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Yes exactly. Moreover, I do understand some of the complexities in and around what it must take to produce compatible software en mass... but with competition driving innovation, I think we'd all be grateful to see fresh gains made in the ability to move our projects out and away from buggy companies beholden to shareholders while failing to keep up. Hurray for the underdog!

Alright, another PPro crash prompted me... so I just exported an XML of a PPro 20 min timeline and opened it in Resolve a moment ago for the first time. On first glance, all the media is there but dozens of title cards (.png) that I'm using for subtitles are in place on the timeline but registering as offline (red) though they still have my text content indicated in them. Not yet sure if I can get them to register as online. Needless to say all the audio/ video effects/ tweaks are missing but it looks like the audio cross dissolves made it across. I've already built huge sections of the film in PPro so I don't know that I have the time to re-organize and rebuild them in Resolve... but overall it's super exciting to see this opened up in Resolve... it also signals being one step closer to leaving Adobe. Knowing just how many people are pissed - myself included - I wonder if Adobe may be getting ready to remove this Export XML feature soon? Anyway.

"Bugs? What bugs?" I've just spent 6 weeks migrating a massive doc film from CC2014 to CC 2019 and in the process traded the few and simple bugs I knew, for god know what. Let's see... hopefully there will be benefits.

I certainly hear your frustration Kaylee. Sometimes (actually often) I like to imagine a software engineer, taking away a perfectly working button and replacing it with 3 that don't work under the guise of improving things... while somehow justifying their ill-gotten salary. Change for the sake of change is fine in some lay-about hippie's dream... but it's a nightmare to working professionals. Fucking hell.

Hey Kai, that's an interesting suggestion. Thanks. The monster I'm building is so crazy thick that it would be interesting to see what would actually arrive through the migration... and in what way. But for now, I'm just finishing the final leg of breaking the huge main project into smaller (more nimble) character driven projects and relinking the newly transcoded media. 6 weeks of 20 hour days, but nothing compared to collecting (10 years) the material in one of the most difficult and demanding megacities on the planet. No life like it... I'll report back on the migration success once I'm there. Oh and I still very much appreciate your insights since you joined EOSHD.

Thank you for the extra insights Mmmbeats, I really appreciate it as so few folks here actually chime in on the editing/ software side of things. Knowing the limitations and bugs are half the battle... and people tend to post their negative views on the software online so I see a lot of that when I'm hunting down my own issues and it gives me the impression that Adobe has hit the bottom. Half my project was in H.264 + Mpeg2, the other half is in ProRes. I've now transcoded the H.264 + Mpeg2 to ProRes and I have to say that I've really noticed a sizeable performance increase in doing that. The other massive boost came from putting the Media Cache on an external SSD. The project used to take 25 minutes to open and load, now it takes under a minute. Staggering!

This is actually reassuring to hear as I'm almost through a huge transcoding and relinking process and just stepping back into the creative beginning tomorrow. Let's see how things hold up.

Methinks this fuckery deserves its very own 'Adobe Horror Stories thread'. The challenge, however, is that who is really going to want to have to relive their's to tell it... I'm 6 weeks into mine and will have it wrapped by the end of today. If you like satire, give this one a go: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2437579

All Adobe products should ship with a handgun... and one round in the chamber.

Good to have you insights KnightsFan. Thanks. I hear you on the mistrust of Adobe... as I remember Andrew sited the Johnnie Behiri Adobe promo as something of a lame counter to the growing backlash. When we last left off on a discussion, I had started using Resolve to transcode as AME (Adobe) had yet another bug... so I've been playing around with Resolve for a few days now and it just seems to work well. A lot of my film has been organized and built in Premiere (across 5 years) with 17,000+ files or I would have already jumped ship... good to hear that there are no hiccups on your 10k assets. Somehow the part of that Johnnie Behiri Adobe thing that sticks with me is when Adobe reiterates (try saying that word 10 times very fast Inazuma?) on how their software is used by the serious Hollywood pros... ugh.

Mongol-salabic?

Now I can't click on a clip in the timeline and reveal in the project/ finder... It's just one thing after another with these guys. If I wasn't so far along into a big project, I'd drop this garbage immediately. Nice work Adobe. That Johnnie Behiri trip to California Adobe piece is just another huge middle finger to everyone. Laughable. Can someone tell me if Resolve is able to hand big sprawling doc films well?

And... the black stripe is now fixed in AME 13.0.2. Still it was good to spend the last 3 days transcoding with the free version of Resolve (that just works)... as sign of things to come.

And the winner is... 5DtoRGB. Hands down. Say it with me... 'chroma sub-sampling.'

So far and between, the original file, Compressor, AME and Resolve.... Resolve is the closest in color of the original source file. Couldn't get iFFmpeg to work yet. Another vote for Resolve,

Good stuff, thanks. Keeping yourself away from Adobe is an exercise in sanity. I'm with you that ProRes is an industry standard and that Resolve must have this right as rain. Yes I'm doing my own tests to see what's what... I'm just about to give iFFmpeg a go with one test file... fingers crossed and thanks again for the tip and extra insights along the way!

Hey thanks for this KnightsFan, I appreciate it. It certainly sounds like you've covered good ground in trying to sort through your a/v issues. I start to get a better sense of python and command line scripts in order to get things done when the big shots cast their wide nets and side-lining the niche heavies. I'm using MediaInfo to get file info when Apple's Get Info fails to show much of anything. Copy Fold Tree (uses Apple's Script Editor) is doing a great job at recreating Folder Trees that I'm transcoding into. You mention that you are not so thrilled with Resolve's encoder but let me ask you, would you use Resolve to encode h.264 to ProRes 422 if you wanted comparable results to what Compressor and AME give?

KnightsFan to the rescue. Thanks amigo, and yes you have the correct overview on the situation. Can I ask you why you use ffmpeg when there are other options? I haven't used it for years but will have a look for it now. Thanks again! Edit: DaVinci Resolve must have a batch converter... anyone with any experience? Surely these guys will get things right.

There is a noticeable color shift in the transcoded file when using Compressor. Any way around this? Doesn't any of this shit work properly anymore? Also, why is there no way to export file without the "Apple ProRes 422" file name? Just perfect for those who want more headaches when relinking media. I mean really, what asshole beancounters are breaking perfectly good shit that used to work properly?

Hi Mark, no stupid questions... if they're actually genuine. I'm in a huge fuckery where Premiere Pro CC 2019 keeps dropping linked media (mpeg2 and h.264) if/ when I reset preferences and/ or delete media cache. But this does not happen with the ProRes files also attached to the project. I've wasted the past 5 weeks full time on this! No more! I've converted 8k mpeg2 files in hundreds of folders and am now moving towards tens of thousands of h.264 files. Horrible process to so as to get back to the creative. Alright so... Turning off the hardware-accelerated decoding option in PPro gets around the problem. Unfortunately it does not help for AME. Does anyone have a working around to somehow export thousands of file using PPro in the same way as AME? Or do I just move toward Apple Compressor?

I think I got it sorted. In AME, I created an encoding Preset where I didn't select the "Match Source" tick box and instead set the Height & Width dimensions manually to 1920x1080. So far so good. Thanks again for jumping in guys... I'm way out on the bright side of nowhere here... years at a time. This place is a huge resource is a godsend to folks like me Onward! *Edit!!! Woops! Spoke too soon... I converted the wrong file. The black stripe is still there. The Headless Leader at Adobe strikes again... others having the same issue: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2555018 This is a bug. Disable the "Enable hardware accelerated decoding" option in Preferences > Import. Restart After Effects, then purge the cache via Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache. It appears that After Effects 16.0 (and Premiere Pro 13.0) are mis-sizing Canon 5D H.264 .mov footage when hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding is enabled on Mac. The bottom 128 pixels of the footage are black, and the footage is vertically scaled so that it fits within the cropped dimensions. In more concrete terms: a 1920x1080 frame renders vertically scaled (squished) to 1920x952, with the last 128 rows filled with black. I do not reproduce this problem with any other H.264 footage, just the Canon 5D samples that I have. The same samples do not reproduce the problem in After Effects on Windows 10. Premiere Pro also appears to be affected by the problem as well (same technology; in Premiere Pro the hardware acceleration option is in Preferences > Media.) Note that the hardware acceleration option is only available on macOS 10.13 and later. The problem goes away when you disable the hardware-accelerated decoding option, which is enabled by default. Note that you need to restart After Effects after turning this option on or off, and you should purge the cache after the restart, otherwise previously cached frames from that footage will be used. I've filed the bug and asked our developers to investigate. Apologies for the disruption.

Thanks for jumping in KnightsFan. The original material in PPro has the black stripe at the bottom but not when I open it in Quicktime. The same material transcoded by FCP7 Compressor into ProRes and placed on PPro timeline has no black stripe. The original file transcoded to to ProRes by AME and placed on a PPro timeline next to the others has the black stripe. Adobe at their best again?

Thanks again for the support OliKMIA! Good to have your thoughts. I thought of the crop as well... ugh. I may have to look towards CC2017... though several weeks of the project has been built in CC2019.

Hi folks, I'm just about to begin transcoding (AME) a large amount to h.264 (5DM2) files to ProRes. I've done a few tests and the output file has a thin strip of black at the bottom of the frame almost as if the file is somehow not 1920x1080. This black is also visible in the source file. The thing is that I've never noticed this 'thin strip of back at the bottom before until I upgraded to Mojave and CC2019. Can anyone open a h.264 file and tell me if there is a thin black strip at the bottom? Mojave? PPro 2019CC? Does anyone know the fix? And actually, I've just transcoded a huge amount of mpeg2 material (XDCAM) to ProRes and somehow the transcoded frame has more in it, just a tiny amount more (wider) but it's not there in the original file. But this material does not have the thin black strip at the bottom. Anyone?

A small update from my side that I'd be curious if anyone else noticed? I went from Mountain Lion to Mojave on a 2013 Macbook Pro and from the get go there there has been a mirco lag in the system that I felt immediately. I'm running another new Macbook Pro (2.9 Ghz i9 max'd out) and it has the same micro lag. Something tells me it has to do with closing the Meltdown and Spectre threats. Also, why is it that Mojave's Finder Sidebar can't hold onto the external hard drive icons? Annoying. Anyone got a fix?