From FCP to PP - Questions from an editor ready for the jump!

[Adam White] "I've yet to see what comes with CS6 in terms of effects/filters. I was well underwhelmed with what CS5 offered out of the box. All the standard filters felt very basic/generic/limiting. Has this been addressed with CS6 in some way?"

Nope. The standard ones are just as cheesy as the ones in CS5. And there are VERY few third party solutions. I can count the free ones I found on one finger. Paid ones with one hand...although I hear some After Effects plugins work. But I don't have them. I'm flush with FCP plugins...and there are HUNDREDS to choose from. There aren't that many in Premiere land...the demand has been low, until lately.

I haven't tested collaborative editing. I do know that if you move your media to another location, you need to connect the media one-at-a-time. There is no "relative path" reconnection in PPro. The media management is worse than FCP...and that was pretty poor to begin with. But, you can always be the first to try the collaborative thing, and iron out the details and be the leader on that front. Unless someone else already is and is holding back.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Adam White] "Sometimes we have a need for multiple editors to work on the same project. In FCP7 we simply create a project file for each editor."

You can import Premiere Pro project files into one "master" project. You can pull in others sequences that way.

[Adam White] "I've yet to see what comes with CS6 in terms of effects/filters. I was well underwhelmed with what CS5 offered out of the box. All the standard filters felt very basic/generic/limiting."

I agree we can do more with standard effects (we don't call them filters, BTW), and transitions. Please make a feature request for the specific effects you'd like to see in the standard installation of Premiere Pro: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

[Adam White] "If not where do I need to be looking for a good range of free or purchased plug-ins to supplement the filter palette. I know the linking with After Effects is great, but for us it is always preferable to keep this kind of activity all in the same application."

Free plug-ins and presets can be found all around the community, you do have to hang out where Premiere Pro users lurk. Namely, our forums: http://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere?view=overview

There are plenty of plug-ins you can buy. Here are a few:

ABSoft
Boris FX
CoreMelt
Digieffects
Digital Anarchy
Digital Film Tools
Film Impact
Frischluft
GenArts
Granite Bay Software
ISP
NewBlueFX
Pixélan
ProDAD
Red Giant Software
RE:Vision Effects, Inc.
StageTools
Synthetic Aperture
Tiffen

Let us know which plug-in foundries you'd like to see added to the list.

FYI, certain foundries that were popular with FCP users cannot create plug-ins for Premiere Pro easily. They are reliant upon Quartz Composer technology which can't create plug-ins for Windows users. We didn't see many good effects (both standard and 3rd party) in FCP until Quartz Composer came along.

You should be able to edit with media stored on a SAN. We don't have any file lockout capabilities built in to Premiere Pro yet. Make a request for that, as well.

Thanks!

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

[Jon Hiseman] "duplicate the clip above the original / sandwich a gradient in between, change the blend mode of the top clip and regrade it. The gradient had simple controls to isolate a portion of the clip. The killer part was that these could be stacked. I have had 15 of these sets of 3 tracks stacked in no time at all."

Hi John,
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but you can use travel matte effects, gradients, and blend modes in Premiere Pro very easily.

Unlike FCP, blend modes run in real time. In FCP, you always had to render anything with the blending mode changed.

Let us know exactly what you would like to see in a future version of Premiere Pro here: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

I find FCP cumbersome compared to PPro when it comes to compositing. Not sure what you meant with "stack 15 of these", gradients? Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe I'm used to how PPro sorta acts like Photoshop and AE.

In PPro, can isolate sections using multi-point mattes or make use of the Illustrator-like Title tool and create shapes, gradients, etc. I go to Ps and Ae only if I have to.

And yes, I too would love alt-drag for duplication of anything! :)

[Alex Udell] "[Jon Hiseman] "So, delighted with the Clip duplicate, I immediately tried to duplicate a transition to another clip in the same way - not possible."

but copy and paste does work with transitions....
"

Yes - That's great if you want to set up a paste operation for 10+ Transitions but way too slow for a single shot.

I used to be Jon Hiseman but I'm feeling better now.

[Kevin Monahan] "Hi John,
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but you can use travel matte effects, gradients, and blend modes in Premiere Pro very easily.

Unlike FCP, blend modes run in real time. In FCP, you always had to render anything with the blending mode changed. "

Hi Kevin
Forgive me if I go on a bit but I think its sensible to talk from actual real world experience.
The comments from FCP switchers regarding PPro's poor compositing result from being used to doing very quick invisible fixes, on the original footage, on the fly, while editing. For PPro I have only found tutorials for titling, smoke and explosions etc,. But I am always fixing, fixing, fixing.

Two problems I encountered recently editing shows that have recently been shown on the BBC:
Music footage in Documentary; Stage - 4 musicians, keys of keyboard, cymbal; all over-lit for a couple of seconds by an excited stage lighting tec.
Wideshot cam op got bored and chose to join the action!
Resort to FCP in extremis - create 6 tight travelling matt areas - regrade individually. 8 mins start to finish.
2nd project - 15 mins 1979 film stored very badly - remove worst of scratches in two hours.
Resort back to FCP - duplicate 15 min clip to track above on timeline. change blend mode to travel matte luma - move clip 1 frame to the right - sandwich custom gradient and, cutting affected clip as you go, substitute advanced clip onto the tiny ares of damaged original. ( Very few blemishes last more than one frame.)

The tragedy of this story is that PPro could actually do this faster but for two key omissions in it's arsenal.
Take the first music vid example.
In PPro duplicate the clip 6 times above the original (tracks 2-7) in the timeline (Alt Drag - yea!)
Select all six and drag from the effects panel:
A colour corrector of choice, the Luma key and either the 4-8-16 point garbage matte
Then individually set the threshold of all the Luma key plugs to 0.0, and the garbage matte points to position and grade the individual areas.

Except it won't work

You can't feather the mattes. Use the feather plug I hear you cry - no it feathers the edges of the whole clip only. Use the title tool - no you can't keyframe individual matte points - only its original shape position and then only via the motion tab. Use AE - yes it can all be done in AE - no question, but its actually overkill and is much, much slower because of the way blend modes work - unless you are a serious full time AE guru. (One man bands seldom know everything about anything) Lastly, but not least, AE requires the dreaded round trip.

So, Whadda we want. We FCP switchers want quick fixes on the fly. Give us great choke, feathering and opacity controls in garbage mattes in PPro and most importantly give us a pen tool for unlimited bezier point mattes (OK - 40 point will do), resizable , feather-able and point key-frameable. All on the timeline and in the program monitor. When you have done all this in 50 mouse moves, show it to a photo of Steve Jobs and listen to the wind - then go away and do it in 10.
Actually, that last sentence is OTT, but I got more and more frustrated as I wrote this.

P.S

Go here to see all this aired in a 17 point thread in 2010
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2917573
The points were answered then by Todd with 'just do it in AE'.

I used to be Jon Hiseman but I'm feeling better now.

My $.02 -

As Alex pointed out, there is a problem with the way that Premiere handles multiple versions of the same media in a project that mucks up collaborative editing. As he said, when used assembly-line style, this isn't a problem (everyone makes one part of the project, unique timelines / media are all imported at the end. Everyone's happy). However, if people are constantly "checking out" and returning timelines with media from the same project, re-importing these timelines creates duplicates, which is a problem. Again, assembly-line style is the way to go here.

I would like to talk briefly about another small workflow thing you need to be aware of. Premiere creates waveform .pek files (the visualization of the waveforms) and .cfa files from every media file you import. You can specify where these are created. I find it most convenient for these to be placed "next to the source media" (an available option) so that then I take a project media offline, I don't have all of the conformed sound files hanging around. However, the location of these conformed media files is written into the project, not the actual media file. This means that (at least in 5.5) if you had user 1 import a file on their computer, it would conform it. However, even if that conformed media file is placed next to the original file, when user B imports this file, Premiere will re-conform this file and place another conformed media file next to it.

Now, I will say that CS6 changed something about the way .cfa files work. However, I don't know what. It was not in any of the documentation. This may be different, but I am not sure. Also, if you just need to nuke all .cfa files on your drive, it's not a big deal, Premiere will re-generate all of them in the background - but it's annoying as hell.

To get around this problem, my shop wound up just ONLY "ingesting" files once (through a couple of assistant editors). Then, when editors needed the files, they would pull them by importing projects, not the individual files. This worked fine, but it's not ideal.

The lack of premiere effects has led me to make heavy use of AE, which is more powerful than FCP. I have had no complaints here - I love this workflow.

Lastly, I must jump in and say that Premiere DOES have relative path relinking... it's just finicky sometimes. I'd say it works like 70% of the time, but is a nightmare if you are working with Canon or Zoom files that have identical names. Adobe knows this is a problem and is working on it, though.

No....Media on the drives is not duplicated.

You just end up with additional Master Clips in the project Browser.

You know how in FCP you can have Clips in a sequence with no master in the Project panel?

This is not true for Ppro. When you have a clip in a sequence, it's always tied to a Master in the project panel. Likewise, if you a delete the master clip from the project Panel, PPro will warn you that it will also delete it's affiliates out of the sequences its used in.

The problem is that when you import a Project to another project to merge them, PPro will not recognize the existence of a master clip if it's already IN the project panel. So you end up with multiple master clip instances and project file bloat.

So 5 editors all using their instances of the same master clip will not yield 1 master clip in the project panel, but 5 master clips in the project panel, each one pointing to the same underlying media file.

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX