Premiere not suitable for professional long form work

[timv66216455]

I'm posting here as a warning against anyone starting a long form project on premiere.

Premiere is not reliable enough for professional work.

I have used Premiere on two features because of its After Effects integration.

I used it on a feature in 2013 and ended up having to change over to Avid.

I have used it this year on another feature because I was under the impression that it had improved.

Premiere cannot deal with long projects with a large number of clips. It constantly slows down to a halt.

Saves take about 10 mins per save and afterwards sometimes the mouse cursor disappears requiring a program restart - which again takes about 5-10 mins.

The interface is jerky and not smooth, file access is slow and unreliable.

There are also random crashes.

Adobe should not be advertising this as a professional product and charging a monthly fee for something so buggy, its like we're demoing their beta software.

People pay me to edit - not to wait around for Premiere to snag and hitch and crash.

Premiere needs a ground up rebuild. I'm moving back to Avid.

This is not a system issue as all other editing / colour / compositing platforms including AE fly on this machine.

[excited_Genie16B8]

"Gone Girl is the first Hollywood feature-length film cut entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro CC."

“Gone Girl” marks yet another milestone for Adobe Premiere Pro CC | Creative Cloud blog by Adobe

"Perhaps one of the biggest films to come out of Hollywood in the past few years was the smash hit superhero film Deadpool.  For the edit, the entire team made the switch from Avid Media Composer to Adobe Premiere Pro."

How Hollywood Is Turning To Premiere Pro | Motion Array

"Act of Valor, which was online edited, conformed, and finished with Adobe Premiere Pro software..."

Why Switch to Adobe Premiere Pro? Ask the Oscar Winners. - Studio Daily

[timv66216455]

While I appreciate the marketing material links, they do not change the reality of Premiere. Other NLEs offer more consistent and superior experiences. This post is only to warn people setting out on large projects. I'm sure in time this post will be appreciated.

[excited_Genie16B8]

Other NLEs offer more consistent and superior experiences.

That may be your experience.  It won't necessarily be everyone's.  Which was the point of my links above.

[djrumbu]

i wouldn't belive hype not 100%, and your "argument" means absolutely nothing when there are thousands of movies made all the time. 2 movies with premiere actually is a bad point , but hey, there is not bad publicity is it?:))

[djrumbu]

totally true, it can barely handle my weddings, but i guess it's cheaper than avid, and also has more features and more flexibility. BUT that being said, so much freedom makes it "fragile" and for some people actually to many features can interfere with the "creative process".  Still a very good program, it also depends a lot on how you work on big projects, the whole workflow needs to be changed when switching. Not everyone can or have time to do that, or even have a use for the whole switching thing.

[wcn_dave]

Not sure what you mean by long form then, as I have a 2.5hr video with over 200 clips, 600 cuts, and about 30 tracks, and it flies on a decent (£1.2k) desktop.

[exile1972]

This is a completely misleading post in that the problems you're encountering with Premiere are a localized issue that are most likely a result of your computer setup and not the Premiere program itself. I've been working on a television show project in which there's 5 terabytes of media and Premiere works without issue and without any crashes.

[djrumbu]

not really misleading, and kinda true, knowing that most professionals are using other software. It's definitely not as stable as others, and just because you are lucky doesn't mean that the software is good That's the point of good software, it works anywhere anytime which in this case is very hard to do. But yeah i can work, if you are lucky.

[excited_Genie16B8]

That's the point of good software, it works anywhere anytime

No such thing at this level.  They all have their issues.

[djrumbu]

Well obviously, but some more than others that being said,premiere will get there, it's definitely going the right direction for sure.

[Kona_Bob]

I routinely do 1 hour HD projects with as many as 600 clips, effects, adjustment layers, motion graphics, etc. and never experience the kind of slowdowns that I used to see back in the 32 bit, 4 GB RAM era.

Once Adobe and Windows both moved to 64 bit and I increased my RAM to 32 GB, it has been smooth sailing for me.

[djrumbu]

For me it crashed at least 10 times a day, but i'm working a lot with multicam and lumetri. Correcting shots while recording multicam stuff. It cannot handle my workflow, but it's fine, i have my tricks to get around some of the issues.

To be honest never had any problems with 1 camera stuff editing.

But imagine 4 hours editing with multicam recording, that's like 80-150 cuts per 4 minute footage for me. Now that i think about it, it's admirable how it handles what i do hahah.

[exile1972]

djrumbu  wrote

It cannot handle my workflow

I think you're continuing to mistake your own computer limitations with the program. I work with a ton of multicam, Lumetri applied 4k media and Premiere has absolutely no problem with any of it.

[djrumbu]

You are just lucky, computer makes no difference here, the type or crashes i have, have nothing to do with the pc. Premiere is just not ready for big stuff.

Just because a few people have no problems means absolutely nothing. Its the not working situations that matter and that make programs better.

It's a lot more complicated than just that it works for a bunch of people. But then again, like i said, premiere is getting there fast, it's cheap and a lot more features than other software.

Numbers don't lie really, so there's that. I worked with avid also a bit, its lot more faster and stable, but way more constricting and "one sided" so pp it'll have to be

[exile1972]

just out of curiosity, what types of media are you having issues with? I work primarily with Sony FS7 mxf files and Premiere has no issues but perhaps you're working with a codec that Premiere has problems with.

[Devyn Brugge]

I think Premiere has a lot of problems with .MP4s and apparently .MOVs (Quicktime) files, is dropping the support for ProRes 32 bit in a future release.

All of those interviews I've seen with Walter Murch, Deadpool crew, Fincher's crew etc. — they talk about how they have special acess to the Adobe Premiere team to troubleshoot software and even write them new code that allows them to get their jobs done with Premiere. The rest of us just don't have that kind of assistance when things go wrong.

It's unfortunate that Premiere has sooo many bugs that are a daily occurrence. Everyone knows this very well. (Yes — I use multiple workstations and see the same things again and again).

[R Neil Haugen]

My understanding is that QuickTime player on Windows having been destroyed by Apple, and using "Quicktime" formats such as mov and ProRes, are two very different things.

Due to Apple being the jealous kindergartners they are, we PC folk have never been able to encode in ProRes anyway. DNxHD/R and Cineform are as good or better formats anyway.

Neil

[Devyn Brugge]

I certainly take it as a rule of thumb, the longer the project, the bigger the headache with crashes, long project saves and opens.

[djrumbu]

Even the guys who edited deadpool had that problem a lot, they were talking about that in some interviews haha, and kinda made fun of the situation haha. Funny guys... Well funny movie.

[TaranVH]

I have to agree with Timv.

I've found that the larger the project, and the longer I work on it, the less stable Premiere becomes. Even just having Premiere in a buggy state, and then saving ANY project, will save bugs into the project, causing more frequent crashes, and more frequent encounters with the dreaded error -1609629695.

On a recent 4 hour long video of mine, I had to deal with these extremely weird... what I call "parasite transitions" which kept appearing out of nowhere. Quick PR BUG REPORT - Extremely weird, blank transitions that make clips invisible - YouTube

I was only able to (mostly) fix this by copy/pasting everything into a completely fresh sequence... a great trick that has saved me many times.

That's in addition to the fact that ALL the video somehow became unlinked from its audio... an infuriating error that fortunately didn't occur until I was 90% finished with the project.

And I have top-of-the-line hardware:

Windows 10

Intel Core i7-6950X CPU @ 3.00GHz (Water cooled)

64.0 GB RAM

Titan X (Water cooled)

Yeah, Gone Girl was cut with Premiere, but they had a ton of help and support from Adobe. IIRC, Adobe added over a hundred features just for them. (Maybe it was Deadpool.)

Sure, Premiere will work find on some systems, but it feels like a lottery. One that I've lost many, many times.

[excited_Genie16B8]

Premiere will work find on some systems, but it feels like a lottery.

Step 4 will increase you chance of winning dramatically.

Unofficial Premiere Pro Troubleshooting Guide

[TaranVH]

Jim, my system already is a custom-built, Intel/Nvidia, Windows 10, dedicated editing machine.

But yeah, it has Word installed. If that's causing issues, I might as well uninstall everything other than Premiere, and edit in a perfectly sterile room while I'm at it, for fear of otherwise angering the fickle Adobe gods.

I feel bad for the guys who can't afford the insane hardware that we have... and we still have issues.

[R Neil Haugen]

Interesting that Word was mentioned ... there was a crazy issue the last build series that bothered a fair number of users but not everyone nearly ... and one guy got so ticked with it that he figured it MUST be an interaction with some stupid other file or dll on his machine.

Spent HOURS going through his drivers/dll listing of files, deleting on, testing PrPRo ... deleting another.

Found it ... an MS file for their "onedrive" stuff, onedrive.dll. With that installed, he had the problem. That removed, all was fine.

Others jumped at it, and that was the fix ... that stupid .dll file for onedrive.

Yea, this stuff is great when it works and sucks when something breaks.

Neil