When I got the time to write this post the title that immediately sprung to mind was The Postman Always Rings Twice as it’s more appropriate however I had written a post with that title a while back so have to live with my second choice as above. What prompted this repeated use of the word Twice? Well you’ll never guess but its that piece of shit NLE known also as Premiere Pox.

As per the previous post featuring the word Twice it’s as much about history repeating itself as well as an inexplicable Adobe Premiere Pox behaviour I shall outline in a much more expletive ridden in-depth manner shortly. But to start off, the history lesson.

My previous post was about taking over a finished production and the client being demonstrably unimpressed with their final product and calling upon Moi to fix it and punch it into shape. Well it’s happened yet again, this time by a client who always pleads extreme poverty and low budget issues and then posts pics on Insta flying first class on Qatar Airways to his next destination. Yeah, that guy. Don’t get me wrong I really like this guy but the constant fight over money when he splashes is a little hard to swallow. However having said that he is at least coughing up on this one. About half way anyway but that’s 5000% better than he was originally offering. So I am winning that battle slowly. The trick is to use professionals who charge what they charge and get the job done right from the start, not pay peanuts to a bunch of fuck head amateurs and then still have to cough up the bread for the Pros anyway. Won’t be flying first class for long with that business model.

And now to the main reason for this post and the reason for the word Twice to once again rear it’s ugly head.

But first…

The project I just received was cut in Pox 2022 or 2021 and its a fucking nightmare. 23 days of shooting, no files renamed, no sync bins even though I have 10 projects called SINK A/B/C/D etc oh an duplicates of those from different stages in the shoot. But here’s the thing, they are still all identical in almost every way. I am struggling to see the differences in each project and even when I open them and re-link to the footage it all still hangs up on the same spot. There are probably 20 or 30 sequences in each. Some have 3 or 4 duplicates of the same timeline, with nothing in them! Others are labelled sync but they’re not, even the ones labelled synced,synced are not synced and my personal favourite, synced,synced,replaced… you guessed it, not synced. So far, of the 23 days of shooting I have managed to find 5 synced days. Days. This is a 6 part series for a very well known, established, leading Net Streamer and it’s all sorted in Days! No paperwork either. So everything is a shambles. No folder for timelines so you have to search for them and they are everywhere. I know it’s an automated search thing but I still have to go thru each one to see if there’s anything synced anywhere at all and that’s a tedious manual process. On top of all that the drone footage that is duplicated in every project at least twice will not relink everything and so means having to manually relink each shot individually. And I have almost 100 of them. I soon learned that they were duplicates (principally because they are not renamed so all start at DJI00001.mov) I can happily skip those files. Synced Timelines named Day 6 when in fact it’s a duplicate of Day 5. But anyway I digress, now to the real reason behind the Twice in the title repeat.

Every time I need to click into and out of Premiere Pox I have to click on the button TWICE!. So if I want to drag and drop a project from finder I have to hit the Finder icon TWICE! AND THEN I HAVE TO CLICK ON THE IMPORT SETTINGS BUTTON AGAIN, EVERY FUCKING TIME, TWICE. Whenever I want to drag in a project, the first time it’s unsuccessful so have to do it again and that adds up to… TWICE! Maybe it’s because of my absolute hatred for this system that I have a mental block on a setting somewhere but I can’t see why that would be the case. I just fucking hate it. I just fucking hate it.

And so now instead of editing, which is what I am paid to do, I am trawling thru probably the worst post production workflow I have ever encountered in the 30 years I have been editing digitally. Even my 2 year old Grandson could do a better job. And he’s still in fucking nappies.

And so I shall leave it there and continue to relink all the myriad projects and timelines in front of me as fast as I can, then create the QT proxy files from the original BRAW files and send the project to FCPX where things are much more civilised.

Happy Xmas and a Happy New Year, Y’awl.

Jayce

PS. Turns out the double clicking this is a dual monitor issue. Working on a single monitor resolves the double clicking to some extent. Poxy Piece of Shit.