On the Adobe side: Reset the preferences for AE: Reset After Effects Preferences If that doesn't resolve the issue, reinstall AE (you should find an alias for the  Uninstall Adobe After Effects application in the After Effects folder). On the Mac side: Launch Disk Utility and run First Aid on the disk and the volume.  If you're using a version of Disk Utility that allows you to Repair Disk Permissions, do that as well. ... View more

Hi Vivaphil: Subclips = Clipcopies.  Good to know! I can think of two alternatives: Add an edit instead of marking an In and an Out in the Timeline.  That is, just use the Razor Tool or press command K (Mac) while the the clip or clips are selected (if nothing's selected, the keyboard shortcut will add an edit on clips that are in Tracks with the Target enabled).  Mark and Extract any segments that you don't want to keep.  Select all of what's left in the Timeline and drag it back to a Bin in the Project tab.  You won't get Subclips, but you should see that the respective In and Out is maintained when you skim over a clip while in Icon View.  Of course, you could still Subclip, but you'll have to do it one segment at at time. Or... Have you tried using Prelude to create Subclips?  You wouldn't be able to do it from the Timeline, but on a clip by clip basis, Subclipping is entirely keyboard shortcut driven (1, Return, I, then O).  You can filter the Prelude Project tab to show you only Subclass, select them, and then use Send to Premiere Pro (File > Send to Premiere Pro...). -Warren ... View more

Hi Vivaphil: It sounds like you want Subclips.  So, after marking your In and Out, you can make a Subclip. While you have to do them one at a time, you can do this while using Icon View in the Project tab, using the Source window or from the Timeline. To make a Subclip while using Icon View: Set the Project tab view to Icon View. Skim to where you want your In mark then press I to set the In point. Skim to where you want your Out mark, then press O to set the Out point. Choose Clip > Make Subclip or press command U, Mac or control U, Windows. To make a Subclip using the Source window: Open the clip in the Source Window. Set your In mark. Set your Out Mark. Choose Clip > Make Subclip or press command U, Mac or control U, Windows. To make a Sublcip from the Timeline: In the Timeline tab, set your In mark and your Out mark. Press command U, Mac or control U, Windows. Give this a try and report back. -Warren ... View more

Mark: I'm curious. Are you just looking for a way to review all of your footage in one Timeline or are you assembling a cut that will play back for 24 hours at a time? -Warren ... View more

Trevor, have you used Adobe Audition? You might find "Speech Volume Leveler" helpful.  I've only used it for sweetening voice over recordings where one subject is speaking, but I would imagine it could be helpful with multiple speakers (I'd probably subclip based on each speaker and then send those from the PR Timeline, but you could try the full source audio clip). If sending dialog tracks from PR, Premiere will make a copy for you, adding "Audio Extracted" to the end of the filename.  If opening audio files directly in AU, I usually make a duplicate in the operating system first to avoid accidentally saving changes over the original audio.  I usually add "_MOD" to the end of the filename to differentiate between the original and the edited versions. You'll find Speech Volume Leveler under Effects > Amplitude and Compression > Speech Volume Leveler.... -Warren ... View more

Hi Uri: As far as the forums go, this question should probably go in the Creative Cloud forums (Adobe Creative Cloud ). Although, I'd go ahead and start a chat.  To do this, follow this link Creative Cloud pricing and membership plans | Adobe Creative Cloud  and then click "Let's chat." toward the bottom of the page. When it comes to paying the bill, I'm familiar with the Individual Plans.  I'm pretty sure it's always an annual plan that's billed monthly; however, you should be able to pay for a full year in advance.  I've seen the Academic plans available at an annual price through authorized vendors, but not the standard plan. -Warren ... View more

Are you using the "1280x720 Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy)" Ingest Settings? What are your Sequence settings set to?  While you should be able to get full frame, full motion playback from Apple ProRes 422 Proxy at 1280x720 from a USB3 drive or better, it's being scaled to your 4K Sequence settings which are actively affecting what your Zoom Level and Playback Resolution should be set to for smooth playback. Toggle Proxies is set to show proxies, correct? Is the Zoom Level set to "Fit"?  You could try "25%" to see if you get smooth playback while Playback Resolution is set to Full.  It's probably worth mentioning that if your Zoom Level is at 25%, then "1/4" is a good setting for Playback Resolution. Speaking for drives, what are you currently using?  If it's a standard hard drive (which, or course, would be external with your hardware setup), what is the current capacity?  Most standard drives have a reduced sustained data transfer rate some point after reaching 80% to 85% capacity. ... View more

Side note: Your screen shot includes your system serial number.  I'd hide that.  You can remove the SN in Photoshop or hide it with the Markup Tools in Apple Preview (just draw a selection around it and press Delete).  I've inserted an edited version of your screen shot to this post so that you can remove it from yours and still have the helpful information visible. ... View more

I almost forgot!  You can create your own keyboard shortcut for “Add or Remove Audio Keyframe”, making the proces completely shortcut driven. So, you can use your custom keyboard shortcut to add keyframes and then use [, ], Shift ] and Shift [ to increase/decrease the volume between the keyframes. Reminder: The keyboard shortcuts for Increase/Decrease Clip Volume and Add or Remove Audio Keyframe only work if Track Targeting is enabled (for audio, the targets appear as “A1”, “A2”, A3” to the left of each Audio Track and shows as blue if enabled (yellow in older versions of PR. ... View more

Hi Andrew: Could you be confusing Fixed Effects with Standard Effects?  Fixed Effects appear if you're looking at an instance of a clip from a Sequence. An MXF file, for example, will have no pre-applied effects (that is "Fixed Effects") and as such would show nothing if looking at the Effects Controls tab for the master instance of that file; however, if you add the MXF file to a Timeline and then view the instance of the file from there you'll see Motion, Opacity, and Time Remapping for picture and Volume for sound. -Warren Terminology side note:  A MXF file isn't a "RAW file".  An accurate way to refer to it would be "Camera Original". ... View more

What export preset are you using? ... View more

Good news! -Warren ... View more

If I were in this situation, I'd start a support chat with AppleCare.  Go to MacBook Pro - Official Apple Support https://support.apple.com/mac/macbook-prothen scroll down to "Help me with my MacBook Pro" and follow the links.  Or, just call AppleCare at (800) 275-2273. I'd also start a support chat with Adobe support.  Start here: Contact Customer Care -Warren ... View more

Hi mcuthrie: I'm envious and not envious at the very same time. Have you tried any troubleshooting that weeds out it being the the source footage or it being Premiere Pro? For example, how does your new system behave if you're using QuickTime Player or GoPro Studio? And, have you tried PR CC 2017 yet?  (You may already know this, but you can install 2017 without removing 2015.3.) -Warren ... View more

Will your system support a 3rd display so that you can dedicate the 2nd to Mercury Playback for full screen preview and the 3rd to Bins? I know it's not ideal, but if it worked you could keep that sweet laptop configuration. Or perhaps consider adding a Blackmagic Intensityy USB3 breakout box for driving the full frame previews. There are rumors of more powerful MacBook Pros coming next year, but I think it's gonna be a really long wait. -Warren ... View more

Faster hard drives increase your read/write time.  So, you're helping AE to load your footage more quickly and write rendered frames to your output format more quickly. You should also see some better performance if your set the Media & Disk Cache preference to an SSD drive. The tricky thing with external drives and a laptop is always having the external drive connected. This is the system that you already have, right? I'd add more RAM first and consider swapping the internal hard drive for an SSD drive at some point (putting the current 1TB drive into an external enclosure). Even if you left your system as is, it should do well enough for awhile. ... View more

Add a Rotation keyframe with a value of 0x0.0º at 0:00:00:00 and another Rotation keyframe with a value of 0x90.0º at 0:00:04:00.  The default keyframe interpolation methods should be fine. Based on your screen shot, you're probably going to want to use the Pan Behind Tool to center your Anchor Point to your Shape Path.  As pictured, you're going to get an orbit style rotation. Since you're using a Shape Layer, you have two Anchor Points (the Transform Anchor Point and the Contents > Shape > Transform: Shape Anchor Point).  To that end, you also have two Rotation options (The Transform Rotation and the Contents > Shape > Transform: Shape Rotation). If you'd like a perfectly centered Anchor Point, start with Layer > New > Shape Layer rather than using the drawing tools.  Add a Polystar and change the Points value from 5.0 to 3.0.  Adjust the Inner Radius and Outer Radius to increae or decrease the size (to maintain the triangle shape with a Polystar, the Inner Radius must always be half the value of the Outer Radius).  Add a Fill to the Polystar with the desired color and then use either the Polystar Path Rotation or the Layer Transform Rotation. But also, do the beginner tutorials. ... View more

Assuming that you have enough RAM to render the frames in the first place, processor speed is going to have the large impact on your render times.   If it fits your budget: i7 processor over i5 processor 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB (32GB if your laptop choice supports that) SSD hard drive 4GB GPU is a strong choice Of course, I think you've just spent $2,500 to $3,000. If you change nothing else in your list, go with 16GB of RAM. -Warren ... View more

Yeah, now that you mention it, Premiere was probably hanging because the display card that it thought was being used had been swapped out.  Resetting the preferences might have helped in the same way a clean install did: FAQ: How to reset preferences in Premiere Pro -Warren ... View more

I was a little sad to lose native export to Animated GIF in AE on the Mac side. If Animate CC isn't doing it either, then you'll have to export to a video format first via AME (H264 Match Source High Bit Rate or QuickTime Apple ProRes 422) and then convert the resulting MP4 or MOV to animated GIF in an application that converts video to GIF (GIF Brewery 3 or Gifrocket - Create Gif from video, for Mac OS X could be good options, but I haven't tried them).  GIFBuilder used to be the go to choice, but I think it was last published in 2001 (in other words, it won't run in any recent versions of OS X). As for AE on the Mac side, I've had very good results with GifGun by Extrabite​.  It adds A "Make GIif" button to AE user interface. There's a trial/free version with a resolution limit and then the full version for $30. Something that seems to be lost to the history of computer graphics is creating a Super Palette in Debabliizer for GIFs generated from video.  Debablizer would scan each frame of video for the most common 256 colors, creating a custom 8-bit or less color table that could be extracted in PS and loaded in AE or in GifBuilder. ... View more

Every so often there's a video file format that Premiere Pro doesn't support (it's rare, but does happen). Your camcorder may have come with a conversion utility.  If not, there's probably an application that will do the conversion for you. But, like John and Jim have said, more information is needed. ... View more

I'm not seeing the Geforce GT 710 on the recommended list for Premiere Pro (Premiere Pro System Requirements for Mac OS and Windows ), but I could be missing it. Have you had a chance to start a support chat?  (Contact Customer Care) For what it's worth, if you're running Creative Cloud for individuals, you can run it on two machines.  So, if you happen to have a second system, maybe you can get your current project done on that machine while troubleshooting the Geforce GT 710 display card issues.  (I know, that tip is only helpful if you happen to have two workstations.) Of course, the Premiere Pro Hardware Forum may offer some helpful tips: https://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/hardware_forum -Warren ... View more

Report back on what you purchase! ... View more

A clean install is almost always worth a try. It doesn't have to be over your current boot drive.  You can install OS X and Creative Cloud on an external drive and test it before committing to overwriting your current boot drive.  External Thunderbolt SSDs are ideal for this, but a USB3 thumb drive will also work. -Warren ... View more

Rowan: Do you have a bootable backup of your boot drive?  If so, you can preserve where you are now when you roll back the OS.  Also, with a bootable backup, you can back out of updates to the OS that don't go as expected as easily as restarting your computer and holding down the Option key to pick your Startup Volume. A re-install of OS X should preserve your User folder (even if it's an older OS version), but you'd want to have a backup regardless.  If you're Mac isn't too old, you can do an Internet Recovery to install the OS that came with the computer (hold down Command+Option+R). Of course, depending on how severe your issues are, you may want to go with a clean install.  If you do that, you can use Migration Assistant to restore your User folder(s); however, sometimes it's better to go with both a clean OS and clean user accounts. -Warren ... View more

While there's room for improvement, Illustrator's still the vector illustration application to beat for numerous reasons. For one, you can do math in the text fields and mix units of measurement. ... View more

Hi Matty: I just caught your thoughts about Avid Media Composer.  You know, about five years ago, I used to think it was really, really odd that the user interface of Media Composer hasn't really changed since 1995.  After what happened with Final Cut Pro, I was sharply reminded that if you make your living with a software application that the last thing that you want are extreme changes to the expected appearance and functionality.  It's not uncommon to find Avid based facilities that have not updated hardware and/or software unless absolutely necessary.  Further to that end, Avid support recommends running a configuration that matches what their support department uses (Media Composer System Requirements​) "for an optimal experience with Media Composer." -Warren ... View more

Hi Mark: Well, hopefully no one's computer runs perfectly.  I mean, I'd be out of the very specialized freelance support that I do for configuring and maintaining video editing workstations (which is a very nice supplement to my freelance graphic design, video editing and motion graphics). I totally get that you want a stable workstation.  It's just not nearly as simple as getting Adobe to talk to Apple or Apple to talk to Adobe.  What I hear you saying is that if Adobe offered a more complete solution for as part of the Creative Cloud, so for maybe $129/month you received both software and hardware and personalized technical support, that you'd be up for it.  (Of course, I would imagine that the pricing would be higher than that.) That could be a good feature request.  Or maybe a strong idea for someone to jump on, calling it "Creative Cloud Plus" or something.  Hmm.... Then again, it does exist through Value Added Resellers - just at a fairly high price point. Is there a video post production facility that doesn't have dedicated IT staff to keep the workstations up and running so that the editors can focus on the craft of editing?  I'm not sure that there is. In the meantime, I highly recommend the following two blogs by Kevin Monahan: How to file a feature request for Premiere Pro Updating and backing up project files: best practices  -Warren ... View more