The one thing that doesn’t get touched on, which always drives me nuts about the iPhone is not only that the video frame rate tends to drift, but also that there is a 24FPS but not 23.976. I know 24 is film, but most people shoot everything for video which is 23.976 in the US, and most of Apple’s stuff should be for TV.
Iain Anderson at Pro Video Coalition has a must read article on Why ProRes?
Luckily ProRes has become pretty standard across my editing. Most cameras can record to it, and it works great, with so little processing power. Personally I don’t even like bringing any MP4’s in, and convert even them to ProRes Proxy.
Of course now with a Blackmagicdesign 6k Pro I have been shooting BlackMagic RAW and it in 6K certainly seems to take more processing power than ProRes, but it is also more compressed.
I would like to see how the M1 processors can handle H.264, which might mean less recompressing. I just see standardizing on a format to make Premiere work more like AVID, which has always been the most stable editing system.
OWC on Apple ProRes Workflows for Windows.
ProRES is a great codec so I can see why Windows users would want to use it.
RedShark has an announcement on the new OM System’s OM-1 the last camera with the Olypmpus Branding. and it is a 4K powerhouse, though only records internally in H.264 and H.265 video with 4:2:2 color resolution (It needs an Atomos to record ProRES). It has not been priced as of yet.
PVC again for the win, damn this is a great site.
Nick Lear has an awesome article on using an iPhone 13 as a B Cam and the pitfalls it entails and how he got it to work. And the things you don’t realize, like yes you can and should shoot with ProRES, but if you do you can’t shoot in LOG in Filmic Pro and the possibility of using Cinematch to help with balancing.
This is so disappointing as to really use this footage you will need to decompress it to a constant frame rate. especially disappointing since the footage already takes up much more space and need to re compress it to really use it properly to get it constant frame rate. And you will be losing a generation in compression (I know ProRes can handle it better than HEVC but still).
Apple’s new iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro both feature a new Cinematic Mode, which is basically iphone’s portrait mode for video. So the video also has a depth map, and with AI can track faces and even switch faces or do manual rack focus. It is not true depth of field, but fake depth like portrait mode, and it only works in 1080 30p. According to the video you should also be able to focus after the fact, which would be incredible!
This will be a very impressive feature, and will enhance video, though won’t be perfect just like portrait mode which enhances but not like a real lens with real depth of fieldh. And hopefully someone will make a plug-in for NLE’s that allows focus after the fact much like the awesome focos app. And let’s hope it can be integrated into Filmic Pro as well, as I find it unlikely to record at non-variable speeds
And the extra GPU core of the iPhone Pro and at least 256gb of hard drive space will eventually be getting ProRes recording. Now I am sure that it won’t be ProRes RAW or even ProRes HQ, but instead lite or proxy, but that will beat H.264 or H.265. Of course ProRes is going to wreak havoc on icloud photo storage, and really show how slow lightning cables are.
The Pro can also capture in dolby vision hdr up to 4k 60 fps. I think this means that cinematic mode doesn’t include Dolby Vision HDR, but then what computer monitor can play that back for adjusting color?
I also wonder if the LiDAR scanner in the Pro will enhance the cinematic mode? I guess they would have said so if it did, though it’s depth map would be better you would think, though maybe it is only for night mode.
I do love that since YouTube re-compressed everything you should basically upload in your editing format, since they don’t have upload limits like Vimeo. It is pretty funny that Adobe Media Encoder’s YouTube settings are H.264, but I guess it saves your bandwidth.
Jarle Leirpoll, the author of the book Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro and who runs the awesome site Premiere Pro.net, has written an absolute must read article at Frame.io on Premiere Pro’s Render and Bit Depth settings.
Honestly after all these years of using Premiere Pro I didn’t know exactly how all these settings work and when they are affecting things, and Jarle really goes into depth and he ran extensive tests on everything to prove it.
This really should be essential reading for any Premiere Pro user, and his open letter to Adobe is so true, and I just hope they listen. The whole thing should be simplified, which would quickly solve so many users issues with banding on exports.
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.