Or more accurately

My Continuing Adventures Using The Underpants Of DOOM aka Premiere Pro

I’m not averse to change, nearly four years ago at the age of 52 I dragged my wife of 17 years and 2 of my 3 children aged 12 and 15 and our dog Pixie all the way from the south of Africa to the east coast of Ireland. A big challenge and a helluva stressful time. I mean epic. However that does not compare to my level of anxiety on day 2 of delivering episodes of television for my South African client.

Yesterday I posted a short list of things I hated and that was just an assemble day. I’m now fine cutting an ep with music and effects and splitting out microphones and those fucking subtitles and boy am I having a wild ride.

Here is today’s list of what gets up my fucking nose about Premiere Pox.

1. I have to remember to hit Command S to save, even with Autosave. Because… see point 3.

2. I have to wait while it saves everything. If I click on anything while it’s saving I get bonged at. My default error sound.

3. When it crashes, and it crashes often I’m lucky if I only lose the last 5 minutes of work. My first crash of the day the iMac completely rebooted and was unusable for about 15 minutes while it tried to figure out what its purpose in life is.

4. There are so many different types of error messages I have now started taking photos of them and waiting to see if my file manager shouts at me for having too many duplicate photos. So far it hasn’t because every time it crashes I was doing something different. So it’s not like when I was using Avid and I could guarantee that the first time I opened the title tool it would crash, this is on a whole other level of crash.

5. I can’t just hit Command R and drag the clip to the length I want when I want to do a speed ramp. I have to find the duration or completely wing it. And this show is heavy on speed ramps.

6. I am so fucking slow. With all the crashes and the double clicking to view clips and the modifying of key and mouse clicks its insane.

7. I know I talked about the magnetic timeline in the last post but it’s truly astounding how brilliant the magnetic timeline is. Especially when you are constantly trimming stuff and you want to be able to leave certain things in place.

8. It’s taken me over 5 hours to do just over 2 minutes of fine cutting. With crashes not being the biggest problem but because it’s just so clunky.

9. Another reason for the slowness is that the playback sync keeps randomly changing, from a few frames to sometimes a whole second. Then it’s okay for 2 minutes then it’s fucked for five. The first time it started I was pulling sync based on what I thought it was out by only to be even further out. Gosh darn fuck fuck, so I spent a about 10 minutes exporting the scene and checking it in the finder because I was brain dead.

10. An update on point 4 from previous post. It’s not redoing peak files every time it opens, unless it hadn’t managed to complete them when I last opened the project. No, it’s relinking media, searching, so for a good minute stuff is offline because Premiere thinks you moved it’s cheese while it was out.

I’m so over this. I was told that I should work in v2020 (I’m in 2019 something) but I can’t because the production house is still a million versions behind and it won’t be compatible. Go figure.

Anyway, rant over for today I really should be getting back to my episode now that it’s finished exporting and I can actually use the programme again.

Peace, love and vomit. Mostly vomit

Jayce