Problems with Morph Dissolves

Report · Sep 12, 2017

Listing here a compendium of questions/issues we've been wrestling with.

They don't always work: Often they do. But for instance, an ECU of a face cutting to the same face, same expression, shifted slightly to the right. After a minute or more of "Analyzing in Background" plus a final render the result is no better -- no different than -- a cut.
The "Analyzing in Background" workflow: if you render before analyzing is complete, the "Analyzing" banner gets rendered into the cut.
Causes frequent crashes. Ripple-trimming a sequence that has Morph Dissolves later on down the timeline.
The more Morphs you put, the more at-risk for crashing your sequence becomes, though even one of those nefarious nudniks is enough to burden the edit.
Crashing tends to lose previously analyzed morphs along with their renders, even if a project has been dutifully analyzed, rendered and saved several times before the crash. (To some extent this points to PPro's tenuous relationship with render media in general: app crashes lose render media. Heck, save, quit and re-launch tends to result in lost render media, but PPro render media management woes are grist for another post)
The crashing for us isn't a minor nuisance. Once the Morph Dissolve genie gets out of the bottle and onto the timeline, the risk of any ripple trim, insert or cut is greater than 50% per edit-decision, meaning we adopted a workflow to save after every move. Which leads to this little jig...
We've taken to dropping markers on all our Morphs. In this way the Markers panel, which shows live thumbnails per Marker (awesome for this purpose -- thanks Adobe), and gives you the ability to see which Morphs are analyzing (or re-analyzing after the last crash, or re-re-analyzing, or re-re-re-re). So thumbs up for Adobe's Markers Panel, but a duck kazoo for the Morphs.
Overall the question is: are we looking at a not-ready-for-primetime feature or are there workflows/solutions we're unaware of that might allow us to continue using Morph Dissolves going forward? Right now I'm recommending we avoid this feature entirely until it's practical to use.

For reference

Avid's equivalent Fluid Morph is much more robust, taking a second or two to render and achieving much better quality results, never bogs down the timeline, making it a feature you can use on a regular basis. So it can be made to work, albeit on a different platform

Adobe Community

Problems with Morph Dissolves