Stability on Mac
 

Im starting the postproduction of a feature film shot with the SI2K. Our workflow is clear, in the begining we tried to use premiere, I´ve been working with Premiere/Cineform, for a long time now, the problem is that lately i´ve been having a lot of stability issues with Premiere crashes, broken projects, and the limitations of the project sizes and memory usable for premiere, make me want to return to Final Cut.

I was thinking to upgrade my dual core processors to quadcore, thinking that the change will fix some issues but im not so sure now. Thats why I wanted to ask all of you about your experience with FCP/Cineform. And the limitations I´ve been facing compared to a PPro workflow.

How is the stability with the audio when you work with FCP and CFRAW.

PC is still a better experience. Premiere is best under XP64 with 4GB of RAM, then for many, there are no stability issues. CineForm under FCP is getting better, yet it is more of an up hill battle as Applie is much less supportive than Adobe, and Apple offers no real-time support for third parties (no mater what we do.) Premiere a better architected product for third parties than FCP, Premiere just needs to be less of a memory hog (fingers crossed for CS4.)

If i upgrade my processors to Dual Quad Core opterons do you think my experience will be better. Right know im using Opterons 2216 2.4ghz, everything seems to run fine, but when i import audio I start to have problems. And in my case we shot 180hours of material for the Feature, so editing will be a nightmare if the system dont work smoothly.
In your opinion what would be better, upgrade to DualCore 3ghz processor, or a Quad Core 2.5 (wich is the higher clockspeed amd offer now)
Or to migrate to a Intel workstation, wich will be almost the same price as the processor upgrade
What do you recommend me to do to work smoothly?

Best solution is to break the project up into 15-20minute reels, once the memory footprint of Premiere is reduced, everything should work fine. We do really like the new Intel systems, but if Premiere is not happy you should address that first.

Sergio, we haven't done any characterization work with AMD lately, so it's difficult to make a strong recommendation for AMD. All of our work has been done with Intel. That said, there shouldn't be any processor dependencies. Probably a bigger positive influence on stability is running XP 64 bit, and making sure your PPro project files don't get too big. Large project files are the catalyst for the problems inside PPro.

Do you mean divide the project into 15 or 20 sequences. Or do 20 different projects?

I ask that because dividing the project into sequences doesnt help to reduce the project script size, I think the problem of premiere handling long projects is because the size of the script itself, sometimes it doesnt even open.

I´ve been doing preciselly that, I break the project into sequences, wich in the case of the film are 161 sequences. The problem is that i have to double that, 322 sequences, because i have to sync the sound in one timeline and then drag it to another to mantain the sync in all the clips. In FCP you sync the sound on the timeline and it remains synced in the project bin.

I had to do a project for each 20 sequences, and even breaking it that way I lost 6 projects. That means i wont be able to see the entire film in context while im editing.

I´ve seen that you have problems when the project file is near 20mb, if its heavier than that its almost a fact that it wont open again. And the size of the project increases as you add sequences and media.

Thats why I dont know if it is the hardware or what im doing wrong. I use Windows 64bits, 8gigs of ram, a CalDigit HDOne 8TB array, and Quadro 3500. What pisses me off is that i have another system with a SCRATCH installed the only difference is the GPU, and it runs like a hot knive through butter.

What could i do? What workflow would you use, maybe offlining with in Media Composer?

Divide you movie into projects of roughing 15 to 20 minutes of finished time -- just like tranditional film reels. Each reel is edited separately and the reel projects are significantly smaller than the whole. I've seen several projects finished this way, so I know it works. Yes, Premiere is not likely your project size, and more sequences will not help. If you want to see your projects as a whole, flatten the draft each reel and import those in each project (it is the large number of clips that cause Premiere the headache, single large clips are fine.) Now you can edit fast, and see the rest of project of your data whenever you need. It does take a little more planning, yet the time and hassles saved are huge.