I work remotely from a small seaside town on the East Coast of Ireland. Much of my work is from clients in South Africa. I currently am supplying 3 episodes of Scripted Television for a couple of shows on a weekly basis. In between all that I have a couple of local Irish short films and have just finished a South African feature film which was picked up by a big American Streaming Service. So I am no stranger to working remotely. So far, nothing to see here, move along.

BUT!

I run a 2019 iMac Pro, maxed out to the top spec, running the latest version of everything. As you’ll know from this blog I work mainly in FCPX. I am able to work in AVID and Premiere Pox if the job requires it but prefer X. I avoid Premiere Pox like the plague and rather convert everything from X to Pox at the point of delivery. And so I have loads of tools to facilitate the process to make it as seamless as possible at my SA clients Premiere Pox facility and workflow.

I run XtoCC and SendTOx from Intelligent Assistance for conversion of FCPX XMLs to Premiere Pox XMLs (or as Pox prefers to name it FCP7 XML. Speaks volumes.)

The biggest issue I had was Subtitles. Subs in Pox do not translate into X and so I now have my subtitler run an SRT creation app called SubTitle-VideoEditor Pro and use Premiere Title Import from Spherico to convert SRT files to Adobe Essential Graphics XMLs for easy import. More on this particular workflow in a sec.

I use XtoPro from Marquis Broadcasting to create AAF files for Mix.

And finally, I am running Premiere Pro 22.4. (Current at time of writing) for my clients who need to have a Pox project file. And so we come to the crux of the matter.

A recent complete reinstall on my iMac broke the Adobe installation my client uses… Version 2019 13.15. I am not fucking joking. Their hardware is incompatible with the new software and so are not able to upgrade it. Also they have something like 8 full edit suites and at least that many subtitle stations all running Adobe Premiere Pox. So this has posed a really interesting quandary.

We as individuals with a desktop and possibly a laptop or even just a single laptop can upgrade and maintain our systems with relative ease. I’m 2 years away from paying off the iMac Pro and MacBook 16” Pro and I’m ready to throw money at Apple’s latest version of the future. But my client is stuck. The upgrade path runs into the mega thousands of spondoolas and just can’t afford to replace everything every five years or so. So now working remotely logging into a large facility is problematic if you are running the latest of everything. It’s not so much an issue with FCPX or even Avid (which has been resisting change since 1987) but Premiere have this new policy of not supporting versions that are 2 releases earlier than the current version. Whoops.

And I have tried so hard to get the company to institute a move away from Premiere but the editors find X too steep a learning curve. Ha Ha Ha HA HA. Dicks.

But seriously this is an issue. One we should talk about. It mostly means that we are not able to upgrade our own systems to keep inline with the bigger facilities/ small post production houses. And don’t get me started on the fact that a client in Ireland is running the latest of everything too. Which poses another dilemma of compatibility.

Gosh where to from here?

Peace Love and Vomit

Jayce