Inspiring

Question

Is Sony A7 footage just known to be sluggish in Premeire?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
November 5, 2021
2 replies
1579 views

My machine can play anything buttery smooth from BRAW to AVI to ProRes to R3D but these relatively rinky dink video files off the A7iii play like I feel after losing the chili eating contest.

Is this a known thing? If so, is there any way to improve it?

Performance

This topic has been closed for replies.

Kevin J. Monahan Jr.

Community Manager

Hi Brady,

Sorry this issue has you frustrated. This sounds like one of our Known Issues. See here. The workaround is to try Full Res rather than half or set the Program Monitor to High Quality. Bug fix is coming soon. Can you verify if this works?

I hope that the next update will finally get you to the promised land, I just have to ask for a little more patience as we fix this bug. Sorry about the frustration.

Cheers,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

A

ah.photo

Inspiring

@DestinyPatterson On the contrary, the footage the a7 III creates (H.264) is not rinky dink. H.264 is a very difficult edit to work with due to the more demanding decoding required. This is why these files are so space efficient. Lots of work to both encode and decode these compressed files.

ProRes files may be massive, but they are significantly easier to work with. It's a codec built for editing, with less demanding resource drain on your machine.

I can't speak to every raw format out there, but some raw codecs might even be optimized for editing as well, at least compared relative to H.264.

My suggestion is to create proxies for your H.264 footage. One of the editing-centric intermediary codecs like ProRes, DNx, or Cineform. Once you have some proxies in place: it's smooth sailing!

D

DestinyPattersonAuthor

Inspiring

Yeah, transcoding is always an option, but the entire reason to use Premiere is to never have to transcode becuase it (normally) takes anyting you throw at it and plays natively. That said, H.264 from any other source playes like butter in PP so something Sony is doing is making those files clunkier to edit with. It still feels a bit ridiculous that my m machine can play R3D 8k files or Blackmagic Q0 BRAW or Blackmagic ProRes 444 with zero stutter and a compressed H.264 from an A7iii plays like slop. That it's a decoding issue means nothing to me.

I guess I'll just tussle with this Sony crap until either Sony or Adobe makes the files play smoother, but knowing how Adobe screws everything up 5 times before releasing a version that actually works I'm not holding my breath.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Sounds like you just are OK settling for what mega-huge software companies give us, which often is sloppy, broken, bloated products. Adobe (and Avid) are huge, industry-standard companies that know they have a built-in revenue stream from sectors that have to run their products in order to fucntion. That does not spur greatness or innovation. Just look at how Pro Tools remains the clunkiest, crappiest, most user-unfriendly industry standard platform in existence. The interface still works like it did in 1998 and they have no motivaiton to put time and money into revamping it to be more fucntional because "why would we?"

Adobe isn't much different. I have a cellular fear of updating any Adobe product because half the time it completely breaks something or removes functionality I use daily. My body is still quivering from that stupid Dolby audio rug-pull a few years ago. And remember how they only took 10 years to get ProRes to play natively? Yes that was partly on Apple, which is another apathetic company.

Either way, looking down your nose at people with legitimate gripes about a behemoth, glacial company that has no interest in making their products as good as they could be isn't terribly welcome. "That's just how it is" is never the opening line from a story of great innovation.

Oh and just FYI, I just tried playing one of the A7iii clips in Resolve: smooth as a greased kitten. So yeah, this is an Adobe thing not a "my machine" thing. I look forward to the day when Resolve and all the effects capabilities are fully realized. I'll fully jump ship in a heartbeat because Blackmagic actually cares.

Such an interesting take. And apportioning attitudes to others you've never met ... ah well, common enough these days. Normally wrong, of course ... but still common.

I'm not at all looking down on others who have problems with any of these apps. First, I'm the one who routinely posts here that these are all nothing more than tools. Fancy hammers. Use whichever tool works best for you. And move on with Life. Getting emotionally involved with an app ... I just don't get.

As I have often noted here, at times I've been on the short end of an update, meaning I needed to stay in a previous version for months. Yea, been there, done that, kept working in the old one while testing different updates to the new one until it finally worked on my machine. And yea, most users were getting along fine in that version of PrPro even though I wasn't.

I didn't conflate that I and some subset of users were hammered, to Adobe being sickos, or putting out crud. Just that a build had some issues with certain kit and media/workflows, which unfortunately happened to include me.

I've posted a few epic rants here about decisions by Adobe management I disagreed with. Such as killing SpeedGrade. Adobe is just another bunch of humans, for all that's good and stupid about humans ... that's all. Another bunch of humans. Some stuff will be good, some ... will not. That's Life.

As a user of Resolve, and someone that teaches Resolve users how to color in PrPro when they have to, I've got a ton of experience in and hear about Resolve daily. BM just released 17.4, a major update, enough so as to be a new version. And yea, I participate in the BM forums also.

Let's see ... 17.4 works for the majority of Resolve users, but for a significant group, it totally broke their workflows. And in between of course, are some users that can work but are irritated about a number of things. BM rushed out a patch, which one top-end colorist noted on the BM forum was actually worse on his gear than the 17.4 "original" drop.

There are things all over the app broken for some users. But again, most are doing ok.

Which is totally like ... PrPro major updates. Most do ok, some of us are irritated but working, and some are hammered. Yea, Life.

But I do appreciate a couple things about the Adobe side of the aisle.

First, I can keep multiple major versions of Adobe apps installed. So I can keep working in a current usable version and test working in the new version without interrupting my workload at all. On my main desktop.

You can't do that with Resolve, of course. So you need to do like most of my colorist acquaintances do: load Resolve updates on a secondary machine, and test until proven stable for your media/workflow. Or ... like I'm doing at the moment, waiting to update until the colorists I'm working with say the water is safe now.

Second ... Adobe allows the user to make your own workspaces, and vendors to hop in and add functionality in ways that are totally locked out in Resolve. I prefer my workspaces, which I can't create in Resolve at all. No user customization allowed over there.

And that includes gear. Such as my Tangent Elements panel, which in Adobe apps is mappable by me to about anything I can think of. I've got that running not only color but track mixing audio functions such as pans and volumes. I'm using it in graphics ... mogrts ... to size/rotate and place things. All sorts of other things that I can set and map to the panel.

In Resolve, that panel is half-blank at any one time as BM locks it down and does not allow either Tangent or a user any control of a panel in their app, as of course ... the BM model is to give cheap software to get you to buy their hardware. Different business model, equally as valid as Adobe's subscription model.

Hey, I love my BMPCC4K camera. But I'm not interested in spending a thou or more on a panel I can ONLY use in Resolve. Ain't happening.

Different strokes for different folks, of course. A good friend loves to edit in Resolve. The UI there drives me nuts. It's all good, he edits in Resolve, I work in Premiere except for when I need to be in Resolve.

Again, these things are simply tools. Fancy hammers. That's all.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded