Premiere Pro - The Shittiest Software Going

[User]

56 minutes ago, Mmmbeats said:

I edit in Cineform rather than h.264, which I think really helps performance.

Media Encoder is also very good, I find.

Some other notes:

Dynamic link (Premiere <--> After Effects) is quite a system resource hog.  I tend to only use it if it's going to really benefit the project workflow.  For quick stuff I just use the old-fashioned render-out method, which is rock solid.

In addition to the above, I have had some render issues with complex projects.  I have had to mitigate this on occasion by rendering out in high-quality chunks (or layers), recombining on a timeline and then re-rendering.  So that's another big minus point - but that's only been occasional, when working with massive files on particularly complex timelines. 

Thank you for the extra insights Mmmbeats, I really appreciate it as so few folks here actually chime in on the editing/ software side of things.

Knowing the limitations and bugs are half the battle... and people tend to post their negative views on the software online so I see a lot of that when I'm hunting down my own issues and it gives me the impression that Adobe has hit the bottom.

Half my project was in H.264 + Mpeg2, the other half is in ProRes. I've now transcoded the H.264 + Mpeg2 to ProRes and I have to say that I've really noticed a sizeable performance increase in doing that. The other massive boost came from putting the Media Cache on an external SSD. The project used to take 25 minutes to open and load, now it takes under a minute. Staggering!

[Dustin]

I was a cc subscriber for 4-5 years but simply refuse to pay $60 a month. I have dropped to $10/month for photoshop/Lightroom and currently am trying out resolve which is free. Does everything I used premiere pro for...

[kye]

It might be interesting to do a Resolve stress test to see if it can handle big projects.

Maybe someone who finishes a big project can pull it into Resolve and render it out and give their impressions?

I'd do one but I don't have a real project that's big enough to be a genuine test.

[User]

Hey Kai, that's an interesting suggestion. Thanks.
The monster I'm building is so crazy thick that it would be interesting to see what would actually arrive through the migration... and in what way. But for now, I'm just finishing the final leg of breaking the huge main project into smaller (more nimble) character driven projects and relinking the newly transcoded media. 6 weeks of 20 hour days, but nothing compared to collecting (10 years) the material in one of the most difficult and demanding megacities on the planet.

No life like it...

I'll report back on the migration success once I'm there. Oh and I still very much appreciate your insights since you joined EOSHD.

[kaylee]

hey i just wanted to add to this that im ~EVEN~ having all kinds of CRAZY problems with PHOTOSHOP right now!!!

absolute incomprehensible nonsense. legit infuriating. basic things not working

44 minutes ago, kye said:

It might be interesting to do a Resolve stress test to see if it can handle big projects.

Maybe someone who finishes a big project can pull it into Resolve and render it out and give their impressions?

I'd do one but I don't have a real project that's big enough to be a genuine test.

same. someone whos done this should tell us how it worked out, system specs, etc

[User]

15 minutes ago, kaylee said:

hey i just wanted to add to this that im ~EVEN~ having all kinds of CRAZY problems with PHOTOSHOP right now!!!

absolute incomprehensible nonsense. legit infuriating. basic things not working

same. someone whos done this should tell us how it worked out, system specs, etc

I certainly hear your frustration Kaylee. Sometimes (actually often) I like to imagine a software engineer, taking away a perfectly working button and replacing it with 3 that don't work under the guise of improving things... while somehow justifying their ill-gotten salary.
Change for the sake of change is fine in some lay-about hippie's dream... but it's a nightmare to working professionals. Fucking hell.

[scotchtape]

The irony is that I hardly ever update my CC programs because all the updates are filled with bugs, so unless something is really not working I won't update.

The entire point was supposed to be that you got the most "up to date" software.  The reality is that it's always filled with bugs.  Remember the data deleting bug?  #professionalsoftware

[User]

27 minutes ago, scotchtape said:

The reality is that it's always filled with bugs.  Remember the data deleting bug?  #professionalsoftware

"Bugs? What bugs?"

I've just spent 6 weeks migrating a massive doc film from CC2014 to CC 2019 and in the process traded the few and simple bugs I knew, for god know what. Let's see... hopefully there will be benefits.

[User]

On 12/18/2018 at 8:44 PM, kye said:

It might be interesting to do a Resolve stress test to see if it can handle big projects.

Maybe someone who finishes a big project can pull it into Resolve and render it out and give their impressions?

I'd do one but I don't have a real project that's big enough to be a genuine test.

Alright, another PPro crash prompted me... so I just exported an XML of a PPro 20 min timeline and opened it in Resolve a moment ago for the first time.
On first glance, all the media is there but dozens of title cards (.png) that I'm using for subtitles are in place on the timeline but registering as offline (red) though they still have my text content indicated in them. Not yet sure if I can get them to register as online. Needless to say all the audio/ video effects/ tweaks are missing but it looks like the audio cross dissolves made it across.

I've already built huge sections of the film in PPro so I don't know that I have the time to re-organize and rebuild them in Resolve... but overall it's super exciting to see this opened up in Resolve... it also signals being one step closer to leaving Adobe. Knowing just how many people are pissed - myself included -  I wonder if Adobe may be getting ready to remove this Export XML feature soon? Anyway.

[Snowbro]

My cousin is a senior manager at adobe & I still couldn't get him to fix one small bug in premiere. Adobe will do whatever it wants, at least they did add some features to premiere finally (color)

[kye]

14 hours ago, User said:

Alright, another PPro crash prompted me... so I just exported an XML of a PPro 20 min timeline and opened it in Resolve a moment ago for the first time.
On first glance, all the media is there but dozens of title cards (.png) that I'm using for subtitles are in place on the timeline but registering as offline (red) though they still have my text content indicated in them. Not yet sure if I can get them to register as online. Needless to say all the audio/ video effects/ tweaks are missing but it looks like the audio cross dissolves made it across.

I've already built huge sections of the film in PPro so I don't know that I have the time to re-organize and rebuild them in Resolve... but overall it's super exciting to see this opened up in Resolve... it also signals being one step closer to leaving Adobe. Knowing just how many people are pissed - myself included -  I wonder if Adobe may be getting ready to remove this Export XML feature soon? Anyway.

My understanding is that most people currently use Resolve for grading, which means round-tripping to Resolve via the XML export, doing the grading, but then rendering out the graded individual clips which are then swapped into the original project in the editing software to replace the ungraded clips.  In this sense, PP (or FCPX) won't be too worried or motivated to make sure that all the dissolves and effects make it out to a Resolve timeline.  I'd suggest that BM would be very interested in making sure things import as well as possible, but BM is currently adding entirely new screens and hundreds of new features in each major release, so they definitely have their fair share of bugs too.

I've heard that there's normally some work to get all the media linked in Resolve, but it has some quite good features for linking clips quite easily (something like highlight clips -> Relink media -> select "include sub-folders" and point it at a folder with all your footage in it) so if you do need to relink files it's not necessarily a big job.  There's lots of advice around for solving strange importing problems so if you want to pursue it at some point then google can help.

3 hours ago, Snowbro said:

My cousin is a senior manager at adobe & I still couldn't get him to fix one small bug in premiere. Adobe will do whatever it wants, at least they did add some features to premiere finally (color)

Ouch - I'd say that using contacts to circumvent their prioritisation of bugs is a bad idea, but considering how buggy people say it is, maybe that process isn't working so well!

I remember when those colour features were added.  I saw a bunch of Youtubers had released videos with exciting titles and I thought the added features must be really great - then I saw them and actually laughed out loud.  If you double (or triple) the available features then it looks like a huge improvement, but to Resolve users they just went from having 1% of the features to 2%, so it's not so exciting from our perspective 

[User]

19 hours ago, kye said:

My understanding is that most people currently use Resolve for grading, which means round-tripping to Resolve via the XML export, doing the grading, but then rendering out the graded individual clips which are then swapped into the original project in the editing software to replace the ungraded clips.  In this sense, PP (or FCPX) won't be too worried or motivated to make sure that all the dissolves and effects make it out to a Resolve timeline.  I'd suggest that BM would be very interested in making sure things import as well as possible...

Yes exactly.
Moreover, I do understand some of the complexities in and around what it must take to produce compatible software en mass... but with competition driving innovation, I think we'd all be grateful to see fresh gains made in the ability to move our projects out and away from buggy companies beholden to shareholders while failing to keep up. Hurray for the underdog!

[fuzzynormal]

I am editing my current doc with PP and I'm getting it done. My anecdotal experience says it can handle large projects (100hr+ of footage) such as a feature length documentary, but with caveats.

1) You should use proxies

2) don't do any complicated compositing

3) use an old version (I went backwards and am using CC 2017.1.2)

2019 just about killed me for a week before I did a XML export and took my project to an earlier version of Premiere.

Premiere Pro crashes, but I can't say more or less than my FCP used to.  Still, PP just never feels "solid."  There's no objective way to qualify that assertion, you just need to use it to get a gut-level feeling about it.  That feeling has never been reassuring for me. 

Also, the way PP demands media to be loaded into a project in order to migrate sequences is, augh, such a pita!  That mundane detail might seem trivial to the uninitiated, but to those of us trying to move edits across different editing seats it's absolutely horrendous.

[User]

Good insight here Fuzzynormal, thank you!

52 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

2019 just about killed me

Details please?

No compositing here, just dissolves and sometime a few video layers running together... and big walls of sound.
Towards proxies, I've never worked with them. But I converted everything to ProRes as I really appreciate knowing just how much I can push and pull on the footage before it breaks apart. Is this still possible with proxies? Somehow methinks not.
I knew CC2014 inside out and was mostly familiar with what would sink it... but it was starting to feel ancient.

[fuzzynormal]

45 minutes ago, User said:

Details please?

Stuttering (maybe 5fps) playback of PROXY media to the point audio dropping out during said playback.  These are 1024x540 res PROXY files that were created by the default PROXY settings in PP and created in Adobe Media Encoder.  Bottom line, the new software couldn't playback those clips.

My issues were happening on an older machine, but the older machine could handle the exact same project just fine in 2017.  Once that project was  loaded into 2019, nada.  All settings were identical from the project in 2017 to the project in 2019, including all preferences.  My conclusion after internet sleuthing was that 2019 just demands more processing overhead for some reason.  Don't really care why this is, it just does.  That's my experience and it caused workflow issues.

So....that and some random unrecoverable crashes that I hadn't seen before made me nope right on outta 2019.  I got better things to do than trouble shoot beta-level software.

Couple of nice features that come with 2019, but without a certain level of workflow stability, just no no no.

45 minutes ago, User said:

Is this still possible with proxies? Somehow methinks not.

Yes and no. 

When I'm pulling and pushing the grade it's usually during the coloring stage --and proxies are turned off at that point anyway so you're seeing a pretty accurate rendition of what you're gonna get from your source footage+grade.

Sometimes I'll quick color grade a proxy too as I'm editing; it holds together enough to do the basics.  And, as mentioned, all fine tuning I do with the source footage anyway.

Basically I'm saying that, for me, working with proxies doesn't really affect the coloring workflow.  It does, however, make the basic editing so much more pleasant.  Just scrolling footage in the thumbnails with no lag is such a blessing.

[User]

Yeah man I hear ya on your workflow frustration issues and the revert back to CC2017.
For me - as detailed in another thread I had running - 2019 would only see some of my h.264 and mpeg2 files and this causes me a crazy huge fucking slide sideways where I began a slow decent into renaming folders (to get Premiere to see the files) and relinking hell that just kept getting worse. During that process I noticed that the ProRes files always stayed linked so decided to go through a huge 2 week long conversion process... more time and money lost on what had always worked fine on CC2014 + 2013 Macbook Pro. But I'm somehow standing in the clear now and aware of one major bug that I'm not sure how it is triggered: I roll the timeline sequence and lose control of the entire system... have to do a power shut down to break it free and start again with work lost. Happened a few times over the last days and no idea what the cause is yet. This is happening on a 2018 Macbook Pro (Mojave) out into a Lacie 5 bay via Thunderbolt (1), with an external Dell daisy chained via Thunderbolt to HDMI.

Thanks again for chiming in here Fuzzy... so few people here seem to have any editing issues.... it's all camera camera camera!

[fuzzynormal]

I always encourage proxy editing simply because there's less processing stress on the computer.  The less the computer has to work the less likely it is to crash or lag.  At least that's my reasoning.

Doing native format editing is okay for really short form projects, but even then I tend to go the proxy route simply because it allows the editing GUI to function more cleanly.

FCP was always breezy with ProRes, but I'm not on FCP at the moment, so...

[Mmmbeats]

I prefer intermediate codec to proxy workflow myself. Never had any problems using CineForm.

Of course transcode is the pain in that workflow, but done and dusted at the start of the process, and surely less extra procedures than proxy anyway?

Of course proxy has its advantages, I just prefer inters.