What is the best workflow on a PC with Premiere Pro?

I currently use Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and will be upgrading to 3.0.

I was planning on purchasing the Mainconcept MPEG Pro 3.0 plugin http://www.mainconcept.com/site/consumer-products-4/mpeg-pro-hd-3-7850/information-7862.html for adobe and using it with a Black-Magic Design Multibridge Eclipse http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/multibridge/ for realtime preview on an external monitor?

More expensive (possibly) but more capable is the Matrox Axio LE -gives you multiple realtime HD and graphics layers plus a whole host of IO options.

I've been running it since CS3 and it's been pretty stable and performed very well.

Paul.

I had very bad experience with Mainconcept MPEG plug-in due to memory leaks - it kept crashing on me constantly. But it was a previous version. Maybe they fixed it now.

Cineform is an alternative, but you need to transcode.

More expensive (possibly) but more capable is the Matrox Axio LE -gives you multiple realtime HD and graphics layers plus a whole host of IO options.

I've been running it since CS3 and it's been pretty stable and performed very well.

Paul.

Does it come with a rackmount option? Because the last thing I need is another device on my desk

The LE card itself is a PC full length PCI-X card that goes in the PC - the breakout box with SDI in/out, component, s-video, digital and analogue audio is a 1u rack mountable box.

Paul, I've just had a delivery of an Axio LE + CS3 on a HP 9600 at work and I'm considering buying one for my personal work. I didn't have much time to experiment with but have some queries. Have you ever tried filming in HD and outputting to a SD DVD? I've read elsewhere that quality can be compromised in the SD output. When I've tried it I wasn't sure whether the final SD DVD was worse off than if I had to shoot the original footage with a SD camera in the first pace.

And how are you doing your SD DVD's from HD filming (if you are doing them in the first place)? I believe there are quite a few workabouts with the Axio to convert HD footage to a SD DVD.

Hi Brian,

I rarely do DVD's these days, so don't have an answer unfortunately. Have you looked on the Matrox Axio forums - good place to ask and I seem to remember a number of discussions on this topic. There were certainly plenty of posts on the best downconvert route. Most of my downconversion ends up as web sized!

Cheers,

Paul.

We were showing CS3 with the main concept plugin at IBC last year and it was stable. I had tried an earlier version of the MC plugin and it crashed all the time so it looks like they may have fixed it.

Paul, I've just had a delivery of an Axio LE + CS3 on a HP 9600 at work and I'm considering buying one for my personal work. I didn't have much time to experiment with but have some queries. Have you ever tried filming in HD and outputting to a SD DVD? I've read elsewhere that quality can be compromised in the SD output. When I've tried it I wasn't sure whether the final SD DVD was worse off than if I had to shoot the original footage with a SD camera in the first pace.

And how are you doing your SD DVD's from HD filming (if you are doing them in the first place)? I believe there are quite a few workabouts with the Axio to convert HD footage to a SD DVD.


I'm considering the Axio and CS3 combo for XDCAM HD editing. Did you build your system yourself or did you buy a turn key? I already have a Dell Precision 690 with plenty of horsepower, but with optimization being the key, I would rather buy a new system and have it kick butt than struggle to adapt my current computer to work never knowing if I'm getting the most out of it.

Also, how much does your Axio accelerate After Effects?

Bob.. For the same price as an Axio LE you can buy a Macpro Quad or better still 8 core Macpro, install FCP and the transfer software and off you go. It will work, you won't have to do any configuring and the XDCAM/FCP workflow is a marriage made in heaven. Add a cheap Decklink HD card for HD-SDi, component, composite etc.

I used to build and configure my own PC's and I never managed to get a totally stable system. The last time FCP crashed was about 6 months ago, and even then it didn't crash the OS.

Unfortunately, without getting into details, Mac isn't an option in our shop. If it was up to me, we would have been using FCP about 5 years ago. Since then we've been editing DVCAM with the Adobe suite and have become pretty ingrained in the workflow, especially the ability of premiere, AE, and photoshop to work so seamlessly together. That's the most appealing part of the CS3 workflow for us since we do a lot of graphically intense projects. Now that we're migrating to HD, and have chosen XDCAM HD for our primary acquisition, I'm looking for the best options for editing with premiere.

Yes, I really like the integration of CS3 too - plus we output a lot of WMV etc too and author in Flash which has a lot of FLV video. I found that the PC route was best for me years ago and stuck with it - I suppose working for a very large PC company for many years also helped, even though I ran a support department that also supported Macs!

Lately I have been having to dump my footage to DVD for other people in my company to view the footage. I dont have an external dvd burner so I have been captuing it into premiere pro and then exporting it to a DVD from there. Do you think this is quicker or slower than having a rackmount DVD burner that would just dump from and SD-SDI or component signal.

Going via Premiere is VERY much slower than using a dedicated DVD burner. I have one of the Pioneer LX10's (now discontinued I think?) and that allows me to capture either to DVD or HDD in real time and add custom menus etc. I use this for sending caopies of raw footage to client - or at least I used to as I've not done this with XDCAM yet as I send them the proxy files on DVD data disc.

I also have the pioneer deck. It's considerably faster than premiere for running off quick copies for everyday distribution. However, if I'm looking to produce a more polished product with menus and maximum quality of encoding, it's worth the extra time to burn out of Encore.