Splice Now

I’ve been working with Adrenaline 2.7.3 for a little over a month now and I thought I’d pass on a progress report. In general, I’m very happy with it. There are still some quirks, but the advantages now far outweigh the disadvantages. I’m working with 14:1 media on a quad-core G5, with two users sharing a project over Unity.

Pros:

1. Fast and very stable. Only one minor crash in four weeks of intensive work.
2. Plays video responsively.
3. Scrubs audio very responsively.
4. Updates waveforms quickly.
5. Saves very quickly.
6. All the other advantages of Adrenaline:
   – 16 tracks of playable audio
   – realtime audio dissolves (indispensible for me now)
   – powerful effects capabilities, most realtime
   – restore previous trim command
   – unified mixer

Cons:

If the list below looks long, it’s only because I’m providing a lot of detail. These are relatively minor problems.

1. Slow performance with frame view big bins. With bins over about 10 or 15 MB, dragging clips around, renaming them, or loading them into monitors feels very sluggish. In addition, whenever you open a new bin, all clip frames in all open bins, and all timeline waveforms, are reacquired, which can make opening a new bin feel pretty sluggish.
2. Quirky stops. On the source/record window (the computer monitor) stops are precise, but the client (the big TV) often flickers badly for a second or so after you hit stop.
3. When you hit “L” twice quickly, the system says you’re moving at 48 fps, but you’re still going at 24. You have to pause briefly between keypresses to really move at 48.
4. We’re shooting on 16mm film for an HD finish, and if I enter a trim or dissolve duration in feet and frames it’s always interpreted incorrectly. The only way to enter durations properly is to work in time or total frames. In addition, you can’t measure 16mm durations as if they were 35mm. Even though the system offers to let you do this, you always get 16mm.
5. I use iTunes for music and sound effects and couldn’t live without it anymore. The only quirk is that you can’t drag from iTunes to a bin (you can’t do this in FCP either). The solution is to drag to the desktop and then drag to your bin from there. But if your cursor moves over a frame view bin on your way to the target bin, you’ll get all kinds of horrible artifacts, which won’t go away until you’ve closed and reopened the bin.
6. If you use “Dual Image Play” in trim mode (so that both sides of a trim move together) you’ll discover a very annoying bug in Adrenaline. Everything works fine in the trim mode window. But on the client monitor you see a frozen frame when you’re rolling a cut.
7. If you open a Unity bin and try to rename it you’ll often get an error message. You’ll have to close and re-open the bin to see the change.
8. Dragging clips from one bin to another in frame view will cause the clips to “align to grid.” If you’ve got a bunch of clips nicely organized and you move them to another bin they end up spaced differently, removing a lot of the organization.

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