A Modest Proposal Regarding Editing Software

In the beginning, there was Avid…and it was OK. 

My Adobe (Non-)Switch Story

I can clearly remember my first experience with Adobe Premiere.  It was in the early 1990’s, and I was working full-time in the News Department at Wisconsin Public Television.  I had managed to talk the news director into buying me a really new-fangled device – a desktop computer.  I believe it was a first-generation Pentium, maybe 90Mhz.  I had been into computers since about 1984, and had composed music and scored a lot of TV programs using Atari computers. Geekery was in my blood.  So once I got the Pentium, I was poised on the launching pad for what was to come.

And then I got a copy of Adobe Premiere, version 3 I think it was.  And I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.  Strange, buggy, crash-prone, you name it, it was just not good.

AdobeCS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions Part 3

Well, I’ve been editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the nVidia Quadro CUDA video card for about six months now, and it has been an interesting ride.  You can check out my starting impressions in blog posts here, here and here.  But what’s the latest?

I recently had one of those Tevye “Fiddler On The Roof” moments - you know, when he sings “Sunrise, Sunset” and weeps about how quickly his children grow up?  Well, the summer of 2010 has been like that for me.  It seems like yesterday that I was sliding the nVidia card into my fairly-new HP z800 eight-core Xeon edit workstation.  Blink twice and it is the end of August.  To say this has been a busy summer of editing is a gross understatement.  I’ve shot and edited around 25 videos of varying length for the craft industry, did multi-cam shoots and edits for several concerts, did a commercial for a Vermont bed & breakfast and managed to pack in a a wedding shoot and edit to boot.  I would love to say that the experience was flawless…but I can’t.  I’ve had almost as many crashes with Premiere CS5 as I did when I was running CS4 with what was usually a fairly buggy Matrox RT.X2 card. 

Two of my larger projects consisted of lots of HDV footage that was shared between several different timelines.  One of the projects had over 300 different HDV clips.  If you have edited with Premiere for long, I’m sure you had a project that, when loading, just grinds to a halt.  In this case, what seemed to be the offending clip was always a Quicktime .MOV file, and when you load up 300+ clips and the machine freezes at “12 clips remaining” to load, it’ll make you pull your hair out.  Interestingly, even shiny-new CS5 still offers the workaround that it’s predecessors did:

Adobe CS5 and nVidia: First Impressions Part 2

Sorry about dropping from sight for the last couple of weeks, but when the day-job calls, it calls with a vengeance.  I also apologize for the lack of photos, but I just didn’t think to do screengrabs at all the right times.  Bad editor!  No doughnut!

As I was saying…

Adobe CS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions

I guess once you break the big rules, you get used to it.  You may remember my mini-series from last January, when I replaced a several-year-old Dell Pentium-D workstation with a fire-breathing HP Z-800 eight-core Xeon box.  At that time, I installed my existing Matrox RT.X2 video accelerator card and an ATI Radeon HD4870 video card, to work in collaboration with Adobe Creative Suite CS4.  The system ran pretty well, but it wasn’t a month later that the news started leaking out about something big on the horizon - something called Mercury and CUDA, to be included in the new version of Adobe Creative Suite - CS5.

April brought my yearly trek to Las Vegas for the NAB Convention, and one of the first places I went to was the Adobe booth.  The demos of of the Mercury engine running with the nVidia CUDA cards were incredibly impressive.  I knew instantly I wanted to torture-test this combo.  A few phone calls by the PVC brass brought to my door (eventually) an nVidia Quadro FX4800 video card and the Adobe CS5 Master Collection. As what seems to be the lone member of PVC that edits on a Windows box, I intend to use this combo for ongoing torture tests for PVC.  But first I had to see if it could even be installed in a calm and controlled manner.

Breaking The First Rule Of Non-Linear Editing, Part Two

Our story so far:  Our intrepid editor and geek just spent about $7000 on a new editing computer.  To try and save money, he bought the HP Z800 without a DVD drive or video card.  When he finally tries to install the BluRay burner…)

“bump.”

Whaaaat?

Breaking The First Rule Of Non-Linear Editing, Part One

When last we spoke, I had announced my intention to break The First Rule Of Editing - to actually upgrade my editor in the middle of several ongoing productions.  My reasons were threefold:

* Against all odds, I had the money;

* My 4-year-old dual-Pentium Dell XPS600, which had been rock-steady, had suddenly become pretty flaky, with USB ports disappearing and reappearing at unpredictable times - and when your keyboard, mouse and ShuttlePro are all USB devices, that can be a bad thing;

* And as a Adobe Creative Suite CS4 user, the demo of the upcoming Abobe Mercury engine in combination with new-technology CUDA video cards and a hot Windows machine is quite impressive.  Check it out.

For the last ten years, I have made something of a specialty out of taking inexpensive, low-to-midrange computers and making DV editors out of them. Back in the days of the Canopus DVRaptor, I could take the puniest machine, add RAM and a hard drive for media, and build a pretty functional editor (by the standards of the early 2000’s) for less than $700.  I built more than 50 editors like this over several years, but times have changed.  The budget this time was going to be a whole different beast.

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