Best Workflow for Professional Finishing?

[William Meese]

Short answer: It varies with the online house. Best to have a long conversation with them now about what they expect and what they need. Include the editor.

Long answer: Your concern is valid. Moving projects between platforms has never been easier but is never perfect. The more complex the project, the more overhead the transition costs. Avoid it and you save money.

If the only reason to offline with Premiere is mixed sources, ask the editor to consider Avid for offline too. Its media management and editing strengths outweigh Premeire’s advantage in handling native formats, and the transition will be minimized.

If the editor isn’t strong in Avid, I would not ask her to deal with an unfamiliar NLE. Ask the online house what they expect for the transition.

Does the online house offer Premiere finishing?
How complex is the offline edit? There’s a point where the benefits of just transcoding everything outweigh the benefits of staying native, even if it means 6 TB of transcoded online HD.
How much online polishing? If there’s significant polishing in the Avid online they’ll probably transcode the delivered sequence anyway.

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks William. I’m going to try and talk with a likely post house Monday.

If we do transcode before editing what would be a good Codec that would be easy on the data load given that we will be on-lining eventually?

Thanks.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Morten]

I am working on a large documentary, also with 100+ hours of footage – Panasonic P2, Sony EX, C100, and some Smart phone footage. During the 2 years of production I have edited a lot of sequences, first on FCP7 and recently on PremierePro. But now we are bringing in an editor, and this means moving to Avid.
Unfortunately this also means manually resyncing of all edited sequences, since Avid needs to transcode to DnX format on such a large project (AMA is not stable enough). We have used more than 6 weeks transcoding, and at least a week to re-establish the edits that I have done.

So it is important to make the right decision about what system to edit on. If you choose to edit on Premiere, do update to CC since it offers better performance with C100 footage (but still needs to manually interpret footage for Progressive frames). You could use Prelude to make editing notes and transcode everything to ProRes or DNX for better transition to colour grading.

– No Parking Production –

Adobe CC, 3 x MacPro, 3 x MbP, Ethernet File Server w. Areca ThunderRaid 8…. and FCPX on trial

[Walter Biscardi]

If the Post house is using Premiere Pro, no reason to transcode anything. BUT you have to be VERY well organized with all of your media elements.

As others have suggested, talk to the Post House that will be completing the project NOW before you do ANYTHING. Don’t even organize your footage yet until you talk to them. Each Post house has a way they prefer to organize a project and their workflow through to finish. You want to set up your project to their needs.

We always try to talk to producers and other editors who will finish with us before they touch one frame of footage.

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

Southeast Creative Summit, Returning in 2014!
Foul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People.

Blog Twitter Facebook

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks Walter, I appreciate your chiming in. And I get the message that we must talk to the Post House. The facility is not entirely locked, but there is a front runner and I will try to talk to them tomorrow and give the forum some sense of what they say.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[William Meese]

If you do decide to transcode for offline, Avid’s DNxHD should ease the transition to online. I’d rather use more storage space and ease the CPU load, especially with a large project.

I just stepped into a series — 26 half-hour episodes — with all media on a 4 TB external FW800 drive. Don’t go there; invest in a good raid tower.

And I’ll second Morten’s recommendation for the CC version; they’re making specific improvements in managing media.

Let us know how you go.

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks for the info. We will be working in Premier CC, but currently with some old hardware – MacPro 1,1 – there is an internal debate about the efficacy of buying a new iMac, what’s difficult to know is how much of the editing we will end up having to do ourselves versus sending out which is the goal.

We spoke with the Technical Supervisor at the Post House we are most likely to use. They haven’t worked with Premier in the past but he is very familiar with it and didn’t see a problem. He also thought it would be okay to keep MOST things in their native codec. He emphasized that they always transcode when working in house in order to keep the cpu load down and avoid possible hiccups, but he understands why that is impractical for us and wasn’t really worried about it. He offered to do a test in their conform and color correction systems when we have a short piece edited, I think that’s a grand idea.

He did (wisely) instruct us to transcode all of our odd-ball material, that is to say material that doesn’t have it’s own time-code or isn’t in our standard frame rate (23.978). For us that means some limited iPhone and Handycam material as well as a fair amount of proxy stock footage material. He suggested either DNxHD or ProRes HQ as the intermediate codec. But the different variants of H264 from pro cameras he thinks we can leave native.

I’ll try to update how this goes as we proceed.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA