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Filed under: *VIDEO* •CS4 •CS5 •Editing •Hardware •Post Production •Software •

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:

If you have a project that will not load, just start a new project (with the same Project Settings parameters) and import the entire recalcitrant previous project.  99 times out of 100 this will work and allow you to continue editing.  Of course, I would much rather just have the original project load up, but obviously something is wrong here.  In some online research, I learned that this is not uncommon, and it seems that Quicktime and a firewall is usually the culprit.  The theory goes like this:

Apple hasn’t updated Quicktime to 64-bit yet (jeez, what video app HAVE they updated in the last three years?) and because of that it has to communicate with CS5 through TCP/IP, and if your firewall isn’t properly punched to allow this, you are going to have trouble.  It’s an interesting theory, and it even made my heart leap a little to think I might be able to fix the problem.  However, I went so far as to turn my firewall *off* and the non-loading project problem still remained.  Do I complain about this to Adobe or Apple? It hardly seems to matter, since the two companies don’t seem to be on speaking terms these days anyway.

Next is the question of what does and doesn’t play in real-time.  I’m still enormously impressed with the capabilities of the CS5/CUDA combination, but it won’t accelerate *everything.*  For example, I decided I needed some jazzier transitions for a client project, and with my old favorite ProDad Vitascene not supporting CS5 until the winter, I bought a bundle package from Pixelan that included SpiceMaster and 3D Six-Pack (hopefully a review is in the offing.)  Sadly, the high-powered HP/nVidia/Adobe rig still needs to render all of those effects (and to be fair, I bet the problem lies with Pixelan as much as the other three suspects.)

I almost forgot to mention that my nice new HP Z800 blew a power supply.  One of the things you get when you spend $7000 on a computer is a 3-year, next-business-day warrantee.  In this case, the good folks at HP couldn’t have handled it better.  I got online in a chat with a service tech, he asked a few questions about how the computer was failing, and he agreed with me that the power supply was most likely the culprit.  This was at 1AM on a Friday; at 9 AM the following Monday I had a brand-spankin’-new PS in my hands, and swapping it into the beautifully-designed x800 case took less than a minute.  I haven’t looked back since.

Now for the good stuff:

My latest project is creating a 10-minute remembrance of a youth center for a 50th high school reunion.  I traveled to Minnesota to shoot interviews with several of the graduates, and instead of just taking one angle I set up a 2nd camera and shot a profile of the interviewee with a green chromakey screen off to their side.  My plan was to key video of the rock star subjects into the screen as they talk about them.  It was a long shot, but I figured I’d give it a try.

There is a certain website that might have a name somewhat like Yew Froob.  Using a freeware downloader, I grabbed a few short clips to test my theory.  To my everlasting surprise, all the Yew Froob clips just dropped into the Premiere timeline and played perfectly!  I would have never guessed it would be as simple as that.  (And the clips themselves hold up remarkably well to being blown up in the Effects Controls tab.)

Well, there you have it - lots of news, some good, most bad.  I sure hope Adobe is reading this, because truth be told, chatting with the HP service tech was a real revelation on how good customer service can be.  Sad to say, a group of people in India trying to diagnose complex issues over 8000 miles and one enormous cultural divide just doesn’t work very well.  Bring tech support home, Adobe!

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