Adobe CC for a television series!? Workflow thoughts..

[Walter Biscardi]

[Michael DeJohn] “Who has used Premiere Pro CC and the rest of the Adobe CC suite in a project of this scale and what did your workflow look like? What problems did you run into? What post production platform would you recommend in this situation?”

We’ve been cutting “This American Land” for PBS for two seasons now with Premiere Pro. First on CS6 and now up to CC. Name a camera, format and codec and it’s in that series. The Producer uses a series of stringers across the country to shoot this series and we’ve gotten every Panasonic, Canon, Sony and even RED camera footage along with all the DSLRs and GoPro footage. That’s one of the beauties of Premiere Pro. We throw it all into one timeline, natively and go.

Originally we were making the switch from 11 years of FCP to Avid when FCPX came out, but that fell apart in our attempt to do an all native workflow. PPro is handling everything we throw at it for This American Land and another series we have been cutting going on four years now, Science Nation for the National Science Foundation.

We bring everything in natively, final timelines are 1080i / 29.97, shows are currently sent to Resolve via flattened QT file, though I’ve been testing OMF / AAF with native footage workflows from CC to Resolve 10 and initial results are promising. OMF goes out to ProTools for audio mix.

All the materials are brought back into Premiere Pro for final assembly and output. It’s a breeze to cut with and while I discovered a series of Serious Errors during a recent run of work, Adobe has been addressing that situation and all should be fine on that front shortly.

We have a mix of Mac Pro and iMac for primary editing off a 100TB Small Tree shared storage array. All systems are connected via 1Gig and 10gig Ethernet, no fibre or control software necessary. We actually have 24 computers connected to the SAN from our librarian and project manager to the clients to the actual workstations. Makes it super easy to manage and edit a series.

[Michael DeJohn] “I’ve searched high and low for a solid, full bodied workflow using the Adobe CC and come up kind of empty handed. I’m interested by applications like Prelude and how all of this could work for our post team but want to make sure we go about it the most efficient way possible. “

Adobe has been putting out success stories for a while and on my various Blogs I did some extensive posting on our transition from FCP to Premiere Pro. It hasn’t been flawless but for our needs, PPro is working out really well for broadcast.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Michael Hendrix]

Walter, just curious, are you considering switching from Resolve to Speedgrade with the next CC update?

Just wondering with a true roundtrip workflow, will people consider the switch.

[Michael Dejohn]

Thank you for your reply, Walter! Apparently I was looking in the wrong places! I’m encouraged to hear of your success in using Premiere on that series.

[walter biscardi] “All the materials are brought back into Premiere Pro for final assembly and output. It’s a breeze to cut with and while I discovered a series of Serious Errors during a recent run of work, Adobe has been addressing that situation and all should be fine on that front shortly.
“

Could you elaborate about your “SERIOUS ISSUES” a bit more?
And are you using any other applications in the CC suite in your productions? i.e. Prelude, Story for transcripts?

Best,
M

[Rupert Howe]

Hi Michael,

While we’re still mostly using FCP7 in-house here in BBC Bristol, we’re cutting a few things on Premiere CC. We’ve just started cutting a major natural history series with approx 1800 hours of native Red Raw 4K & 5K (approx 250TB). It’s still early days, and we’ll be going for months over several edits – but in week 3, so far so good. The edits are using top spec Mac Pros with 48GB RAM, Quadro 5000 cards and Red Rocket cards, connected to an XSAN via 8Gb fibre.

With this amount of media, even with proxies, FCP7 would really groan.

We’ve had other shows that have always used FCP who have used Premiere CC successfully, some in combination with After Effects. These have been using slightly lower spec Mac Pros, and their media is generally mostly Sony XDCAM and Canon XF.

We had another series that tested with Premiere CC, but had their OB & FCP workflow down so tight that it was hard to see the advantages of switching at the moment. This was complicated by a multicam cutting issue in version 7.0.0 and 7.0.1 that I think will be fixed in 7.1, which affected some editors but not others.

All these shows have had their media managed carefully before going into Premiere – generally by rewrapping P2 and XDCAM and XF media to native Quicktimes and renaming them. Most of this is still done in FCP Log & Transfer or Sony tools because Prelude & Media Encoder do not have any tools for rewrapping. Native rewrapping to Quicktimes makes each clip into a single, uniquely named file without transcoding – which is easier to manage than a cluster of files locked inside a full complex card structure. This helps subsequent media movement, relinking, consolidation, finishing and archive requests, and because you’re not transcoding there’s no generational quality loss from the native card media.

Theoretically you take a performance hit with Quicktimes, but we’ve not seen it. If anything, the Long GOP codecs inside Quicktimes seem to work better than in their original card structures.

Last year we cut a natural history show on CS6 – The Great Bear Stakeout – 2 x 60 mins, with 10 file/camera formats, 5 framerates, mix of 1080 and 720, a total of 800 hours of footage and 25TB of storage. With very little time for preparation, we cut successfully for 90 days, sharing on an XSAN to 5 Mac Pros.

All the major software issues and feature requests we had in CS6 were fixed in CC.
Notable issues were: large project sizes (2GB) & related crashing, audio sync issues via external video, long save & load times, autosave failing a couple of times, Long GOP media playback stuttering, project indexing, 3 way colour corrector black input slider not working properly with CUDA.
Notable feature requests were: lack of track mixer, dupe detection, through edit markers and timecode overlay.
The only big thing not addressed so far is the lack of GPU acceleration for 3rd party plugins/effects.

The major workflow things to watch out for, which you should still look out for in CC, were:

1) Ingest & naming
We couldn’t rewrap & rename, as described above. They only decided to come in-house to cut on Premiere 2 weeks before the edit. The native media had been logged on drives, and wasn’t named and organised the way we’d have liked. We had to take camera card folders (without rewrapping as described above) and so folders and clips didn’t have unique names. CS6 relinking was so bad that if clips went offline, it would prompt you for “C0001.mxf” without any clue to which of a thousand C0001.mxfs it was, or where the original path was. This is much better in CC. Duplicate card folder names led to a relink & consolidation & export problem at the end – see below.

On the other hand, doing it this way meant that we imported/ingested all the 25TB/800 hours in a day, after copying it to our XSAN. They’d spent 4+ months transcoding to ProRes Quicktimes for FCP. So that’s a big theoretical saving from FCP. Rewrapping to native Quicktimes and renaming, when we do that, takes a little longer, but is massively quicker than transcoding.

2) Clip IDs
We used a master import project to share out projects to all your editors, producers & users. That gives all the clips one unique clip ID, which Premiere will recognise when sharing sequences. Otherwise, you can end up sharing sequences which bring along all their master clips alongside them, making your projects messy and full of duplicate master clips.
Another tip – also useful for FCP – is to keep your Rushes folders at the top of your bin structure, above the sequences. This helps Premiere check the Rushes for matching master clips in sequences. It’s more useful when importing XMLs, or fixing master/affiliate clip links in FCP.

3) Frame rate interpreting
We had 5 different frame rates, all of which have to be manually interpreted to 25fps for our 25fps sequences, using Modify > Interpret Footage. However, this frame rate interpretation seems to get lost at various points – eg by exporting XMLs or sharing Projects. You have to watch out for it – what happened was that editors would sometimes use 24 or 30 or 50 or 60 media in a 25fps sequence, which then had to be fixed by reinterpreting and eyematching. Given that natural history is full of crazy framerates, we have to stay on top of this all the time.

4) Getting the native media out
In this case, taking it to Baselight at an external facility was tricky in CS6 because after you consolidate the project, relinking the media at the other end in CS6 was too hard – the relinking is much improved in CC. Another thing that hurt was duplicate naming of the containing folder for camera cards. If you have cards from an XF305 and P2 in this folder structure, for instance:
20120612 > P2 > 20120612_CARD1 > CONTENTS
20120612 > XF305 > 20120612_CARD1 > CONTENTS
Then when Project Manager consolidates your final sequence and copies out the media, Premiere will copy both the P2 and the XF305 clips (and other formats if there are any) into the same folder called 20120612_CARD1, creating a hybrid card folder structure all jammed together inside the CONTENTS folder!

This is generally not a problem for us, as every file and folder we use is is carefully individually named, but in this case it was a pain.

As mentioned above, generically named files in native card folder structures are going to be a pain for us too, given the amount of media we manage in the edit and the archive – we’re working on solutions for that.

5) Audio track export to OMF
For Great Bear Stakeout in CS6, this was fine – the single unencapsulated OMF with separate audio went into Pro Tools fine.
For other productions in CC we have had issues with exporting OMFs when stereo and mono files are mixed in standard tracks and crossfades are added between them. Pro Tools wants to make everything mono, and doesn’t like the transitions between these files.
We tried just using Mono tracks – but unfortunately this means that you have to change levels and effects separately on the left and right channels – you can’t link them.
We have had other issues with unencapsulated OMFs not linking properly in Pro Tools. But other times when it’s been fine. The solution to this is to export multiple encapsulated OMFs below 2GB, as you have to do in FCP.
Finally, there’s a weirdness with multicam audio, when preparing for the OMF – when you enable it, the audio can disappear – when you flatten it, it reappears, but sometimes from the wrong camera. We suspect this is to do with the way the multicam source sequence is made in the first place, but have been unable to recreate it reliably.

6) USB Microphone for Voiceover
This is a silly ongoing saga. You have to create your own Aggregate Device in Audio/MIDI Setup. Premiere will create its own, but you cannot set the sample rate or drift control in it, and you can get some weirdness. Also, you should set a keyboard shortcut for recording voiceover, so you can press one key instead of clicking 2 buttons.

I could go on with a list of minor things, but those are the main ones and I’ve already banged on too long. Editors have picked it up with little or no training. We’ve got to the point where the main things they complain about there being no picture of the keyboard in Keyboard Shortcuts, and there being no way to set duplicate keys for the same command, and occasionally losing a key they’ve mapped. So it’s doing its job as a broadcast edit tool.

There’ll no doubt be things specific to your media and processes which you’ll have to troubleshoot, since they work differently from FCP or Avid. We are testing import, sequences and exports all the time.

We’ll be testing more with FCPX too – the editors who use it say it makes editing fun again, and we need to do more work on how it fits with our requirements – but once you know what to look out for, we have already shown that Premiere CC can work well as a replacement for FCP7.

Rupert

– – –
Rupert Howe
Production Workflow Lead
Support Partners (UK) Ltd at BBC Bristol Digital Village
https://support-partners.com/

[Frank Tourv]

Guess will chime in on this, i work at a TV studio (food and travel channel, but in french).

– Footage comes in usually from Canon 5D mkiii. We use a Teranex 24TB SAN system, which is slow and cumbersome with 20min + projects. Its a leftover from the previous administrators that we are stuck with… Anyhow, h264 is uneditable because of the slowness of the system – we therefore have to convert h264 to Prores422LT via Prelude(rename things/add metadata) at the same time while we are at it.

– Once converted, in PPro it runs smoothly. Program is nice and i dont have much too say, there is only one issue : OMF exports and multicam. Multicam audio cannot be exported to OMF(protools doesnt open it). Audio then as to be flatten which sometimes doesnt keep the same timecode, crashes PPro and in general is a pain in the ass. Multicam sequence should be video only, audio should be kept to standard tracks and not multicamaudio at all costs(which is more trouble).

– Export to mpeg2mxf and we are set

The only issue with the workflow is def. the audio thing. If you have to deal with a lot of audio tracks and music a lot(therefore making protools crucial), i would back off until they fix the multicam/audio things.

Aside from that, its rolling

[Kara Stephens]

Hey Michael DeJohn , what did you ever figure out as far as work flow? I’m producing a similar show and am thinking of moving over to Adobe and have been looking to see if Premiere is robust enough. What did you end up going with?

[Zdenek Klusacek]

Hi Rupert,

thanks for a great review, it is very useful to read about real issues. Just one thing I have read elsewhere that Premiere Pro has problem with XSAN ACL. You have not experienced any problem with rights/owners and saving projects on XSAN?

Thanks a lot.

Zdenek