Ho avuto modo di testare Premiere su progetti molto differenti tra loro: spot, fiction, corporate e devo dire che, fin qui, il bilancio è positivo. Certo, non faccio le capriole di gioia: l’interfaccia di FCP era e rimane imbattibile, ma purtroppo le necessità di gestire formati sempre più complessi mi hanno fatto propendere per un software che, tecnologicamente, è molto più avanzato.

Lavorare con materiale H.264 o Red 4K in tempo reale è un bel passo avanti rispetto alle ore di encoding e ai Gigabytes persi per convertire tutto in Prores di Final Cut. Il supporto dei driver CUDA è un’autentica rivoluzione. L’integrazione con After Effects è interessante, puoi aprire dei progetti di AE direttamente sulla sequence di Premiere e la possibilità di usare la permanent cache di AE ti permette di evitare l’export. Certo, in caso di lavoro di equipe, le cose non sono così semplici, ma i vari one man band che ci sono in giro ne trarranno giovamento. Adobe Media Encoder è integrato e ti permette di lavorare con agilità sul versioning (anche qui accelerati da CUDA, ovviamente se si ha una scheda nVidia sotto le chiappe).

Premiere è sempre stato un giocattolo al cospetto di FCP e Media Composer. E in un certo senso ancora lo è.

A chi interessa Premiere? Per chi ha sempre usato Media Composer non ha alcun fascino, del resto MC6 è altrettanto tecnologicamente avanzato. Un montatore Avid, che già rifiutava il metodo di lavoro di FCP, non ha motivo per muoversi verso Adobe. Premiere può interessare invece proprio chi è stato abbandonato da Apple. Perchè Premiere, voglia o no, è il software che gli si avvicina di più. Però, per diventare veramente ‘market killer’, deve assolutamente essere sviluppato da montatori (Final Cut) professionisti. La cosa più sbagliata che possa fare Adobe in questo momento sarebbe quella di voler competere con Avid sullo stesso campo. Non avrebbe senso: la natura delle due piattaforme nasce da presupposti diametralmente opposti. Deve, invece e per forza, ‘copiare’ Final Cut e allora, quella grandissima fetta di mercato di orfani Apple, si sposterà inesorabilmente verso di esso.

Ma per farlo deve prima risolvere una montagnetta di problemi.

Essendo iscritto alla Creative Cloud, mi posso permettere di tormentare Adobe con i miei suggerimenti che ho scoperto essere condivisi da molti altri montatori.

Questa è la mia personale whislist che ho sottoposto agli sviluppatori. Voi che ne pensate? Ho dimenticato qualcosa?

– Linked selection tool. This feature affects the way of working with audio and video synched clips. When enabled you work as usual. When disabled you can select video or a audio channel and edit it independently. This is really useful working with audio splits. Please check FCP.

– Split stereo tracks in timeline, one stream per channel. This is really annoying. Most of the filmmakers works with two channels of audio separated, actually two mics (boom and radio or radio and camera mic). The audio tracks should be mono and when you drag a stereo clip in the sequence TWO tracks must be occupied in order to work with the tracks you really need and get rid of the others. E.g. If I need only a the left channel I drag my stereo clip on the sequence, unlink the channels, cut the right channel and pan to the center the remaining one.  With Premiere doing this is very slow and tricky.

– Keyboard Shortcuts panel: add Save button. There is only a Save As button. If I want to update my personal setup I can’t just save it!

– Add Edit on selected clips instead of targeted tracks. Targeting mode is very Avid way of thinking. My selection must be prominent instead of my targeted tracks. E.G.: If I have 3 audio tracks and 3 video tracks and I want to perform an edit in only 2 audios and 1 video the easiest way is to select the interested clips, move the playhead to the edit point I want and cut. Why should I go to left side of my screen, select tracks and then cut? It’s a waste of time. Click to select and cut is much quicker.

– Different colors for audio and video on a sequence (or an highlighted separator). It’s really useful to have an immediate overview of what I have on my sequence. When all the tracks are ‘closed’ there is no difference between audio and video clips.

– Different color or tonality between enabled and disabled clips. It’s really hard to understand what clips are enabled and what are not. Please gray the ones disabled.

– Enabling clips. If I have to clips one enabled and one disabled and I want to switch them now I need to select the first and disable it then select the second one and enable. Why don’t doing that selecting both clips and change their status with a single command? This is really useful working with multi-mic audio clips.

– Title clips must get their names from the text inside. When I work with subtitles and I have 100 subs on my sequence I’m obliged to give a name to every sub in order to understand what is going on quickly: if I need to find quickly my sub I must go over it with the playhead. Naming a title clip is a nonsense and a waste of time. The title should get the name from the text inside. If my character says ‘Hello’, Hello must be the name of my title clip.

– Smaller font size for right click menus. Please, reduce the font of those menus, I have to scroll almost the entire screen in vertical to get the bottom choice. Maybe you can ask the users to set the font size in the preferences? (Same thing in After Effects)

– Add Search button in ‘Where is my File’ menu. When reconnecting medias went offline there should be a Search button. In most of cases files are still inside of our hard drive in a different path and need to be find quickly. Why should I put the name in the search form to get them?

– Can’t import TIFF files without extension. Why?

– Import folders and subfolders. When I have my footage on my hard drive already organized in folders and I import the top folder, I MUST find the sub folders in my project!!!

– Image sequence import in Media Browser. I can’t import image sequences in Media Browser.

– Paste attributes dialog. When I copy a clip and want to paste some attributes to another clip I can’t. It is only permitted to paste all the attributes together. When I paste the attributes I need a dialog to appear and choose what attribute to paste (motion, opacity, distort, effects.. etc…)

– JPG sequences in real time. I have a MacPro 2012 and a Quadro 4000. My 11 Mpx Gopro sequences don’t play in real time.

– In Project window codec indication. Premiere is very good because you don’t need to conform the footage. But I still need to know what footage I have in my project!! In The Project please insert a column for codec and type indication. E.G. Quick Time Movie, ProRes HQ…

– Visualize partial previews  when cancel render, the partial rendered file remains in the preview folder, why can’t I see it rendered on my sequence?

– Selection of 3-4 standard track sizes on the sequence (or a slider to control all the tracks size easily). It’s really useful to navigate the sequence to have a quick command to reset the sizes of the tracks and bring them to a preset size (smaller, small, normal, large). Every multitrack software has this feature.

– In sequences, when a clip is uncollapsed please put the opacity line on the very top. Happens very often to grab the line instead of the clip during editing.

– Collapsing and uncollapsing clips is totally unuseful, please check FCP 7 and MC behavior.

– Please make the projects lighter, faster to open and save. I use SSD raid on a 12 core Macpro and I have to wait several seconds to open and every time I save a 180Mb project.

– Open more projects at the same time. It’s really useful to move things around projects when conforming or moving from offline to online.

– In the source monitor the last frame of a clip is black. This is annoying. Please use as last frame THE last frame of a clip.

– Copying & pasting .MTS files is too slow

– Use up and down arrow keys to increment or decrement values in fields like in AE.

– Importing method: ‘by reference’ mode is better. If I delete a clip from the project it must stay in the sequence where is used. Linking things is not dummy proof.

– Why there is no audio preview of audio clips in media browser?

– Working with cinema and tv professionals means that you must be able to read all the metadata the production send to editorial. I can’t read metadata information (like ‘scene’) in audio wav files coming from the most popular audio recorders.

– The track selection tool must move multiple clips once selected, pressing shift is annoying.

– Please, autosave only if something has changed in the project. Otherwise is waste of time and space and if I leave for a couple of hours the project idle i will loose all the previous versions because of this behavior. Crazy.

– Export using previews and ‘by reference’. Why if I have a Prores sequence with Prores footage with no fx applied I must re-encode and not just join together the pieces? Please check FCP 7 behavior. Re-encoding means waste of time and quality.