In the Preferences dialog for Premiere Pro there is a section called Memory that allows you to specify how Premiere Pro and other Adobe applications will use your RAM.

Premiere will allow itself a certain percentage of memory by default and you can decrease this by increasing the RAM reserved for other applications and the operating system. This is a maximum limit and the memory is only used up if it is actually needed.

Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Prelude, Media Encoder and Photoshop all use the same memory pool so the RAM is assigned between them. Premiere and After Effects are assigned the highest priority within the pool so closing these applications can improve performance in the other apps.

Adobe applications are designed to share data in realtime through dynamic linking so it is common for users to run multiple apps at once. It is therefore recommended to set these settings as high as possible. The default is around 70-75% of total RAM. Note that it's possible for third-party plugins and importers to exceed the memory limit.

After Effects has a Details button in its Memory & Multiprocessing pane that for some reason the other applications don't have. If you click this button you can see which Adobe apps are running, how much memory they are using and what priority has been assigned to them. As you switch applications from foreground to background, watch the maximum allowed memory change as the priority is lowered.

If you install additional memory in your system and it is not reflected in the Memory dialog, close all Adobe apps and delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/dynamiclinkmanager/6.0/memorybalancercs6v2.xml (or whatever version you are using). On Windows 7 the file is located at C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\dynamiclinkmanager\6.0. When you relaunch Premiere the file will be recreated and it should see your new memory.

In the Memory pane you can also optimize rendering for performance or memory. In performance mode Premiere runs several tasks in parallel and uses all of your processor cores (up to 16). In memory mode it runs fewer tasks simultaneously so these settings will lower both CPU and memory usage.

Tips for optimizing memory usage

• Close Adobe applications that are not in use
• Turn off thumbnails and waveform displays
• Reduce the size of large images
• Optimize rendering for memory
• On Windows, try increasing the size of your page file (virtual memory). It should be at least the size of total RAM and some people recommend that it is twice as large.

Here are some interesting articles we discovered over the past week.

Automatic Duck Somewhat-Almost-Best Practices

Lots of tips, tricks and gotchas for using Automatic Duck.

How to create a DCP

A video tutorial on creating a cheap DCP for digital projection. You still need somewhere to test it though.

DaVinci Resolve Lite for transcoding Avid MXF media

Workflow for applying LUTs to ARRI Alexa footage for bringing into Avid.

Best Mac GPUs in 3D Game Shootout

The range of graphics cards for Mac Pros is poor so Bare Feats tested how fast Windows-compatible cards were after being flashed to work on OS X.

They also confirmed that the difference between Lion and Mountain Lion for graphics processing is negligible.

Adobe recommends OS X 10.8 for Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro CS 6 makes use of OpenCL so Adobe is recommending OS X 10.8 due to its OpenCL improvements. We'd recommend not using a brand-new OS for critical work though.

Switching to Premiere Pro: Day 1: Prelude to a fall

Michael Murie details his first impressions of Adobe Prelude. (It's also interesting to note from the comments that Wes Plate, formerly of Automatic Duck, is now the product manager of Prelude.)

Carbon Copy Cloner goes commercial

Useful backup tool Carbon Copy Cloner is becoming a paid tool but previous versions will remain free. Users who donated in the past will get free licenses.

Details on Xsan 3.0

Alongside Mountain Lion, Apple launched Xsan 3.0 without fanfare. It's based on StorNext 4.2 but there aren't a great number of new features.

The Foundry Summer Sale

The Foundry is offering 30% off their products if you switch from a competing product. I'm still running Shake so this is very tempting.

New encoding presets for Adobe Media Encoder

Adobe has released additional encoding presets covering mobile devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook and new presets for XDCAM EX and AVC-Intra in MXF wrappers.

How to re-download Lion from the Mac App Store

Now that Mountain Lion has been released, Lion no longer appears as an option in the Mac App Store. You can get it back if you've already purchased it by Option-clicking the Purchased tab.

How I installed Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my 2006 MacPro 1,1

Older Mac models such as the 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 are incompatible with Mountain Lion. Here's how to install it, but it's complicated and has drawbacks so it's not recommended for a working environment.

We've just started a new blog series called Bugs of the Week. This will be a weekly post that highlights bugs in popular editing software that we've come across in the past seven days.

Adobe Premiere

• Clip in/out is ignored when exporting via AME
• Various issues with MXF files
• If you put mono clips on stereo tracks, you may end up with duplicate audio channels in an OMF
• Autosaves not occurring if you're playing back when the autosave interval comes around
• Timeline redraw problems can be caused by an overheating GPU

Avid

• Workaround for getting external video out from Magic Bullet Looks 2.0
• Avid applications are not yet compatible with OS X 10.8's Gatekeeper feature

Final Cut Pro X

• Optical flow reverting to frame blending

Final Cut Pro 7

• Old third party plugins may cause crashes on OS X 10.8
• Certain XDCAM clips can crash FCP
• How to fix Out of Memory errors

(Crash Analyzer has some additional suggestions for fixing that last one.)

Today Adobe announced the full feature set of Creative Suite 6. Here are the features that stood out at me:

• Open CL - Mac laptop users do not get a choice as to which brand of graphics card they use so it's great to see GPU acceleration extended for people with ATI graphics cards.
• Full-screen playback - Premiere Pro can now play back your sequence in full screen on your primary monitor, which is great if you're on the move.
• New trim mode - This one seems to be aimed at Avid users with dynamic trimming via JKL.
• Adjustment layers - This is something I've wanted to see in an NLE for a long time. You can add a Photoshop-style adjustment layer and it will affect all clips beneath it. This is great for applying global effects to a sequence.
• Combine mono, stereo and multitrack clips into a single audio track - One big point of confusion for Final Cut Pro switchers was the way Premiere Pro CS 5.5 dealt with audio tracks. Instead of having one audio track per channel, Premiere can create mono, stereo or surround tracks, which means that mono clips can only be added to a mono track and stereo clips have to be added to a stereo track. These limitations are now removed in CS 6.
• Big thumbnails that can be "hover-scrubbed" - This looks to be almost identical to skimming in Final Cut Pro X. You can even set in and out points from the thumbnails.
• Ability to toggle Work Area off - The Work Area was another point of confusion for FCP users. It allows you to set a certain area of the timeline for rendering and exporting which can also be achieved by setting in and out points. If you don't plan to use this feature, it can now be switched off in CS 6.
• Markers can now be assigned a color and duration - I've always felt the marker implementation in Premiere was poor so this is great news. There is also a marker window that provides a summary of all markers in the sequence and you can quickly jump to them. No word yet on whether you can import and export marker lists.
• Unlimited multiclip angles - I was disappointed with the four-angle multicam in CS 5.5 so this is a big improvement.
• Uninterrupted playback - You can now adjust effects on-the-fly without pausing playback.
• New apps - Prelude and SpeedGrade
• Prelude has an SDK - Adobe's new tool for ingesting file-based media has an SDK to allow production houses to integrate it into their custom workflows.
• Ray tracing, extruding and 3D tracker in After Effects - Adobe is really aiming at the higher end of the visual effects market with these features.
• Variable mask feathering in AE - I've never been keen on AE's mask tools so this is a big improvement.
• Automatic Duck integration - Pro Import AE is now bundled with After Effects and allows you to import Avid projects into AE.

What's clear from this release is that Adobe is aggressively targeting a broad range of users. There are features in the new release that will be familiar to Avid, FCP7 and FCPX users. Since the demise of Final Cut Studio, Creative Suite is the only suite in town and this release fixes many of my complaints with CS 5.5 (although no word on new developer features yet). I don't think it will change my plan to use Avid for long-form and Premiere for short-form but the wide-open nature of the NLE market right now is something that is clearly producing great results for editors.

Post Haste is a Mac and Windows app to organize your projects from customizable templates. You can setup various parameters to include in the folder name such as project name, client, date, etc.

In the recent rewrite of Post Haste we added a new feature called folder breaks. Folder breaks can be set on a per-parameter basis and tell Post Haste to create a new folder at the start of that parameter. This allows you to create folder hierarchies and is best explained through example.

Folder breaks can be added by ticking the relevant checkbox next to a parameter in the preferences window.

Here are some examples of how folder breaks affect the destination path of the project, using the parameter values shown in the screenshot below.

If all folder breaks are switched off, Post Haste will create a single folder with each parameter separated by an underscore (or whatever separator character you have chosen).

If a folder break is added for the Project parameter, Post Haste will create a new folder and all subsequent parameters will be appended to the project name with an underscore.

If a folder break is added for the Project parameter but the parameter value is left blank, Post Haste is smart enough to apply the folder break to the next valid parameter value.

If a folder break is added for Project and Editor, Date is appended to Project and Editor becomes a new folder.

If a folder break is added to all of the parameters, it looks like the following:

Post Haste allows filename conventions and project organization to be largely invisible to the end-user. Folder breaks make it easier to fit the app into existing naming conventions and are very useful for corporate environments.

Post Haste is a free app for Mac and Windows and is available here.

Sometimes your NLE will throw up a cryptic error while you are editing, such as "General Error 41" (Final Cut Pro) or "BAD_MAGIC" (Avid). Such errors are often meaningful to the application's developers but not its users.

Luckily Crash Analyzer in Pro Maintenance Tools has a comprehensive error database. Click the Error Lookup button in the toolbar and you will be presented with a searchable list of all supported errors (over 200 at the current time of writing).

Selecting an error presents an explanation of the cause with suggestions on how to overcome it. This can be a real timesaver when a cryptic message pops up on a deadline.

A full list of supported errors is available here and we add new ones in every software update. If you receive an error message that is not supported by Crash Analyzer, you can submit it for inclusion in a future version from the Actions menu.

Crash Analyzer is available as part of Pro Maintenance Tools. We also have an iOS app called EditCodes that uses the same database.

Don't export directly to Compressor from Final Cut Pro

Only use Frame Controls where necessary

Perform heaving-lifting in a separate pass to the encoding

Use a cluster

Conclusion