GH5 choppiness, skipping and dropping of frames

I think we're all hoping the next patch cometh soon ... and with many things patched!

As to their ... rather intruguing ... support "structure" ... yea, that's ... um ... intriguing ... um ... ?

Neil

I can’t believe they’re having someone as valuable as Ivo do level 1 support on UserVoice.

Several strange assumptions there to me ...

First, why would Ivo be reading the UserVoice posts in general? No clue here why that even came up. The engineer that is tasked to sort through them and find the usable ones, sure, but ... Ivo? Ivo bosses engineers. Weird idea. Ah well.

Second, UserVoice as Level 1 support? Not hardly. The UV system is there to gather information for them primarily. As has been noted. The information most useful to the development team is culling through for data for issues they can't replicate in-house. For the upper managers, metrics on over-all performance.

Like it or not, the "Level 1" support is split between these user to user forums and the 'chat' and phone help. Now ... chat and phone assistance can be problematic. The first people answering are generalists it seems. Kevin always says that as soon as you get someone on chat or phone, immediately ask for the Video Que to get someone with better knowledge of Premiere.

Some users get very good assistance. Some ... oh my, that wasn't ... good. That isn't a great situation over-all to me. I've done one help request each, phone help and chat. Didn't know to ask for the Video Que the first one. I think I knew a lot more about Premiere than that person. Second one, asked for the Video Que ... and that took a few more minutes. But the person that came on was very efficient at sorting my ill.

So I've had mixed results, but nothing horrid. Thankfully.

A quick note on the old Bug/Features posting system, versus the current UserVoice system. An ongoing issue has been that users are particularly poor at selecting a label for a bug or feature request.

• Many things listed as "feature requests" in the past were things that weren't working as they should have been ... a bug. Which might take some time to get properly re-directed in-house.
• Many 'bug reports' concerned parts working precisely as intended, but the user wanted a change in how that worked. Again, needing internal re-direction.

Which is why they've gone to having engineers sort them out. They had to before anyway.

Neil

They are more focused on adding features

If so, please tell me the plethora of new features added in the last six months? Let's see. Auto-reframe ... and ... um ... huh.

That really was the big new feature of 14.x/2020. Why only that?

Because they've been working on bugs/stability. In reality. And not new features.

Another thing "we" get at MAX is typically a look forward at possible new ideas/features in the CC suite. Notably lacking in the Premiere information this time at MAX. Why? Because at the moment, as they told us, new features are backburnered. They may have one or two things, but ... nothing major is the expectation we got.

Has the 2020 rollout been a perfect implementation? Of course not. But compared to say, the release of 2015.0, it's been amazingly easy. Holy ... whatever. There were some releases back then that ... woa. Just bad. Compared to those, this is a vast improvement. (Yea, that says more about "back then" being bad than this being Good. But ... it's a better direction.) Part of the 2020 work was rebuilding/replacing a ton of old code. Which clearly ... hasn't been perfectly implemented.

The direction is good ... but needs further fixing of the code. Yep. That's clear.

The day of a new "drop" back a couple years back ... this forum would explode with posts. Threads would have 10 posts or more in an hour, and there were TONS of threads per hour. This time? Not nearly so much. Not in the same ballpark at all.

It's not as bad. And there's still 2019 to work with for those having trouble with 2020.

Let's look at Resolve, for comparison. You can have ONLY one version on a machine, period. So to test a new version, you must replace the older version. No other option. Some shops have a test-machine simply for that purpose. They install a new version, try a number of projects, if they all work ... they start one-by-one upgrading systems checking every time for usability.

And yes, there are shops that still are on 14.x Resolve due to issues with 15.x and waiting to find if 16.1 is stable for them. (I'm still 15.x here ... about ready to jump to 16.x)

With Premiere, you download the new version, try it out. If it works, great. If not, you keep working in your old version. I've had a version or two of Premiere that I couldn't use for say six months after it was released. But I could test the patches, see if they fixed my ills. In a matter of moments.

These are all simply tools made by humans, necessarily imperfect. Fancy hammers. If the hammer works for you, fine, use it. If not, use a different hammer. Accept that all the people working on any of the tools are simply other humans, as imperfect as we are. Be thankful when they get something right, and ... select a different hammer if they can't.

Neil

Quoting:

There are very few response from Adobe Staff on UserVoice that are actually meaningful. They don't bother to respond to well upvoted requests like MKV support, the Legacy Title Maker, and Encore. They don't respond to bugs that have numerous comments: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/39039550-bug-report-speed-i...

UserVoice is a void where Adobe can direct complaints to and ignore them. Ivo's hiring was supposed to shut us up. 

You're most welcome to your opinions. As is anyone and everyone. However, just because any of us sees only one possible way to respond as being "responsive" doesn't make the opinion necessarily accurate. I certainly don't expect that simply because I say anything that anyone else need agree.

When they want more information, the engineering team tends to go directly to the user with that info, but not always via the UserVoice system. Especially not when they're wanting a lot of details, to get samples, project files, that sort of thing. The UserVoice system is used as a "collector", perhaps, to give a term to it. You seem to absolutely insist that if YOU don't see the response or follow-up, there hasn't been one. From my personal experience, your assumption is not correct.

Have you talked with Ivo? I'd suggest doing so. Especially as I do value your abilities and your contributions here. You have a lot of working experience, and the passion about the tools to participate very effectively in these discussions. I would love to have you discuss directly with him your thoughts and ideas.

But as to your three examples ... um ...  I think I could make a better list of especially long-suffering issues ... but then, our workflows are all different aren't they?

MKV ... how many users actually need to work in MKV? I get that it's a favored format for archivists, but I've not seen any real workflow outside that arena that needs it. Our youngest is an upperclassman in college, and being an archivist is probably where he's headed. And I think well suited. I have learned about archivists a bit more than most, though certainly not nearly as much as a long-time working archivist.

And I also understand how within certain fields, certain "tools" are central to the process simply because everybody else does it that way. From looking it up several times, MKV is a very fine format, probably way under-known and under-used compared to many other formats as far as quality/size issues. But not the only format that could accomplish the task needed.

But realistically, relatively few users truly need MKV. And the Premiere team is having major issues with things like P2 as you so rightly pointed out. BMRAW is another major pro format that's workable only with plugins. Some of the issues with Canon C-hundred cams are pitiful. I can't disagree with the development staff on this one. I think concentrating on the more widely spread and/or "pro" formats is wise. Especially ... again ... noting the problems they are having.

Would it be nice to have MKV? Sure. Wouldn't be anywhere on my list of top 100 priorities though ... and most users don't even know what MKV is.

Legacy Title  ... there's been a ton of verbiage by Adobe on blogs and by staffers over the last three years since the old Titler has become the Legacy Titler. Not enough for you, I get that. But jeepers ... they've posted a ton on this.

The base for the whole thing is they were looking at where graphics are going ... and the need to add in all sorts of capbilities to them as such things were coming in to usage. The Titler's code didn't allow for that. They were going to have to completely replace it from ground up anyway.

So they continued to include the Legacy Titler while adding the "EGP" for mogrt work, knowing when it was first added it was both very limited in tool-set and a work-in-progress. Their stated goal was to get it out there and let users push it around, and over time decide where it needed to be developed and changed due to user use and input. Was that a bad decision?

The EGP/mogrt thing was certainly a limited process at first, but now ... the EGP/mogrt area is finally getting a lot more potent. I had a BIG beef with the first iteration of the EGP ... we had a ton of keyboard shortcuts for use in the Titler, all sorts of things. And initially, like ... five ... in the EGP. That was truly pitiful, and painful for those used to high-speed work with key-shorts.

Well now ... nearly every keyboard shortcut that was used in the Titler is fully usable in the EGP. Kerning, leading, everything. FINALLY. That by the way was slipped into 2020 without hardly any notice. So for me, it is a huge production uptake from 2019.

That is one of very many things added to the EGP/mogrts in Premiere over the last three years. There's very, very little left you can do in the Titler that you can't do in mogrts. And you can do so much more with mogrts in so many ways than the Titler could do. Or could ever have done.

Are there more changes needed? Many. All of them way past anything the Titler could ever had done. And of course, I've got my own requests in on that. But they've made massive changes and improvements with the EGP. It's now being used a ton say in network/satellite/OTT "broadcast" work.

A few more changes to the EGP/mogrts process, and there will be very, very little the Titler can do you won't be able to in the EGP. The engineers are looking forward to dropping the ancient code. Because one of the stability/performance issues is just how much ancient code is still in use.

But all this time, you've been able to work with both the Titler and the EGP at your choice. I've not seen a huge problem there. There is a difference in goals for moving the app forward, and that will always happen no matter what part of it you're talking about. But the users have had both tools available. Options. That was a problem somehow?

Encore is for me in some ways your strongest point, but even that has become pretty weak for me. I used to do  DVD's for clients. Now everyone seems to prefer a thumbdrive or online file delivery. I don't recall the last DVD I had to make. Probably sometime in 2017. Even that said, I would prefer the option was still there within the Adobe apps. Personally.

As has also been discussed publicly ad infinitum, the company Adobe licensed their authoring tech from was bought out by a different company ... who immediately wanted to cancel ALL licenses of the DVD authoring program they'd acquired. Adobe got them to allow Adobe to continue to provide Encore as long as it was 1) only part of CS6 and 2) was never updated. If Adobe hadn't agreed with that, Encore would have been dead then.

For Adobe to have replaced Encore would have meant licensing a different authoring process from someone else, rebuilding the code for that license's process, and well ... the whole program. The bean counters didn't think it worth the cash to start from near-scratch to build a new DVD/BluRay application. Remember, these are the Metrics people? They saw the DVD/BluRay delivery process already in steep decline, and decided that the money simply wasn't there. And therefore assumed Encore would limp along probably as long as it was needed. (Being as they didn't see a long-term need.)

I disagreed then, and still do ... sometimes that ain't the only reason to decide something. So yes, I would dearly love an actual usable Encore to be around. I disagreed with the decision to let it ... go.

But ... as a point of checking around currently, many of the options that were so prevalent for making DVDs have gone the way of Encore. Clearly, most companies that were in that section of the business have not found it profitable to continue the product ... or have not even been able to stay in business. And with that, I don't think I've got that strong an argument over the bean counters. Much as it dismays me. Reality is what it is.

Truthfully, if you wanna gripe about Premiere and the lack of response to user requests? Go to open/closed captions. That is a MUCH stronger argument for you there! That's been a mess since I started with CS6. And is STILL a mess.

And for the last thing, saying they want to "shut us up" ... sorry, but that's just ... hmm. And to me makes absolutely no sense whatever in any real-people universe. I don't see that you see any individuals there ... you seem to only see everyone as the same corporate clone or something. Which ... is weird, for my mind.

I've spent enough time at NAB and MAX over the last several years with the engineers and supervisors, who are there and available for anyone to approach. The engineers and supers all do editing and sound and all on their own ... this isn't just a job, but the stuff they love to play with. They want it do perform well.

We WILL have major disagreements over how X feature should work, or whether it's needed. I've been standing at a counter with an engineer and three other users at NAB, and there were radically different views of how something should be approached by everyone in the discussion. Yea, that's people being people. And working with different needs, approaches, media, everything else that affects how we utilize these tools.

A big constraint is always ... budget. I've got several feature requests ... as do so many. A number of bug filings. They have X number of bodies to get stuff done with. Reality being painfully present in all situations. Talking with the engineers at MAX, they really like what Ivo has brought in, completely reorganizing things. They say the process is much faster for moving things through "the pipe" now. They're very pleased. When a tech staff lights up at the mention of someone who just came in and completly "disrupted" their working process, well ... that's interesting.

And ... the guy that reads all those UserVoice reports (one of several people that read the raw reports) wants more ... and far more detailed reports. Why? Two things he said ... 1) it gives the team a better chance to understand the issue and 2) it gives the bean counters more metrics to up the budget.

I don't know about you. I want that budget upped. You may not understand it, you may not like it, but that doesn't matter. The system they have is the one users have to work to get changes. And yes, we users and the engineers all see a ton of changes that need to be made. We will disagree on the particulars until Hades freezes over ... but we all agree more changes are needed, faster.

And within the Adobe-sphere, that tool ... is the UserVoice. The one big thing about Adobe upper management ... is ... Metrics. Are you aware that half the company makes software for other companies to study and utilize user experiences and practices to design their responses to their business environment? Photoshop and Premiere and Illustrator are only part of "Adobe".

To work with them, that's something to understand. They live breathe and probably eat metrics in the upper offices. It's our one way to affect things ... give them metrics!

Neil

I've been around enough arguments about scaling techniques and curves versus keys for artifact generation and everything else in this complex job to understand different individuals can have very different views of the same thing. Some of the LONG discussions say on the LGG forum over whether X does better for this task than Y ... with people having detailed testing they provide .... are similar.

So applying your comments, then obviously all but one person in each of those discussions is not seeing the situation unbiased. So ... who is the only one in each discussion unbiased?

There is something that comes into play here ... each of us has a different understanding of the relative importance (or even relevance) of items affecting anything. I looked at Taran's and Francis' comments, and to me, it looks like you have two different approaches ... Taran wanting a specific added feature for a specific task, Francis noting that the current method is an overall better option for the majority of tasks as "they" see it.

That doesn't say that the current one is best for every possible thing, just ... for the majority of things. In their view, based clearly on the priorities they see. Which naturally would be different than Taran's. I don't see intentional bias or mis-reading. I see different viewpoints and priorities. Taran wants more options, essentially, and Francis says the current single option is the best single-choice option. As they've got a ton of things they are working on currently ... and from what Ivo said, virtually if not all bugs/stability/performance ... adding a new method into the app ain't what they're concentrating on.

Which isn't to say at some point it won't get added. And note, that still lists this as "under review". Which means it's on the list of things being considered.

Me being me, in general I'm with Taran's request ... I always go for having more options to doing something.

You're right about P2 being busted of course, yea ... that's a right mess.

Neil

The Premiere team has their published log of bugs that have been fixed. The one for the fall 2019 release was thankfully rather long. Is it complete? Nope. Ivo made no claim it was. Was very blunt they've a lot of work to do. We'd all like to see a longer list published.

As to the large majority ... first, I had plenty of chance to be around various people, some working regular network shows, some doing long-form, some corporate ... and their comments there were compliant with the comment. Some had some small issues, a few were hammered, and most were working away. I don't know anyone that doesn't have an issue with something in Premiere, but then ... of my acquiantances working Resolve, I don't know any pro colorist that doesn't have some issue there. Or the people working with Mistika ... Baselight ... Avid.

Next, compared to past years, the number of posts and the number of issues here on this forum and on the others I monitor or participate in are fewer. By a significant margin. This even though Premiere is at the largest user-base ever. It has vastly more butts-in-seats than any other pro-claimant NLE.

So ... I'll give the team kudo's for getting a lot of stuff nailed that the previous adminstration (prior to current program manager) basically didn't find important enough to attack. And a lot of stuff the changes of recent years have brought in that had their own troubles. Cool. Whatever.

But ... as anyone here knows, there's more they need to do. I personally think they should significantly enlarge the engineer team to actually get all the bugs and the odd behaviors (that don't qualify as bugs) gone.

I've got a fair number of things ... from the problems with control panels and multiple instances of Lumetri, some things with the EGP/mogrts, closed/open captioning good gravy that's a mess ... um ... yea, there's quite a list.

Suggesting because one has had some issues that ALL folks should not even try the app though is understandable but rather ... weak. Two things. First, as part of this CC thing, anyone can download/install to test without affecting current work. So why shouldn't they test it? There's no harm to doing so whatever.

Second ... most of us can work well in 2020. While others certainly can't. No question. But each person can find for themselves if it works in their shop on their gear with their media and effects load. If it works, great ... if it doesn't, great. Either way you keep working. (And I know Resolve shops still on a 14.X build, while Resolve is up to 16.1)

And if it doesn't work, PLEASE file the UserVoice reports!

Those are all read ... yea, I talked with an engineer who does that. And he wants more reports and more detail in them. They have a few hundred in-house machines, I don't know how many beta testing. But the permutations for machines out in the wild are endless, and they can't even come close to replicating all possible hardware/software/media/effects combinations. Those UserVoice reports are often key to getting the data to figure out what the hay is happening. If they need, they contact back for things like project files, media samples, other apps on the machine, all that sort of thing.

And ... ALL UserVoice filings are collated and passed up to the upper managers who decide budgets. Those folks live on "metrics". UserVoice filings are "metrics".

Lets' bury them in "Metrics".

Neil

Paule,

Hey, understand the frustrations. For some users, this ain't working. And JP's got a good list of issues that need sorting. I could of course add a few, as my workflow/media/hardware are different.

That said, if you noted ... the last update added only one feature ... auto-framing outputs for various "social" media formats. That's all.

Everything else done was a bug, stability, or performance effort. (Which doth interfere with your claim that they make updates only to add features to justify subscription model.) The vast majority of effort over the last developments cycle was to get at the long list of bugs, stability, media, and performance issues.

For the large majority of users, this has been improved, for some dramatically. For some of us users ... it's worse. Down at Adobe MAX last month in LA, the manager for bug/stability re-designing of the entire development team (hired around 6 months back) was there along with some engineers. And available to talk with users.

Both Ivo Manolov (the stability guy) and the engineer (who reads nearly every UserVoice post filed personally) were very blunt that they know there's some horrid issues. Some things they can replicate in-house over a few hundred machines both Mac/PC. And quite a number of things they can't on any machine they have.

So they want as many detailed filings of problems on the UserVoice system as possible. Listing the problem, when it happened. The hardware/media/effects involved. Enough so that they can actually hunt down some of these things which are a complete mangler if you have them, but often only affect a relatively small group of users with specific hardware, media, software, and other combinations that somehow trigger stupid program behavior.

Another thing UserVoice filings do ... they get collated and sent to the upper managers who decide budgets. Those people live by metrics ... give them some.

Anyone with bugs/stability/performance issues should go file things ... and vote on others ... to pump as much metrics in as possible.

Neil

Here is my list of known issues with version 14.0, including your issue with GH5 footage which also effects certain Canon DSLRs, JVC cameras, and Panasonic P2 media. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/premiere/comments/duvlit/premiere_pro_2020_known_issues/

Here are some words of wisdom from someone who has been working with editing software for more than 20 years

Never update in the middle of a project (unless absolutely necessary).

Monitor the software companies support boards for reports of problems before updating.

If possible, make sure to keep earlier versions are available to edit with.

If possible, when updating, do a clean install of the operating system and then just install the apps and test functionality before reinstalling other apps.   You might also disconnect any non-crucial peripherals when testing the update.

I know this workflow is a pain, but if you depend on your system to make a living, it's really the only way to go.  There is no way that software developers can anticipate all the possible combinations of hardware, Operating Systems and other apps installed before releasing software.   Even back in the day when Avid just sold turnkey systems controlling all these elements, updates could sometimes wreak havoc.  Sometimes these problems were caused by a different manufacturing run on a circuit board.   

Believe me, I understand your frustration, but people also are constantly looking for advanced features which aren't gonna happen in a timely fashion without some pain.  

Do not update until you review the responses on this User Forum.  For some users updates cause problems, for others no problems.