Adobe just blew me away! Wow!

So I have been learning Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and liking it a lot as an alternative to Final Cut Pro, but there are some things I think are missing, and have been adding Feature Requests.

Well for my request to add a duplicate clip showing in the timeline, I got a response! And one that points out all the features in the program that are similar. I am so impressed by this!

Hi Jonah,


Thanks for your request and feedback. I’ll add your name to the list of requestors for this feature request.


Premiere has clip usage indicators, which isn’t quite what you’re looking for (indicators in the Timeline), but can be very useful and is a feature that neither FCP nor Avid have.


You can turn on the Video Usage and Audio Usage data columns in the Project panel (list view mode). In the flyout menu (accessed via the widget in the upper right of each panel), choose Metadata Preferences. Then either do a search for “usage”, or twirl open the Premiere Pro Project Metadata section and put a check in the Video and Audio Usage properties so they’ll show up in the List View of the Project panel. You can rearrange the data columns in the Project panel so you can see these usage indicator columns while you’re editing. Now each time a clip is used, the usage count indicates the number of uses across all sequences in the project. For example, this is great for monitoring which clips have been used in cutaways already and which clips are unused and available.


If you need more specific usage information, here’s another tip: in the Preview Area (the top of the Project panel with the thumbnail previewer and clip info), when a clip is used in any sequence, “video used x times” or “audio used x times” appears next to the video and audio type description. And if you click on the small drop-down arrow next to the usage info, a popup menu reveals a list of the sequences the selected clip is used in, with its timecode location in each sequence usage. PLUS, if you select one of these locations in the usage popup menu, that sequence is opened and the playhead is parked at the timecode where the clip is actually used. This is one of Premiere’s “best kept secrets” and we’re working on making the feature much more discoverable.


David Kuspa | Adobe | Sr. Experience Designer, Dynamic Media

AWESOME! Adobe you are doing something right and winning a convert. My only complaint is your level 1 tech support in India is not good at all, and doesn’t really help until you get to tier 2 for the most part.

Premiere Pro in Lion Update 2

  1. OK, so NVIDIA has been able to re-create the problem, and there is a workaround. You must force the Mac into 64 Bit mode (If it can handle it). This Apple Tech Support Document gives how you can do it permanently or for a single boot.

If your Mac uses the 32-bit kernel by default, but supports the 64-bit kernel, you can start up using the 64-bit kernel by holding the 6 and 4 keys during startup.



To select the 64-bit kernel for the current startup disk, use the following command in Terminal:

sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture x86_64

To select the 32-bit kernel for the current startup disk, use the following command in Terminal:
sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture i386

Studio Daily has an article in Defence of FCP X

  1. The article talks to people who are using FCP X and seem to think it is great, and at the very least the future of editing, but I completely don’t agree, and have to say these people are pretty insetting.

Schechtman is a little more blunt, especially when it comes to editors who have already declared their intention to abandon FCP for the competition. “If you’re making a rash decision based on a product that isn’t complete, you’re an idiot,” he says. “We all live a technical life. We all can look back at the not-so-distant past and see that we’ve been through this before. Don’t jump ship, permanently, while someone else is rethinking the NLE for your benefit.”

Insulting and ignoring much of the big picture. Like me having a 5 month job starting where we need a new Final Cut Pro editing bay because our client is a Final Cut Pro house. Well we need to buy a new system and duplicate our Black Magic setup, which is useless for AVID (at least for now) and at this point we have to buy another copy of Final Cut Studio 3 on Ebay for more than $1000, because it currently isn’t available anywhere.

And it is idiotic to say that FCP X is going to be all this and that, if it is as you say an unfinished program! What if when Adobe moved to 64 bit they made their entire suite incompatible with the previous version, and cut out most of the features people needed. People would be up in arms, as they are about Final Cut Pro X! They did not need to release an unfinished product, they had years, and could have waited to release their supposedly finished product. They released it, so it is finished, sure they may add some more features, but it is a finished product.

I spent a week learning FCP X and did not find it any faster than FCP 7 for my editing, in fact I found many features backwards, and felt I had to spend more time organizing because of the lack of ability to use tabs for folders, and organize quickly that way for easy access.

If you want to make the old paradigm better, then add to it, add the new features on top of the old, and if people like it, it will take over, but just to make their way that only way, and to require more steps to do many of the essentials features of the previous version is unacceptable!

Premiere Pro Feature Requests

So after going through and learning about the features in Premiere Pro CS5.5, I have some feature requests, all of which I have put in with Adobe at their Feature Request web site. I will continue to expand this list as I think of more things that are frustrating me, and will always submit them to Adobe first.

  1. Clip Dupe Detection in the Timeline. Both AVID and Final Cut Pro 7 have this. As it is often important to not repeat shots in Commercials, the ability to see a visual representation which shows which clips are repeated is an essential feature.
  2. MIDI interface. With Final Cut Pro I uses a Behringer BFC-2000 to be able to do a good audio mix within Final Cut Pro using it’s automation controls. This would be a perfect pairing with the Audio Mixer in Premiere, and it is frustrating that only Audition has the ability to interface with MIDI controls as I would prefer to be able to mix directly within Premiere Pro.
  3. In the Title Overlays Final Cut Pro includes markers for 4:3 center cut within a 16:9 project, which I am often using (HD project for SD 4:3 delivery).
  4. A re-sizeable, movable Timecode window, like the added to Final Cut in FCP 7.
  5. Reveal in project from Source monitor and not just from the sequence.

Premiere in Lion Update

Well my issue with Premiere and Lion is certainly a CUDA issue. NVIDIA released a new CUDA driver, 4.0.21, but it does not solve the issue. The only way to get Premiere Pro to boot is to remove the CUDA.framework from my Library, and then Premiere boots, but with software only acceleration making my GeForce completely useless. Lets hope they get on this quick!

Oliver Peters at DigitalFilms has an article on FCPX

You can read his post at his blog. I find a lot of what he is saying a little too positive on Apple’s turn from Niche market leader to completely consumer product, but he does have some really great things to say that go along pretty much how I feel about FCP X and what apple has done to it’s own market.

Unfortunately by releasing FCP X in the way it was done, Apple has destroyed the existing ecosystem built around FCP and all developers start at square one again. Some are happy for the new opportunities and others express concern. By ignoring legacy support and releasing a product with many gaps, Apple has alienated many high-end professionals. You can argue all you want that these users constitute an insignificant niche, but for developers, it’s these users who will pay thousands of dollars for capture cards, accessories and plug-in packages.


The danger of re-inventing the wheel


I have nearly four decades of experience in broadcast operations, production and post, with most of it in editing. I’ve gone through numerous transitions and along the way operated, reviewed or been associated with well over two dozen different edit platforms. One of the things I’ve seen in that time is that non-standard workflows and interfaces eventually return to accepted concepts. After all, editing tools are built on over 100 years of post production practices.


For me, FCP X simply is NOT faster nor easier, just DIFFERENT – precisely because Apple has radically changed the way an editor organizes the information and works in the timeline. I will freely admit that my nonlinear days started with Avid and I first disliked moving to FCP. Now, after eight years of mostly non-stop experience with Final Cut Pro/Final Cut Studio, FCP 7 has grown to be my preferred editing tool – warts and all. It’s incredibly versatile, but that level of user control was dropped from FCP X.


I use the timeline as much as a scratch pad as the location for a final assembly. Place multiple clips onto top tracks and preview them as one option versus another. Or build little sub-sequences at the back of the timeline and then copy & paste these into the place I want. Work rough and then clean things up. FCP 7  and Media Composer give me that freedom and precision. FCP X does not. Of course, some of this is handled through Audition clips in FCP X, but that requires that you know and select the possible options first and then combine them into an Audition clip, which can be cut onto the timeline for previewing. To me, this requires more work than I go through in all other NLEs.


My ideal NLE would likely be a mash-up between Final Cut Pro 7 and Avid Media Composer, augmented by the performance features of FCP X and Premiere Pro. It’s difficult to predict the future where Apple is concerned, so I don’t want to discount the possibility of FCP X picking up steam with my customers. If that’s true, then I’ll be there ahead of them; however, today, FCP X is the wrong tool for my projects and those of my clients.


Take the Precision Editor, as an example. This highly-promoted feature is little more than a toy in my view. Trimming in FCP X is much weaker than in FCP 7 and that version wasn’t anywhere close to having the trimming control of Media Composer. Asymmetrical trimming in FCP X is virtually non-existent. The basics, like trimming L-cuts, haven’t been properly implemented. For instance, split edits (L-cuts, J-cuts) are only based on trimming audio track in-points in FCP X, instead of either audio or video as in most other NLEs.


It’s these and many other little things throughout FCP X that will hinder its adoption by the upper tier of users. That has a cascading effect. In a film school, why adopt FCP X for your students, when they’ll encounter Avid Media Composer as the tool of choice out in the “real world”? If you teach a digital media curriculum, whose graduates are destined to work in the corporate and web arena, then isn’t Adobe Create Suite better suited? What Apple has in effect done – by rebooting Final Cut as FCP X – is to pull the rug out from under its own advances earned over twelve years of FCP development. They’ve handed an extraordinary gift to competitors who can better service these smaller, but still important, market segments.


Sorry, i Know that was a lot to quote, but all of that I find right on target.

Apple has new FCPX Videos Comparing it to AVID

You can see them right on Apple’s front page for Final Cut Pro X. They Claim to show how superior FXPX is at Faster Editing, A New Way to Organize, Motion Graphics and File Based Workflows, but are obviously BS marketing speak from people who are not professional editors. Sure there are some cool new features, but they needed to be ad ons to the features and not replacements, because Apple’s way is not the better way, just a different way, that I do not believe is better.

Get your Library unhidden in Lion

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For those of you who are annoyed by the Library folder being hidden in your user folder in lion. Here is the terminal command to make it unhidden. You will have to change to you superuser to do it though.

chflags nohidden /Users//Library


Now if only I can change back the permissions on my Utilities folder so I can read and write…

A Quick Note: It looks like then 10.7.1 update reset this, so I guess you will have to keep making this change if you want to be able to see your library at all times.

Premiere Pro not working on Lion

I am having issues running Premiere Pro on OS X Lion with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 285. It is crashing on launch, and seems to be a driver issues in Lion.

It seems that there is a new NVIDIA driver in Lion, as it is listed as 270.05.05f01, while the most recent NVIDIA drivers on their web site is 256.02.25f01.

And checking the CUDA Preferences it lists the current CUDA Driver 4.0.19 but says an Update is Required (though it is the latest CUDA for Mac Driver on NVIDIA’s Web site).

Since this is the relevant part of the crash log, it looks like a driver crash to me, but the driver info is the 270.05.00 NVIDIA Driver.
 

0   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011769286f cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 4359831   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x00000001176c1e25 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 6299572   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011766efa9 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 2903773   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x0000000117669a8b cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 2685874   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x0000000117671b0c cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 3014845   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011766e2a7 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 2870476   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x00000001176372f2 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 618427   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x0000000117637caf cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 643358   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x00000001176d83c8 cudbgGetAPIVersion + 869529   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011762715c cuGLCtxCreate_v2 + 10810  com.adobe.GPUFoundation.framework    0x000000010cf3fe4c GF::Device::InitializeContextAndLoadKernels() + 194811  com.adobe.dvacore.framework       0x0000000100190b3e dvacore::threads::ExecuteTopLevelFunction(dvacore::threads::Allocated FunctionT > const&) + 4612  com.adobe.dvacore.framework       0x0000000100190438 dvacore::threads::(anonymous namespace)::WrapGCDAsyncCall(void*) + 2413  libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff8f9887e9 _dispatch_worker_thread2 + 25514  libsystem_c.dylib                 0x00007fff8b2913da _pthread_wqthread + 31615  libsystem_c.dylib                 0x00007fff8b292b85 start_wqthread + 13This looks like it is a driver issue with the new Lion Drivers for the Geforce GTX 285.


The only way I was able to get Premiere to launch was getting rid of the 5.5 folder from the Application Support:Adobe:Premiere Pro: folder. The program launched, but would not show any video in the sequence or from any clips, and once I quit the program, when I tried to relaunch I got the same crash again.

Here is my Thread at Adobe forums on the matter. I also called Adobe Tech supper and got a case number. They had me install the older driver from NVIDIA’s web site, but that froze my Mac at the spinning wheel (the wheel just kept going and going) so I had to do a restore using Command-R. It works, but is slow as it has to re-download the Lion install.