Basically, what I want to know is where all the Premiere bashing comes from? The two major complains that I read about are as follows: 1) Inability to properly handle 23.976 video, 2) Bugginess/crashing.
I've experienced the bugginess and crashing, but found that it's actually at fault of either AviSynth or the IM-AviSynth.prm plugin. As soon as I uninstalled the plugin from Premiere (at the disc-space-cost of using Huffy sources), APP has been rock-solid stable. (Not to get too technical, but I took a gander at the plugin source-code. There's a slight memory-handing oversight in it. There's an inconsistency in the location of "new" to each respective "delete". In short: Not all C++ libraries handle new/delete keywords the same way, so those commands shouldn't be mixed between end-user libraries. Handling memory this way runs the risk of mixing "new"s and "delete"s between different runtime libraries, which can cause memory leaks and irregular behavior.)
I'm not quite sure about the 23.976 video. I've run a test export from APP to HuffYUV, which Media Player Classic (henceforth "MPC") has told me is 23.98 fps. That said, I've gotten the exact same results from a VirtualDub export: MPC tells me that a file (never even loaded into APP) is 23.98fps. Loading up both AVIs into APP, Premiere tells me that the .AVI container is 23.976fps but the video codec stream is 23.98fps. For both of them! Granted, I'm using CS3 and they may have fixed the 23.976 problem since earlier releases. But then again, it might not actually be their problem (seeing as how it exported exactly the same way VirtualDub did).
Any clarification would be greatly appreciated. I've actually been enjoying most of Premiere (which may be partly due to the psychology of shelling out the money to buy it--I don't want to be disappointed in my purchase). That said, I want to know which work-arounds I need to use, and what behavior to be on-the-lookout-for when editing/exporting.
On a side note: if I have a 23.976 .avi container with a 23.98 video stream, which do I believe? Which is correct? And why is there a redundancy of that information, especially if it doesn't coincide? (I'm planning for the final-export to be 29.97fps, so it doesn't matter a whole lot, but I'm curious.)


