How stable is MC 5 on a PC machine ?

LuckyStudio 13

LuckyStudio 13

The Tapeless One
Not to start a flame war but am looking to abandon FCS and get back into PC. However I'm still traumatized by the extreme instability of Premiere CS4 on a PC. I am looking to build a new system and maybe jumping ship to MC 5.
 
Mine has been bulletproof. I installed it the day it shipped. Run it on two machines (both certified) and have had zero issues.
 
MC 5.0 is leagues ahead of Premiere in terms of stability.

However - the native RED editing mode is a bit of a "new feature" and people have reported it running out of RAM once you add RSX color looks etc.

It's usable for quickly cutting stuff together, but if you were doing a feature you'd probably just want to hit the transcode button to get it into one of the DNxHD Avid formats (they are very good - essentially what Apple based ProRes off of) so that you can do your creative editing without worries.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
bruceallen said:
MC 5.0 is leagues ahead of Premiere in terms of stability.

However - the native RED editing mode is a bit of a "new feature" and people have reported it running out of RAM once you add RSX color looks etc.
Click to expand...

Not trying to hi-jack the thread, but here is one person's recent experience with Red on Premiere Pro CS5:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=218539

I suppose whether it is "leagues ahead of Premiere" is an open question.
 
ftbt said:
Not trying to hi-jack the thread, but here is one person's recent experience with Red on Premiere Pro CS5:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=218539

I suppose whether it is "leagues ahead of Premiere" is an open question.
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I said "leagues ahead of Premiere" in terms of stability.

Every single Premiere project I've worked on has gotten unstable at some point when it got complex. My favorite was when we got CS4, it took us two days before we could figure out how to even get it to export - we'd hit export and nothing would happen. Since they took out all other Quicktime-saving options, we had no way to get anything out of Premiere! In an obscure website we found advice to move our After Effects plugins into a separate folder and that did it. Adobe, how on earth can you release software that can't even export?

Feature-wise, it is more tricky - in terms of flashy features, Premiere is ahead. In terms of features that I use (dual-system audio, multiple editors being able to share and write to different bins within the same project at the same time, responsive trimming, super-solid features for going to conform, good codecs etc) Avid is ahead.

I'm sure it varies for whatever project you try to do. BTW, if I truly felt Premiere was as good as Avid, I'd go with it in a heartbeat:
- it's practically free for me (since Photoshop and After Effects are a must for what I do)
- I've been using it since (non-pro) version 5
- I've been using After Effects on a daily basis since version 6 or so.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
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Well ... apparently is was stable enough for Michael Madison and Linda Nelson to cut and color correct their 107 minute film using Red files direct from the camera to the time-line, without transcoding or proxies. Different strokes for different folks I guess. (Oh, by the way I learned to cut on Avid, now use FCP and I am just now starting to play around with Premiere Pro CS5 ... certainly looks promising ... you might want to give it a look.)
 
ftbt said:
Well ... apparently is was stable enough for Michael Madison and Linda Nelson to cut and color correct their 107 minute film using Red files direct from the camera to the time-line, without transcoding or proxies.
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I'm sure that it is very possible to cut a feature in Premiere, *especially* if you do it all within a hermetic editing environment. Heck, they used Sony Vegas for Paranormal Activity.

But come on - it can't even read timecode from a standard Sound Devices recorder yet.

ftbt said:
Different strokes for different folks I guess. (Oh, by the way I learned to cut on Avid, now use FCP and I am just now starting to play around with Premiere Pro CS5 ... certainly looks promising ... you might want to give it a look.)
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Totally agree - CS5 is a great step forward and it's maturing at a great pace. I remember CS4 didn't even have OMF export when it came out - now we have OMF, XML, AAF, etc etc. I think CS6 or CS7 could be dangerous indeed.

I used it to online 3 reels of a RED feature coloring job I'm finishing up right now (it was offline-edited by the client in FCP, Avid MC5 wasn't out when I started the process, plus the client wanted 2K! not 1080p! even though we're now printing to film at like 1828x988 ). Thing is though: after the pain I went through onlining the first 3 reels in Premiere, I found it was much cheaper and faster to do the conform of the last 3 reels in Scratch.

For example:
- Premiere's XML import from FCP just didn't work.
- EDL import had major problems. It was difficult to even get Premiere to link to the right clip. I had a crazy combo of bash scripts and C++ code to get the edit to come across from FCP.
- Premiere crashed often when re-linking to the .R3Ds. I had to re-link in batches and wait a period of time. This was with everything broken into 15-20 minute reels at largest.

Again, I am just recounting personal experience. This is not from an easy project, but this is something that a pro-level software package should be able to handle without upset.

I expect Premiere CS6 to catch up in many ways. I it's better, I'll dump Avid and it'll save me money. Until then I think that the best combo *for me* for the next year or two will be Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, After Effects and Pro Tools.

But I do love reading what everyone has to say - and nice to see Premiere making such a good comeback!

BTW Sorry to hijack the thread. I'll shut up now. I did give stability anecdotes at least :)

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
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I use avid on a pc and it's stable as can be. I have premiere but I've never really used it muchsince avid has never done me wrong.
 
I also use MC5.0.3 on a PC laptop. 4 year old Core 2 Dup running XP and 4gig of ram. A bit slow on things but MC has never crashed!

Jeff
 
I've had Avid crash a couple of times in the last couple of years through lack of RAM (I only have 4GB), but it is extremely stable. On the couple of occassions when it did crash, I only lost a couple of minutes work because I auto backup every 10 minutes.
 
As a Adobe beta tester I can say, that most crashes of Premiere come from a underpowered power supply or RAM problems.
Sounds strange, I know but Premiere pushes your hardware to the limits. Limits your computer doesn't normally see.
Most computers you can buy (or build yourself) are build with ether profit or budget in mind. But only the best, matched components will do the trick

It´s like you hop up your car with cheap components and drive it with full speed all the time.

So it is important to have a hand massaged computer and system, build by someone who knows what he is doing.
Strong power supply, matched ram, the right specs.
Then you have a super stable NLE that is the fastest one on the market.

Or you can run AVID on a underpowered laptop and get the same stability, but not the performance.

Frank
 
Postmaster said:
So it is important to have a hand massaged computer and system, build by someone who knows what he is doing.
Strong power supply, matched ram, the right specs.
Then you have a super stable NLE that is the fastest one on the market.
Frank
Click to expand...

I absolutely agree. If you're thinking about building your own edit suite using the Media Composer software, make sure you build on a 64bit platform with a decent amount of RAM. Also make sure all of your components (RAM, Processor, Motherboard, etc) are compatible and up to spec.
 
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