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Adobe Premiere CC, C300 MXF, Pluraleyes Sync, & Metadata Issue
I’m having a hell of a time. Here’s hoping someone can help me with this problem. I’m working on a short film in my spare time for a friend who shot 1 camera on the c300, and Dual System Sound, but there is about 60 hours of footage, so its not a small project by any means.
So as I’ve come to find out over the last month or so, Pluraleyes (even though they bill them selves as having MXF support) does not support Canon C300 files at all. The video doesn’t come in, and the audio has converting issues, this is even on the lastest 3.2.0 version that came out 5 days ago. I’ve talked to Red Giant’s customer service line, and they are no help at all. They just recommend their “Render and Replace” workaround, which I have followed to a T but doesn’t make a difference, and my files will not sync.
So I recently upgraded to Adobe CC, which has a lot better support for MXF files as it and Media Encoder both seem to interpret the spanned clips correctly, so I just spent around 5 days, putting log notes into the metadata field (using the Scene, Take Number, Comment, Description, and Log Note fields), noteing good takes with the good metadata checkbox, and watching footage down. So then I went to start merging files using the new Merge by Audio waveform option, and I realized that in a complete reversal to what I had heard on twitter from several Adobe Employees (And please correct me if I’m wrong I would LOVE to be wrong on this one) there doesn’t seem to be a way to select a folder of video files, and audio files, and to create merged clips from the respective video and audio files, you have to do it one at a time.
Now this might be ok if I only had a couple hours of footage, but I’m doing this in my spare time and I can’t (read i’m not willing) do this by hand for 3 – 4000 video files I am working with.
So my next option that I was mulling over today, is just starting from the beginning, and converting the mxf video files to a format that pluraleyes can understand (ProRes), but as I was doing some tests for outputting prores files from Premiere, I realized that I wanted to bake in the metadata that I entered on the MXF files to the Prores Files so I will not redo 5 days of work. Now If you go to the Export Media Window, there is a button on the bottom that says Metadata, which opens up a new window where you can tell it to bake in the metadata in the file itself, or in a sidecar xmp file or in both, you can also tell it if you want it to include all metadata, no metadata, or some subset of the metadata you entered. So I chose to bake the metadata into the sidecar & the file itself, and I went in and chose to Preserve All Metadata.
But when I import the file back into premiere once it is converted to ProRes, it only saves (of the Scene, Take Number, Comment, Description, and Log Note fields that I entered in) the Scene, & Take Number!
So now i’m stuck with 2 awful options. either merge 3-5000 clips together by hand in premiere, or Convert all the files to ProRes (there by tripling the amount of space I need), and then having to spend another 4-5 days re-entering the log notes and good takes.
I’m pretty frustrated at this point, and just hoping that someone has a better idea then I do at this point, or can see some step I’m missing to make this work!
Thanks y’all!
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2 Replies
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60 hours of footage for a short film… I’d be furious at your friend. I only have productions hitting this much after 30 day feature shoots, sometimes with two cameras in this mix.
Syncing audio and video is a time consuming process. Even with Plural Eyes, you’ve still only created a timeline which you have to go back to and create merged clips.
With that said, as far as I know you cannot merge multiple clips at once in Premiere CC. I can only assume the mechanism for this was to avoid confusion from having one audio clip span through three video clips. Premiere’s matching speed seems insanely fast, makes me think it scans the beginning of each clip selected and matches as soon as it feels it has a confident match.
You could sync as you also watch and review footage, the 60 seconds it takes to select the corresponding audio and hit merge feels like less of a chore spread out over the course of it all.
Depending on the desired length of this “short”, if it were 15 minutes I may consider syncing after picture lock. If it’s a 45+ minute short then it may be more appealing to do a few days of slave labor and sync everything up front.
Another syncing alternative is WooWave. I don’t know if it properly supports C300 spanned clips.
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Are you importing your files directly from the contents folder that comes off of the camera?
I’ve been having some issues with the metadata saving to large 20GB+ MXF files that get synced in Pluraleyes, but these files have been merged together in the Canon XF utility, not within my NLE.
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