I hope everyone had a great holiday. I did a lot of catching up on reading and planning new projects, I’ve never started a year with so many new things brewing.

So I’m kicking off by getting something taken care of that’s a bit of a hassle but will set up the motion productions on better footing.  Our studio is switching from Apple Final Cut-based editing to Adobe Premier CS5-based editing.  FCP’s instability (looking at you Compressor), constant rendering, required file converting, poor integration with the rest of the suite (hey there Color), lack of native 64-bit (with no sign of this even in the next version), and Apple’s apparent declining interest in pro-apps makes me believe this is not a platform on which to build for the future. (more on these limitations here)

The choice was then between Avid’s Media Composer and Adobe’s Premier CS5, and we have chosen to go with Premier CS5 which made a quantum leap in the last version and seems to have the full enthusiasm and commitment of the manufacturer behind it.  With this move there is no more need for slow transcoding (with the right graphics card, more below), native 64-bit so all the processors and all the RAM on a MacPro can be used, much improved integration and far better transferring of projects between After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc…  Also finding a lot of little nice benefits along the way. Talked with a lot of  experienced video editors, and this migration path is getting more and more popular.

Color grading will be done through a combination of After Effects, which has some nice quality, flexibility, and control benefits if you can live without real-time processing, and soon DaVinci Resolve.

To take full advantage of Premier CS5, we replaced the original graphics card that came in the MacPro tower with one of the approved nVidia cards which enables much of the Premier CS5 processing to be done on the graphics card’s GPU instead of the computer’s CPU, this is what eliminates most of the render time and makes the thing screaming fast (this and the native 64 bit programing).  Pictured here is the muscular new graphics card, hogging up two slots in the MacPro (hey Apple, how about some more slot expandability in your flagship, pro-grade computer?).  Picked it up used for just $320 on eBay and it works great.

Now on to shoot some new footage, which is what all the new projects will take care of. First up is the big shoot with designer Anthony Franco which was postponed from December — turns out the weekend before Christmas is not the best time to try to line up 20 crew and cast members.  Who would have thought?

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