Goodbye Premiere

[Peter Ferling]

Oh the ongoing list of PPro3 issues just gets bigger:
1) A playback head the freezes when using dual monitors.
2) A title tool that forgets it's settings and position each time it's opened.
3) Large jpeg and tiff images that refuse to preview or render, and require reboot and/or relinking.
4) Images that flip upside down on their own.
5) The horrible audio drift that occurs when dropping a video frame, requiring recapture with a third party tool.
6) The wonderful apology of were sorry, a serious error had occurred and the application has to be closed.
7) The constant error of system running low of memory, save your work...

Just when I thought all of this was getting boring, I've discovered a new one! Having to tell the bin to properly interpret a 1440x1080i frame grab/still as HDV 1.333 aspect while in an 1440 HDV project. Hmmmm.

I've tried posting on the adobe forums, and for the last two days (after they've rebuilt the site), is having serious issues connecting...

This time, I don't want a fix. My banker and I know of a better solution:

FCP6 on quad mac G5. Buy, install, get work done on time. Get my weekends back. Fix the real problem.

(rant off).

Pete

[Josh Chesarek]

Man, if I were having all of those issues I would be doing the same thing. I have only personally had problems with the Title tool not holding its settings. I am on Vista Premium. Good luck with your new Mac! I hope you have many happy editing days a head of you.

[Matt Wall]

I think my foot would have meet the mother board a few times! Computers ay? Who would have em.

G5 sounds like a good plan. We use them at college and there a great piece of kit!

[Peter Ferling]

Bottom line, and from a business perspective, it's just a piece of software. My clients, whom know little about editing, agree.

The only common issue with going to the Mac route is that it's "pricey". I've heard some issues with compressor. But I'm only interested in editing.

My only advice or reason posting here is that PPro is very picky about the hardware/setup/workflow. If it's not working (as in my case), then its a hopeless situation -and a gamble (unless I purchase the exact same hardware that was used at Adobe to program and test it). In that respect, FCP6 is designed specifically for the Mac platform, and appears to be working well. Makes sense to me.

I'm cutting my very last job tommorrow, after which I'll uninstall it. Fortunately cineform was most charitable in releasing a mac version of their codec for existing prospect owners. That's half the battle already won.

[Wes Coughlin]

Could always try premiere for the mac :)

If you got intel...

[Eric Shepherd]

Yeah, going with a G5 of any spec seems like a step backwards. Granted there's a finite lifespan to this being a usable system, but I'm sure more and more programmers are going to get tired of making 'older' software work and will focus solely on Intel architecture.

To avoid any more headaches, I'd say get an Intel based Mac.. Or can you run PPro 2 for now? I don't know if the resolution stuff would be a problem, since I shoot SD :)

Then you have to adjust to a new OS, get all new versions of the stuff you're currently running, etc. It's a big a jump to simply 'switch'.

I had a trial of PPro 3 running here and then changed video card drivers after about a week and it expired. I couldn't get it to reinstall, so I eventually put another hard drive I had kicking around into my laptop, clean installed XP, installed the PPro 3 trial, and it failed, saying it needed to be repaired, then the key was missing, etc, etc. There are definitely a lot of problems with it, and while it did run, it was awesome and so much faster. I'm sure it will be fixed at some point in the next several months (it shouldn't be on the market with all these problems but that's another story)..

But getting back to the point, if you're set on switching platforms, at least go with current hardware. Older technology is nearly always a bad idea (unless it's audio gear ;)

Eric

[Peter Ferling]

Oh yeah, I'm going intel mac. I have to purchase the studio in order to get FCP6, and I'll need the recommended quad intel G5. Also, cineform only supports the intel mac.

I also understand that there are similiar issues with PPro3 on the Mac's.

I'm going to gamble on Apple having a better solution.

[Eric Shepherd]

There's no Intel G5. It's one or the other. Either Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and then I think Xeon versions of each of those.. OR, G5 (older chips)..

Yup, the Mac versions of the CS3 apps all have licensing problems too. The whole thing is a huge mess. On Sept 1 Adobe changed the licensing and invalidated a bunch of already installed and working legal copies of the software through an update that didn't mention it was going to change the licensing. There's a lot of people on adobeforums.com who are very irate over this whole thing. Companies losing full work-weeks and beyond because their apps suddenly stopped working..

And here I thought having the trial stop functioning after 10 days instead of 30 was annoying :(

[Peter Ferling]

Your right, I'll stick with intel Mac, "Mac Pro" as the description. Sorry for the confusion.

Yow! I didn't know about the license thing. That's gotta hurt.

I never really understood the trial. I beta tested CS3, but only because I could manually install the cineform codecs and get around the HDV limitation. Even so, the beta worked much better than the release. So I and others were somewhat taken. The beta was a sure replacement for CS2 crash, crash, crash.

[Eric Shepherd]

CS2 crashed on you? It's been pretty much rock solid for me. CS3 rendered at 100% on my P4 with HyperThreading, which was nice. CS2 is around 60-70% most of the time. But I couldn't even do pre-renders on CS3 without it being sorry for the inconvenience of its own existence and shutting down on me. ;)

[Paul Gallagher]

Originally Posted by Peter Ferling

Oh the ongoing list of PPro3 issues just gets bigger:
1) A playback head the freezes when using dual monitors.
2) A title tool that forgets it's settings and position each time it's opened.
3) Large jpeg and tiff images that refuse to preview or render, and require reboot and/or relinking.
4) Images that flip upside down on their own.
5) The horrible audio drift that occurs when dropping a video frame, requiring recapture with a third party tool.
6) The wonderful apology of were sorry, a serious error had occurred and the application has to be closed.
7) The constant error of system running low of memory, save your work...

Just when I thought all of this was getting boring, I've discovered a new one! Having to tell the bin to properly interpret a 1440x1080i frame grab/still as HDV 1.333 aspect while in an 1440 HDV project. Hmmmm.

I've tried posting on the adobe forums, and for the last two days (after they've rebuilt the site), is having serious issues connecting...

This time, I don't want a fix. My banker and I know of a better solution:

FCP6 on quad mac G5. Buy, install, get work done on time. Get my weekends back. Fix the real problem.

(rant off).

Pete

I understand exactly how you feel, mine has all of the same problems plus it always crashes in multi cam and It will not export out to encore in the high quality 2 pass codec, goes for first 10 minutes and then crashes.


It is currently with the company I bought it from to see if they cam fix it as I am getting nothing done with it the way it is at the moment. A real bad upgrade from PP2

[Tom Hardwick]

Listening to this I'm glad I stayed with P v6.5 and the Storm2 card. These two sing together, and as my output is only SD DVD there's little reason to upgrade.

tom.

[Eric Shepherd]

I never used 6.5. 7 has been really good to me, and they replaced and added a lot of things from 6.5 that made it a good upgrade from what I understand.. But with CS3, man, they've caused some big problems for a lot of people.. :(

Yes, I only do SD as well. The things added to 7 aren't just HD. :)

The new stuff in CS3 was awesome when I tried it, but I'm not going to risk corrupt projects and all the other things I ran into when running the demo, just to get some new features.

[Pete Bauer]

Originally Posted by Eric Shepherd

On Sept 1 Adobe changed the licensing and invalidated a bunch of already installed and working legal copies of the software through an update that didn't mention it was going to change the licensing. There's a lot of people on adobeforums.com who are very irate over this whole thing.

Eric, could you elaborate? Although the Adobe forums seem to me to be quite a mess during their upgrade process, I did look there and scanned the license agreement and activation pages and couldn't find any indication of a recent change in policy or users complaining of this.

[Peter Ferling]

Here's a new one:

Power point slides saved as tiffs, import as 1 frame video clips. I had to batch covert to high quality jpegs to be recognized as images.