Conforming a DPX files to a timeline

[Jon Howard]

Heya,

I’m trying to figure out a better workflow, but I have something that works pretty well and times out about the same as tape capture.

First, you can import your Premiere sequence into After Effects. Once it’s there, you’ll need a script from AEScripts.com called “Immigration.” It’s what they used to do The Social Network conform in After Effects.

Run Immigration in AE and point it to your DPX folder. It’ll see every sequence in there as discreet sequences, like the way Nuke sees them. Makes it super fast to get DPXs into AE and it would be killer if Premiere Pro had this functionality built in.

From the Immigration window you can either batch import all your DPXs (MUCH faster than going one by one in Premiere or AE without the help of the script) and copy the clips into your Premiere Project, OR, and this is slightly more awesome, replace the quicktimes in your sequence with the DPXs from the Immigration window using the “Replace” button.

The trick with this is that it won’t replace based on timecode. It does it based on filename. This is a problem because it will line up the first DPX frame with the first frame of the quicktime movie you’re replacing. Your DPX files will be in order, but it won’t match a reference file.

We’ve been conforming cuts from FCP into Premiere for finishing doing this. Our graded DPXs have 2 second handles, so we media managed the FCP sequence to offline clips with 0 frame handles. This ensures FCP doesn’t merge clips coming from the same master clip. If your original cut is in Premiere, I’d use the project manager to generate a new project based on your hero cut with offline clips and 0 frame handles and import the resulting sequence into AE.

After we do the Immigration conform in AE, we can copy and paste the layered AE sequence into a new Premiere Pro timeline and then slip each shot 2 seconds and we have a perfect conform. That’s the laborious part though. You could use an app like QuickKeys to make a keystroke based automation do this part of the process if you have to slip each shot exactly the same amount.

It’s a bit of a hack, but until Immigration or some other script can match DPX timecode to QT timecode, it seems to be the only solution in Adobe.

Hope this helps and I’d really love some other options here that don’t involve Glue Tools or any other quicktime wrapper-based solution.

One thing I’m interested in trying is to see if the color facility we use can give us a roundtrip FCP XML. I suspect not because Resolve doesn’t seem to want to generate an XML from DPX media. It gives you the error that “[clip name] has not been exported because it is frame based media.”

I’m curious to see what Smoke for Mac 2013 does with this, but at the Production Premium pricepoint, the above process isn’t a bad option.

I hope it’s clear enough to understand. Let me know if you have any questions. Have a good one!

Jon