]_AE_MASTER.aep for the After Effects Project (which is just a basic project file, but I like it name correctly). Now as for MASTER is because I use a single project file that I keep using, but every day at the end of the day I duplicate the file, and rename MASTER to the date (year first of course, so for today that would be February 24th 2021, I would rename the file to [template]_210224.prproj and then I copy it to my Creative Cloud files, and move into an ARCHIVE folder to get it out of the way, so I have a daily backup.

I find that project organization is so important, and something that so many editors unfortunately completely ignore.

If you organize your project and files this way every time, then going back to a previous project is always easy as you will always know the organization, and where the files and sequences are. And within each project I always use the date in the sequence names such as 21-02-24 for todays date, so you can tell when the sequence is from, and then I add a version number after that in something like _V01. This means that all my exports will have names that match the sequences, so you can always go back to any days sequences.

And if you always use the same organization structure, you can hand it off to other people and all the projects will be the same.

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This is my first post from Jonah on Premiere, and I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to let me know if you like the article or there is anything you are interested in me writing about.

I am going to write some posts about getting the most out of Adobe Premiere Pro, things to help with stability to fix issues as well as organization for when you come back to a project later

Jonah On Premiere

It is 2021 and I am a video editor who has been working in the field for 20 years now. I am both a good editor as well as very technically proficient, and I want to pass on some of what I have learned.

Of late I am mostly using Premiere Pro for work, so I have decided to do a series of posts about working with Adobe Premiere Pro. I want to talk about things that I have learned that will make things more stable, things that will fix issues, and organization that will help you or anything else if they come back to a project after you have finished.

I work mostly on a Mac (I know, I know Premiere works better on a PC), so will mainly be including Macintosh leaned directions, but will include windows when I have a chance. I do have a Surface 3 that I love, though it is a bit underpowered for editing.

These posts will always include the JonahOnPremiere tag, so you can quickly get to just them, and I plan to post every weekday at least once, though not every post will be with this tag, though I would like to make at least 3 a week.