Little Frog in Hi Def by Shane Ross

OK, I’m not all about Avid now. I’m giving Adobe Premiere Pro some love too. With Apple no longer making a tool I can use, I’m exploring the other two main options for NLEs and seeing what they are capable of. Seeing how they might fit into my workflow needs. Now, while Avid does easily plug into my broadcast workflows, I do have other projects that would be cumbersome to work with in Avid Media Composer…even MC6. So those projects I used Premiere Pro to tackle.

Project #1 – Show Pitch/Sizzle.

I have a producer who is in development mode. Working on four to five show pitches in hopes of getting one of them picked up as a series. Them being low low budget, he’s forced to shoot it on his own, with a flip camera that shoots .AVI files. When I was first approached to edit these, I figured I’d use Avid to get back up to speed with that, and to beta test it while I went along. But, as it turns out, trying to convert those AVI files into something Avid could import was a huge issue. When audio did carry over, it didn’t stay in sync. It was way out of sync. And after 5 attempts to get things right, I gave up. I launched Premiere Pro, used the Media Browser to bring in those files and guess what? They worked perfectly right away. I cut them natively and they were always in sync. And because I worked with them natively, they imported instantly…no conversion time.

Now…I must mention that the computer I used for this was my personal machine. A MacPro OctoCore 8.0Ghz (Early 2008) with 12GB of Ram, and the Nvidia 285 graphics card that enables CUDA and speeds up the Mercury Engine…so it enabled PPro to deal with this format more easily. At one point I did move the project to a different machine (with the same version of PPro), but this machine was a Quad Core 3.0 and had an ATI graphics card. So the Mercury Engine was relegated to software only…and boy, did it become sluggish. Glad I only used that for changes. read more...