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shorten a bunch of clips and batch encode them
I got around 600 clips of raw footage, probably around 5 hours of material and I need to filter out the best scenes for using them later in After Effects.
I was planning to load all clips in PP cut out the useless parts and then re-encode what is left for later use in AE.
There are two main questions.
I do not want to export the edited clips as one single file.
I just want to cut away the unneeded parts from each individual clip and then export the “cleaned” clip.
Is there a way to Batch encode these single clips without naming each one manually and do all the other stuff by hand?If not – is there any application that is made for this kind of task?
one more thing…
In the past I used to export these files as h.264 mp4 with 32 mbps and reused them later in AE.
I guess the loss of quality is not noticeable for the human eye. but I was wondering if there is a lossless alternative / codec which allows for several reencodings without losing quality -
32 Replies
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Sounds like a job for Prelude. Depending on your version of CC, and operating system, since Cineform encoding is now native, I’d go with that. Certainly not truly ‘lossless’, but I really doubt you’ll be able to notice. If you’re really wanting to go ‘lossless’, the free Lagarith codec boasts that, but be ready for huge file sizes.
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Definitely a Prelude gig. What’s the original source? I’d do about 50 clips at a time to keep it all straight.
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Thanks for the Cineform tip!
It is cc14 and the footage is from a Sony XDCAM EX35 29.97 fps progressive Quicktime and there is also some footage from a Canon Camcorder recorded at 50i mts.
I had a look at it in Prelude already but could not figure out how to accomplish what I need.
I assume that I do the cleaning already in the ingest window, right? I think I need to set the in/out points and then transcode the clips to a new destination.
The problem was that I can set only 1 in and out point per clip. so if there are two or more good secenes in a clip I have a problem.I could not figure out how to do the same in the main application window. and prelude also did seem to like the mts clips very much.
Can someone please give me a hint and point me in the right direction?
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Getting multiple takes from a single clip would be a hassle in Prelude.
There may be an easier way, but I’d consider making subclips in Premiere, which effectively allows for multiple in/out points per master clip, then batch transcode the subclips to Cineform.
Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia GeForce GTX 770 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Adobe CC * QuickTime 7.7.5
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Hiya…
to accomplish this….
we usually use a combo of PPro, AE, and AME.
In Pro drop clips in a sequence.
Cut away junk you don’t need. so you end up with a sequence in your project that contains all the selects.
in the project panel copy your project, select and COPY your sequence.Switch to AE.
int he AE project panel. Paste.
this will bring in your sequence as a comp with all associated media.
open the comp, select the layers
Use Andrew Kramer’s (Video Copilot Net) trim_compose_script : https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/trim_compose_script/this will generate trimmed comps for every layer (meaning every clip you med in PPro)
then you can send those comps (created by the script) thru the render queue or Adobe media encoder to transcode to whatever you need.
Note pay attention to audio set up in PPro so you end up with only the audio channels you need in AE and beyond.
HTH,
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX -
Making multiple subclips from inside Prelude is easy, just like in PPro but with a better interface. You just can’t put multiple marks on clip from the Ingest function. You have to ingest the part of the clip you want then make multiple subclips from it.
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There actually is a “not too crazy” way to mark all your scenes from within Prelude but you have to be working outside of the camera card format. Say you come across a clip that has two good takes on it, mark the first one then right click and reveal in finder, then option drag that clip to make a copy and it will show right up in Prelude next to the original, mark the second take and move on.
I’ve found that if you duplicate a clip from inside the camera card structure (MXF anyway) the original and the duplicate both disappear from Prelude’s view.
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Steve:
That’s what I thought. So Prelude is out of the race in this case ; )Alex:
Thank you SO much for sharing this and thank you for the detailed description.
I wish I had this knowledge earlier. It would have saved me hours and hours of time!I was able to do a quick test and from what I could see this workflow does exactly what I was looking for. Very fast, very easy and it’s a professional solution.
There’s still one thing I am still doing wrong though. It’s about the sound. You even mentioned in your description to take care that everything is right.
right now I end up with too many layers in AE but still no audio after encoding in AME.
here’s a very quick example.
lets say I do just one clip to keep it simple.
my footage has two audio layers. I need only one track though. Is it better to mute, unlink and delete or do I need to do something completely different?when I copy the sequence into AE I get 3 layers. two of them are audio.
I then select the layers, run the script and once again get 3 comps… I then highlight them and add them to the AME queue.
This results of course in 3 videos. But only one is needed.
(EDIT: none of those three clips seems to have the proper audio.}Can you see where I’m making the mistake?
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Sorry Paul, somehow I skipped your answer without noticing! I just saw it now, after answering to Steve and Paul.
Anyhow.. the “problem” with prelude in this particular case is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy way for the batch exporting part.
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While Alex’s method works, After Effects doesn’t support Tape Names, so you will effectively be losing all of that going to AE, additionally you’ll probably lose other metadata associated with the clips. This is important if you ever need to have multiple users using the same clips, or need to go into an online and offline workflow.
Why not just subclip in Premiere Pro, select all of the cilps in the project panel, and export your subclips from there. (unless i missed something in one of the responses)
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