Worried about Premiere performance
 

I know although the title of the thread sounds like it belongs in the Premiere forum, I thought it may be more pertinent to people here.

I own and rent two SI-2k cameras (soon to be three). The workflow of shooting in SI-2K, editing in Premiere and finishing in Speedgrade XR really impressed me and I went headlong into it. There were teething problems with the workflow in the beginning which I understood and it got resolved very quickly. For some time everything went quite smoothly.

However, recently we have had more and more performance issues with Premiere CS3 to a point that my clients are getting really irritated with our service. There are memory issues, computer hangs, all kinds of problems. CS4, which was supposed to take care of these issues, does not seem to have made major inroads in resolving these issues, although we have not had upgrades from Cineform apart from the beta.

Seriously, I am considering abandoning Premiere altogether and migrating to FCP just because of these nagging and persisting problems because I cannot afford to prolong this situation any longer.

Has anyone used the FCP in this kind of workflow? Have other people had these issues? Is this a Cineform only issue? Please advise.

CS3 + Prospect is much faster than FCP. Most of the issues are due to the Adobe memory problems, which require you to keep your projects smaller than you might want. If you break up the projects, CS3 is stable for highend post. We do see the CS4 has improved some things for memory handling. FCP is an option, and memory handling is a lot better, but on technical, quality, and third party support, things are a lot worse under FCP. I would stick we PC CS3 until both the FCS 3 (when that will be) and CS4 support is done, then choose your path.

Are we getting any closer to CS4 support? Can you share with us your revised timeline?

Yes and No. :)

I had a lot of problems in the past with Premiere CS3, a lot of system crashes, hang ups and many irritating/frustrating issues. What worked for me: I went for xp x64 instead of 32bits, and 4GB of Ram in one system and the main editing has 8gb, I divide the long projects into sequences, render each sequence and import those files into a new project to edit the whole project. You loose some time rendering sequences, and if you need to change something in the sequence you have to go back to the source edit to refine, since you´ll want to use the sequences in RAW format in SpeedGrade.

I´ve been using that method and I dont have crashes anymore.

I got tired of waiting for Adobe to correct their memory management problems in CS4, as well as background app crashes and other Premiere bugs. A 4.1 update is due in April but based on their track record with premiere, I won't wait any longer and am switching to FCS.

Yes, a new version of Premiere Pro (4.1) will be release after NAB, with several bug fixes and improvements: new frame export, fast open proyects, new memory handling, etc. (source: Adobe forum)
Will it be the definitive version?

I'm with David. You have to manage project size, and that has been an issue since Pv5. So I now work in scenes, chapters, individual tracks or songs, etc.

To speed things up and limit duplication, I will import previous projects into new, dump the media I don't need and build what is pertinent.

All said and done, I write out a trimmed project of each piece to a new disk, then import that into a master project, load the sequences in order and render away.

Getting lemonade from this, I found it to be smarter memory and asset management by keeping things lean and trim. It's a workflow that breaks the old habits.

If CS4's memory management is a significant improvement on CS3's then I'd seriously consider upgrading to CS4. Any views on how much better CS4 will be?

Hi

I am contemplating vice versa....

In FCP you get no RT effects, color is all over the place. Metadata changed in QT player is totally different than in FCP, I could go on and on....

I have managed to finish some quite big projects in FCP but it not has been easy.

Right now I would stick with what I know and hope to see some real support for professional workflows in CF.

-Kaspar