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Question

Why Why Why make so many dumb downgrades in Premier cc?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
May 8, 2018
3 replies
1050 views

There is so much wrong with Premier cc I hardly know where to begin. I teach video at a local College and though we have cc on our computers in the lab I strongly recommend that my students use 5.5 instead. Quickly

1, The idea that you can only set the frame size of a project when you drag your 1st file to the timeline is absolutely ludicrous. There are many occasions when your 1st file in to the project does not reflect the desired project size.

2. Can't import any file types that support an alpha channel,avi,flv,mov. Need I say more?

3. Audio channels default to a solid block on the timeline...Useless! And even when you change them to a waveform they are still only the top half of a wave form.

4. You've moved many of the functions all around. It seems that you have failed to realize that there are only 2 types of consumers of your product; those who know the product and have a work-flow build on that knowledge and those that do not know that product. Why would you deliberately sabotage those who are well versed in it's work-flow and force them to rethink all this when the newbies have to learn it from the ground up anyway. Indefensible! And please don't ask me to identify which functions I'm talking about. You know darn well what you have done.

More later .....

This topic has been closed for replies.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

bruces96534395 wrote
1, The idea that you can only set the frame size of a project when you drag your 1st file to the timeline is absolutely ludicrous. There are many occasions when your 1st file in to the project does not reflect the desired project size.

This could just be simple confusion between the terms "project" and "sequence" which are two different things.

You said "set the frame size of a project," but that isn't how it works. A project doesn't have a frame size. It is a sequence inside a project that has a frame size. And the frame size of a sequence can be set at creation or after creation, as the other replies are correctly saying. It has to work that way, so that a single project can contain many sequences, each with a different frame size.

The problem I see, and this is not directed personally because I see this everywhere, is that people are often taught to start work in Premiere by going through all the project and sequence creation steps as one action. But it's two separate actions. You create the project, and then you can start creating one or more sequences. Dragging a clip to the empty Timeline panel is about creating a sequence, not a project. It's just a shortcut that bypasses the New Sequence dialog box by using the clip specs to fill in the sequence specs, but if you want to set the frame size yourself, don't use the shortcut, use the New Sequence dialog box, type in the frame size, and then add the clip.

The video below should make it clear that frame size doesn't need to depend on clips at all, because it shows sequence frame sizes being set without any clips in sight.

Ann Bens

Community Expert

Sometimes you need to set the Editing Mode to custom in order to change the resolution.

MyerPj

Community Expert

Just in case you missed it,

bruces96534395 wrote
3....even when you change them to a waveform they are still only the top half of a wave form.

In the timeline context menu, the 'pancake' symbol up top (of the timeline) just to the right of the sequence name. I you want both 'halves' of the wave form un-check "Rectified Audio Waveforms"

jasontcox

Inspiring

Hi Bruce,

I'm sorry you're having frustrations but the truth is, your frustrations show a fundamental lack of understanding of the software. I do not work for Adobe. And yes, Premiere irritates me sometimes too. I have plenty of gripes. But the ones you listed simply show a lack of knowledge of the program itself.

1. This is false. You can absolutely change most sequence settings, including resolution, after a sequence has been created. You simply go to the Sequence menu and select Sequence Settings. And EVEN if this wasn't available, a user can pre-select sequence settings by making a sequence themselves by going to File - New - Sequence.

2. Premiere supports PLENTY of formats that support an alpha channel. It is true that in the 2018.1 update, they dropped support for some OLD codecs that most users dont use any more. They warned users about this months in advance and it has impacted very few people who ignored the warnings and use older codecs.

3. Im not even totally sure I understand what youre saying here but I think you're confused by the fact that stereo clips show up as a single clip by default in a track. This may be different from other applications, but you still have FULL control over channel volume And channel configuration in Premiere. I think by "top half of the waveform" you mean the left channel. If you only have audio in one channel, you can do a variety of things such as fix the clip with Modify - Audio Channels, before placing the clip in the timeline OR by using one of the Fill audio effects. These are not workarounds.

4. Adobe is not sabotaging anything. If youre jumping from CS 5.5 to CC 2018, you are jumping SIX versions of the software at once. Lots of things have changed in nearly a decade of software enhancements. When you make a leap that large, yes, it will seem overwhelming and like a lot has changed. This happens ANY time you jump 6 versions of a program lol.

bruces96534395Author

Participating Frequently

Why did I know someone would accuse me of ignorance. Of course, how could Adobe possibly be wrong. Why arbitrarily move functions around that do not improve workflow in any way but certainly make it more difficult to find things. Why default to a block representation of audio and not the wavform?. What possible use would that have?. Why eliminate any previously used codecs? It doesn't require any real bandwidth, so why not just keep them. There are plenty of people still using these and what about people who have old files of otherwise useful material. I know, convert them.. You don't mention any of these newer formats BTW. I went through the entire list in cc and not one. I did a bunch of research before posting and no you cannot set up a new project with perimeters like 1920 x 1080 etc. you have to drag a file to the timeline and it will reflect that size, (this is straight from Adobe BTW). which is not always what you want the project to be. For the record, I have had cc since 2015 and though Adobe has certainly tried to fix the bugs, I still find it unusable and 5.5 the superior program. To me cc is like Windows Me or Premiere version 4. No one liked them and most just held on to older versions until newer, better ones came out. Finally, all I did was attack Adobe in my frustration, you Attracted me personally. Bad form sir. Band form.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Welcome to the forum ... just remember, every editor out there does this differently than every other editor. Which is part of what makes editing so fascinating. In PrPro, if you think there's two ways of doing something, go to an aisle-way discussion at some conference, there'll be at least three more ways mentioned than there are participants in the conversation.

As to this thread, I don't see that you were attacked. Comments you made that were seen as demonstrably wrong were corrected. A different point of view was stated and that nearly as directly as you stated yours. There's a big difference between being attacked and being disagreed with.

Understand ... we all feel like ranting at times. And partake of these forums to do so. You can find a decent number of mine, especially on the "old" SpeedGrade forum, and also here. I still think the decision to EOL Sg rather than rebuild a proper new grading app was stupid, and have said so here, other forums, and to the staffers attending NAB in person.

You can also find many places where comments of mine have been questioned for accuracy ... sometimes quite accurately, and sometimes ... I was actually correct to begin with. Questioning the accuracy of my statements I don't normally see as an attack on me. I have made statements that were in fact wrong. So those needed correction. Occasionally, someone who is rather mistaken on something will say someone else is wrong, without actually like, check by doing something pretty obvious to see if the function works as they think.

Including me. And I've apologized (and that is really embarrassing ... ). So normally, unless it's pretty obvious, I'll do a quick check of how X works to make sure I've got the locations/text/& such accurate. With as complex a program as this, it's easy to make a mis-statement.

As to your comments: you don't like the 'half' wave-form view. Fine. For me, I find it does everything I need when editing, so I prefer it. Matter of taste, really. When I go to Audition, yea, I'll normally have the double-sided waveform showing, though I'll "work" more in the spectral frequency display for say cleanup work. I've looked at the screens of a lot of editors who know exactly how to set the waveform display in PrPro, and rarely do they set it to anything other than the 'standard' one for editing. So ... set that the way you like it, the option is there.

For creating new sequences to taste: clicking the "new item" icon and selecting Sequence, then the Settings tab ... you certainly can pick your own settings before creating a sequence (though that's often the slower way to do things). And you get the same thing going from the menu system, File/New/Sequence. Click the Settings tab, set you own sequence. Make your own presets, which is always a smart thing. So this bit ...

I did a bunch of research before posting and no you cannot set up a new project with perimeters like 1920 x 1080 etc. you have to drag a file to the timeline and it will reflect that size, (this is straight from Adobe BTW).

... is wrong. And from the most recent 'manual' file ... https://helpx.adobe.com/pdf/premiere_pro_reference.pdf :

Create a sequence
In many cases, you want to create a sequence that matches the characteristics of the primary assets (clips) that you’ll be editing. You can create a sequence that matches the characteristics of an asset by dragging the asset to the New Item button at the bottom of the Project panel.
You can also create a sequence by using a sequence preset. The sequence presets included with Premiere Pro include the correct settings for common types of assets. For example, if you have footage mostly in DV format, use a DV sequence preset.
If you plan to specify lower quality settings for output (such as streaming web video), don’t change your sequence settings. Instead, change your export settings later.
When all the parameters of your assets do not match all the settings of any preset, in the Sequence Presets tab of the New Sequence dialog box, do one of the following:
• Select a preset with most settings matching the parameters of the assets you want to edit, then select the Settings tab, and customize the preset so that its settings match the asset parameters exactly.
• Without selecting a preset, select the Settings tab of the New Preset dialog box. Select Custom from the Editing Mode menu, and customize the settings until they match the parameters of your assets.

Personally, I've used PrPro since CS6. I've often had at least three if not four of the CC versions installed at any one time, as I tend to keep projects in their original versions. Some releases have been buggier or cleaner than others, but that's software. And yes, I've been forced to hold off on using a new release because of a bug that hit me for several months until it was fixed. I worked away in the older versions ... not as happily as I might have been, but successfully.

I've been to several straight NAB's, spent a lot of time talking editing, cameras, software, and gear in the aisles. Listened a ton to the amazing depth and breadth of experience there. Hours of conversations on the ins/outs of all the NLE's, which to me is quite intriguing. I've been to the the last couple Adobe MAX conferences as a Teaching Assistant where there's several thousand users, again, hours of discussions with some talented and experienced users. Critical discussions, in the intellectual sense of the term. Discussions heavily dissecting the UI and tools of various post-processing apps.

And I've been quite active on these forums for several years.

Over the years since CS6, there's been a couple really buggy releases, for sure. This last release however ... judging from the forum threads ... has been a pretty 'clean' one relatively. Nowhere near the spike both in the number of different issues posted nor the depth of the threads on those issues as about any other release in years. And they do already have two bug fix patches released, which is faster than they've done in the past. So many of the bugs from the initial 12.0 release have already been fixed.

Yep, there's some things still needing fixing. And on the new User Voice system, they've acknowledged them and promised work. That's the sort of response we users never got before.

But there's a couple 'minor' updated features in the new release that have been huge for me ... the Comparison view in the Program monitor, used for color, graphics, effects checking ... very useful. Add to that the shot-matching feature, which has worked pretty well for me, even better than the shot-matching in SpeedGrade. I tested something like 40 clips of all kinds of media & scene types in both Sg and the newest Lumetri ... Sg was better by small amounts on only a couple clips, Lumetri better on like 90%, and Lumetri was never way off like the Sg one occasionally was.

Those two features alone save me a ton of time.

For its time, CS6 was a good build. Rather solid. Still workable, true. But very dated now. In my opinion, of course.

Your mileage will vary. State it clearly. But understand, others will have their views and experience also.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

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