One Week with Premiere Pro

Creative COW by Robbie Coblentz

We produce two TV shows for the Pursuit Network. Our SOP has been to take everything provided by the field producers, compress it to ProResLT 1920 x 2080 29.97, drop it into FCP, and roll. Encoding everything to a single format prior to editing turned out to be a critical step because it eliminated a lot of rendering, temporal, and spatial goofiness -- and just made FCP 7 work a lot better.

…But it took a ton of time.


Enter Adobe's newest version in the NLE space -- Premiere Pro CS6.

We are on Mac Pros -- either 4,1 or 5,1 machines. The 4,1 units are 8-core and the 5,1's are 12-core. They are fast, slick machines that chew through almost anything… Anything, that is, except the funky, prebuilt hardware-specific settings in Premiere CS 5.5. That was the main reason we only dabbled in last year's PP model.

Hello Transmit, Adobe's new hardware settings that make third-party cards from Blackmagic and AJA work much more better. Much, much, much better. It was time for us to look at Premiere Pro again.

OUR SETUP:
We are running 4 MacPros in separate edit bays with either AJA or BMD hardware. All machines are connected to a MacPro FinalShare 40 TB media server via either 1-gig or 10-gig ethernet. Project files are kept on a separate server, hooked up via 10-gig ethernet. All edit bays can access all media or project files via AFP protocol sharing. read more...