Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 for the Mac

Well it's a whole new world... FCP is, well, X'd... Like many others I've been clinging to my FCP 7 but with the announcement of Apple shutting down any future support or development for Color and many of the short comings of FCP X I am looking to other NLE possabilities.

After looking into many options I decided I wanted to find a "bundled" package similar to Final Cut Studio - Enter Adobe's Production Premium Bundle: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and the list goes on and on. I had been waffling because I didn't want to spend the $1500 full street price and just then Adobe dropped the crossover price to $850 - Yeah!!! So I downloaded the 30 day free trial. (If you do this, make the time to give it a real good try. I was put off the first afternoon because I didn't give it enough time to set in to my way of thinking.) I can officially say that after 3 weeks of testing and learning I have made leap and bought the bundle.

The cool things for me are round tripping with After Effects, Photoshop and Audition. Also the importability with many different CODECs and formats. I just dropped a bunch of footage from my EX3 in after choosing the right sequence settings and there it was in realtime - pretty nice.

I'm using mine on an older MacPro (2006) tower 2.66 Quad Core with a Black Magic Design Intensity Pro video output card. I just upgraded the driver to 8.2.1 and it seems to work fine. I'm going to upgrade the CPU soon and add an NVIDIA FX4800 GPU card to activate the Mercury Engine features of the package. I hope to have more info on that soon. For the mean time I am putting it up against my FCP 7 package and working through the similarities and differences. So far so good.

Until next time, good shooting or editing

TDTrey.com

Sony PMW-F3 and Non PL Lenses

OK. So we have the 3 SONY primes 35, 50 and 85mm T3'ish -- very nice. Also we have the RED 18-50 T3 PL zoom - handy. When they were offering the pair, 18-50 and 50-150 from Optimo, it was a great range and deal... But now it's a different pricing structure... So we have steered ourselves down the NIKON road for a little while =)

Ken Rockwell.com and eBay are your friends. We went through Ken's sight and double checked our lenses for reviews, tips and tricks and finally general pricing considerations. We decided on covering a range from 28mm to 200mm with a 28-70 ƒ2.8 ED and a 80-200 ƒ2.8 ED. Really rugged, well built and clean.

The 80-200 came in a week ago and we were able to take it to Duclos Lenses in Conoga Park last week. REALLY nice guys Paul and Matthew. Boy do they know their stuff. As it turned out they were doing a run of Cinemods on 80-200 Nikkor lenses that week and just added our parts to the run. We dropped off the lens in the morning and went to lunch and it was done by the time we got back an hour later. Awesome!!!

To add to our collection we also got the 28-70 this week. We'll test it out on a commercial shoot this coming week. We'll have it modded probably later this week or next. The mod is great - they remove the "click-stops" in the aperture ring and add a focus gear. If you like they will upgrade to front flange to 80mm for consistency.

The look seems very nice from these lenses. Bokeh is pretty smooth. Don't see that much vignetting in the way we use the lenses. All in all I think a good decision.

While we were at Duclos we checked out their 11-16 lens - very cool. Again - rugged!! Worked really well with the F3. Gives you a great wide look. They are so popular for the RED and EPIC and F3 that there is a fair sized waiting list - well worth the wait and the money.

More to follow as we put the lenses through some real world testing...

Until next time, good shooting

TDTrey.com