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XDCAM native through Premiere Pro – Workflow
Hi All,
I have a corporate gig coming up that requires a large content capture (32+ hours). I have more details regarding the production of this gig posted in the Corporate video section (titled: “32 hours footage in 4days – workflow”), but in brief: the workflow I’m trying to discover will be the one with the fewest transcoding / compression generations through post to delivery. The scope of the project is to capture the content, cut it into segments based on Client review of Dalies, and export these segments for the web delivery (or export native and compress, if it’ll roll faster that way). The goal is to present a 4 day intensive training seminar as a webisode-archive/index online. The end result will have approx. 90 episodes.
The current workflow I’m considering involves shooting the EX1 and taking the native files through Adobe Premiere. I’ve not edited in Premiere before (I have 5+ years editing for clients on FCP, so what assumptions I’m making come from that background) and I’m hoping to get some feedback on the ease / difficulty of working w/ the native XDCAM files in this program. (I would need to purchase the software, so if there is a lesser than ‘pro’ version that can handle this workflow, that would be fine for me). My hope is that the software can import and export the file without needing any transcoding / rendering as long as I keep everything XDCAM until I’m ready to compress for web (The edits I’ll be making are very basic – a single ‘In’ and “Out’ cut per episode with a basic title overlay created within Premiere as a lower third – text w/ a block color solid behind). After the export I’ll compress for web in batches via “Compressor” and upload in batches to Screencast.com). Of course – if Adobe has a software similar to Compressor that would work better in conjunction w/ Premier, I’m open to making the purchase if the time saved is significant.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this post and further thanks in advance for those who reply. If anything in this post seems off please let me know – I don’t get married to a ‘way’ of doing something, so alternate, time-saving proposals would be wonderful.
My Best –
-James
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3 Replies
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James –
I shoot with an EX3 and edit with PPro CS5, so I’ve got experience with the workflow and it works really well.
PPro will import in the XDCAM EX footage natively, and you can start editing right away. You can also use Adobe Media Encoder to encode to other formats if you need too – it’s Adobe’s version of Compressor.
I just came off a week long shoot on location where we had over 400GB of footage, and I had to edit on site for a highlight video to play the final night. I haven’t read your other post, but let me just give you 2 words…media management. I love shooting tapeless, but keeping all those files in some sort of organized way can be tough.
PPro CS5 worked perfect. If you’re coming from FCP, there are a few little things that work differently, but they are very similar.
—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com -
Hi Eric –
Thanks a bunch for the reply. It’s great having a resource like this.
One more question realted to the Adobe production software: Have you noticed if compressing the XDCAM files straight out of PPro CS5 is significantly slower overall than exporting native and compressing in Media Encoder (from my experience w/ the apple software, that is the case), or does PPro handle compressions speedily (relatively speaking).
– James
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James,
Well, what are you trying to compress too? I’ve found, and maybe others can comment on this as well, but the speed at which things enocde depend on a number of factors – what are you compressing too, CPU speed, hard drive speed, are you down scaling the footage, etc.
I’ve found that usually Adobe Media Enocder (AME) usually encodes around the same amount of time as doing a direct export out of PPro. I think I’ve seen fast h.264 encodes directly from PPro, and that may be due to the fact that I’ve got one the Mercury Playback Engine approved cards.
From what I understand about your workflow, it would seem to me that the best thing for you to do would be to edit everything in PPro, then export out your sequences to AME and let them encode when you’re not editing.
One other piece of advice I’d give you is that with all the footage you’re looking at shooting, I’d break the project up…maybe into days – have the videos from day 1 in one project with a sequence for each video, then all of day 2 in one project, etc. It might make project/data management easier.
I read your other post in the other forum – the project I had a couple weeks back was somewhat similar. I was shooting B-roll of events and then lectures from the back of a hotel conference room every day for 5 days. In my hotel room, I had my laptop for editing and a 1 TB RAID drive the client provided for storage. When my cards got full, it was off to the room to dump them, then back out to shoot. Then every night, I had to go through the hours of footage and find clips that would work for the end of week highlight/overview video.
As I mentioned, I had over 400GB of footage. I came up with a system to keep track of all the footage, and that helped locate clips when editing.
—Eric
Owner | 100 ACRE FILMS
https://www.100acrefilms.com
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