Monday, July 9, 2012

Premiere Pro CS6 and 6.0.1

OK. So I've been on CS6 for about 5 weeks now.  I like a lot of the new features: better trimming, adjustment layers, Warp Stabilizer built in to Premiere Pro directly.  When up and running it's great.  But in the last week I've had some issues with my tower stuttering and freezing.  I called Adobe last Friday at the end of the day and tried to give them a detailed explanation of the issue - they were very kind but kept passing me around from department to department... Frustrating.  Well I did a little more digging on my system and found a few more answers on my own.  Then, low and behold, I got a phone call from one of the lead tech support guys this morning following up as they could see there was not a resolution to the issue yet in the report.  VERY COOL =)

Well the tech spent almost an hour with me on the phone and went through all the nooks and crannies of my Mac Pro to determine where the problem might be.  We tracked it down to a probable conflict with some behind the scenes apps interfering with the PPro performance.  (Keep in mind that this system is an 8 core, 2.93 Ghz box with 24 gigs of RAM and separate GPU and GUI graphics cards, RAID 5 @ 200MB/sec -- not a sleeper)  We set up a ROOT account to log into and ran PPro 6.0.1 with no problems.  This means it must be in the building of my main account - not the Boot Drive or the system.  Good, I don't have to blow the drive --  bad, I have to pluck out the offending sub apps or slowly bring across my prefs from the old account to the new one and the delete the old one when I've got a solid new one... Tic Toc - but doable.

I've been testing 6.0.1 on my 17" MBP and found it really nice, fast and friendly.  The issues were only with the big tower.  PPro 6 seems a lot like FCP 7 (or 8 =)  I think Adobe is really coming along with this product.  Very happy about that!!!  I'm moving almost 50 percent of my work into DSLR territory and the file size and Xfer/conversion time is a killer on fast turn arounds and on-set reviews.  I love just dropping the native files into PPro and going.  Hoverscrub and JKL functions really help to speed up the process of logging and picking clips on set.  I'm waiting for PluralEyes 3 to come out and everything will be in place.

The majority of my work these days are talking heads for docs and sound bites so being able to turn them quickly is important.  I cut a series of interviews with CS 6.0 and was very pleased with the adjustment layers and the sound control.  I was prepared to got out to Davinci Resolve and Audition if I needed to but instead elected to stay in Premiere the whole time and make a go of it.  The client was very happy and didn't need a second round of changes - Yay!!!

Overall I think Premiere Pro is moving forward quite nicely.  Probably by 6.5 we'll be in a place that feels a lot like where we left off with FCP7 - Sorry Apple... Still love the computers =)  I'm very happy with the openness of Adobe to listen to our needs and then do there best to get us the updates ASASP.  I think letting Apple do what they want to do - computers and mobile devices and letting software developers work on what the really want to work on will give us the best result in the long run... Too wordy???

Well that's it for now. Until next time, good shooting and good editing.

TDTrey.com