Premiere 25 - Speed changes are broken

[paleditor]

Premiere 25.2.1 Build 2 - Speed change issues have plagued premiere for a long time but this latest took me over the edge. The problem happens when trying to replicate frame exact speed changes when conforming a project by taking it from proxies to online resolution. AFAIK speed ramps have never been totally frame accurate but now this affects also linear speed changes. This is a huge problem when having to create frame accurate online versions of projects that get a/b checked for quality by clients such as studios. Here is a simple example from this weekend: A clip with a linear speed change of 175 %. The clip gets replaced with an almost identical version (same length, same time code, just higher resolution). The new clip is at 175% but the frames are not identical. It's a short clip of under 10 frames, so rounding errors should be minimal but what really gets me is - the start frame is off. There is no reason for the start frame to be different. This happens when overcutting, but also when perfoming replace clip edits, or reconnecting to the higher grade footage. Workaround is to eye match the frames and cut them in frame by frame, which is of course not feasible for longer project. This is just one example of dozens of the same incident in one project. In Premiere pre V25 you could count on for at least the linear speed changes to be frame accurate. On a side note - the problems with keeping speed ramps frame accurate has been getting so bad a lot of my editor friends try to avoid them whenever possible when dealing with projects that need to get conformed.

[IanB_360]

Hi @paleditor 

I feel your pain! As an online editor I know how frustrating conforming speed changes to different media can be. The team and I would love to help out and get these issues ironed out so that future editors would never face such an issue. I would like to get to know more about the media and project files if you have anything you can send to the team so we can take a look you can send us that via any media file share of your choice. And correct me if I read wrong but you were saying the previous version 25.1 did not have the same problems with linear speed changes? Please let me know if you can send some media and project files and we will gladly help out. Also the most basic but important bug information will be helpful for solving this How do I write a bug report. 
Best of luck! we are always here for help.

Ian

[paleditor]

Hi Ian, thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately I can't send you any files, since this is a heavily NDA project but I can try to answer some questions here: I am not aware if this was not an issue in 25.1 - I had to upgrade from 24.x to 25 for this project and adobe took me directly to 25.2.1 - what I was saying is that I do not recall in pre 25 versions that linear speed changes had been a problem. But speed ramps certainly were. Also this is the first time that I encountered that the start frame changed. as far as the clips go - went from UHD 24fps in DNxHR LB 8-bit to 4k 24fps in Apple ProRes 422 Proxy (we are still in the process of taking the Proxy to 4444 or EXRs). This error happens regardless of platform as we tested it on several different macs. Let me know if I can provide anything else, I'll do my best. Thanks!

[Timothy Eaton]

I have the same issue.  I rendered out a section with burned in timecode so I could see what's happening, and here's what I found.

First frame timecode is xx:xx:11:06.  If you accelerate the footage to 300%, the next frame selected is xx:xx:11:09, as you would expect.

BUT if you recut the shot to start at timecode xx:xx:11:07, things get strange/frustrating.  It's all fine and dandy at xx:xx:11:07 at 100% footage, but when you respeed the footage to 300% the first frame becomes xx:xx:11:06 and the second frame is 11:09.  Similarly, if you make the starting timecode xx:xx:11:08 and then accelerate the footage to 300%, the first frame will now be 11:09, and the second frame is 11:12.

So basically, it's not really selecting the nearest frame to the frame you edited.  Premiere is instead finding its favorite nearest frame at whatever accelerated framerate you have chosen.  Both "Speed Duration" and "Time Remapping" function in the same (incorrect) way.

I just tested it, and it looks like the same thing happens in version 24.6.5.1 (M Series Processor). It's not been a problem for me before, but last time I did an online conform was a year ago.