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Premiere to Final Cut?
I’m almost sure that there’s real good, easier answer that will do what what we need, but I thought I would post here to double check before starting out. So here’s the deal…
I’m working with a producer out of who had 8 or 10 cameras following people for 2 days for a documentary. The main feature has been pretty well finished up using Premiere. I cut together a session that the subjects had after the event where they sat down and discussed what had been accomplished and so forth using FCP.
Now the producer wants everything that was done in Premiere to be converted over to Final Cut, so we can do more work with the footage, creating trailers and most likely a DVD and so on, titling, minor tweaks, etc, things his Premier editor doesn’t have time to do. This was all done pro bono, so there isn’t any budget to go find a system with Premier on it, and I don’t think there was very much of a plan for what to do with everything after it was shot other than “just get it cut”.
Everything was shot DVX 100 (I think A) and we’ve got all the tapes. Would the easiest way to re-create the project in Final Cut be to export an EDL and re-capture? Is there an easier way? And if instead of re-capturing we wanted to just take the final product from Premiere and bring in to FCP, what is the best way to do so? Use Compressor to change Premiere’s .AVI files to something that Final Cut would recognize?
Any other advice going from Premiere to FCP? I’m not exactly sure at the moment what the Producer is going to want done, or if it will end up being a mashup of cutting together the parts of the Final that he wants with some re-digitized footage, or something else altogether. He wants all the work from here on out done in Final Cut, though, and ideally wants to be able to work with all the layers and everything. I think the producer will take whatever I find out and work with it, but I’d like to hear back about what exactly our options are.
Thanks in advance for any help!
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8 Replies
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export an .edl and recapture.
That should definitely work.
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Exactly what I expected to hear, and what I told the producer last night. I’m not sure exactly what he has in mind, but I’m hoping for some solution other than re-digitizing parts of over 50 tapes that I don’t think were very well organized, and if there are other measures that won’t let us re-build the project but will get us the files we need, that might be enough. If I knew just what he needs, I’d have started asking for tapes to re-digitize already, but I hope not to need to.
Premiere exports .AVI files, doesn’t it? What would be the equivalent of say a DV50 or 8 Bit Uncompressed QT, if I were to ask for that?
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transcoding unless its uncompressed will probably
degrade the picture. even if you could do that,
the .edl import may or may not properly point
to the media files. It may require you recapture
regardless of having them on the drive because
the extension and file type is different.recapturing may end up being the biggest time
saver as crazy as that sounds. -
That is really what I expected, I’ve kept up enough on reading the COW to have been almost sure, but hey, I had to ask. We’ll see what we end up needing and doing, I’ll hopefully finish up my part tonight, and then when I meet with the producer again I’ll try to get a better handle on exactly what he needs done. Thanks for the input.
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[Randy Lee] “Premiere exports .AVI files, doesn’t it? What would be the equivalent of say a DV50 or 8 Bit Uncompressed QT, if I were to ask for that?”
Premiere does not always export AVI files. Premiere is for Mac too, and that works in Quicktime. I’m pretty sure you can export a QT from either version.
A DV50 AVI can be “re-wrapped” into a Quicktime DV50 without any degradation. There are special applications that can do this, I can’t name any offhand. Try Googling. You might not be able to retain source timecode though.
Either way you’ll still need the EDL. The only difference is you reconnect instead of recapture. Premiere can also export AAF files, which is like a modern and better version of EDL. Final Cut used to be able to import them with a plugin. Not sure you can still do that though.
I think recapturing is the easiest and possibly fastest way to go.
Sean
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An EDL is not going to bring across a lot of info like text or any grade tweaks or fancy transitions. Surely it is better to hire or buy a Premiere system than recapture or try relinking converted files. If the timecode goes astray then reconnecting converted files will not work anyway.
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One thing to consider is how much of the raw material is going to be used. Do you really need all of it? A quicker approach might be to take a rough edit and export that to a format the FCP can handle. Or take the final edit and ‘pull out’ some seconds at head and tail of each cut and export that. That way you will not have to re-sift through a lot of stuff the original editor has already rejected. And you will be sure to have takes that the director/production has approved.
cheers
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The finished product right now is somewhere around 90 minutes, I believe. And it is cut anything like how the producer wanted the part that I worked on in Final Cut, there is a cut every 10 seconds or less. I don’t think that the editor that cut it is going to have time to export everything like that, nice as it would be. It could be, though, that I could get access to a Premiere system if he could send us the files for me to use, and that I could export it all that way. I should know by end of this week what we’re going to have to do. Thanks for all the help!
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