Heavy files in Adobe Premiere

[Shane Ross]

“FULL HD” and 4K only mean frame size. Full HD being 1920×1080, and 4K…well, could be many things. 4K is 4096×2160, but is also used interchangeably with UHD, which is 3840×2160…true 16:9.

Frame size isn’t what matters…CODEC is what matters. Is it H.264, ProRes, AVCHD (h.264 variant), DNxHR, Cineform…? Those are what matter. Editing ProRes or DNxHR, for example, are pretty easy as they are “editing codecs,” they are pretty large files, but the compression allows for easy editing. Where AVCHD, MP4…H.264…isn’t all that easy to edit, while their file sizes are smaller. It takes resources to “decompress” them on the fly to play back and edit them.

So…what format of files are you getting? Will you convert them, or do you want to edit them native?

Shane
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Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Oliver Peters]

How Premiere handles these will depend on the speed of your media drives, network-attached or locally-attached or internal, and CPU/GPU processing power. In general, it does best when all media is the same or similar format – same as what FCPX considers “optimized” media. Ideally, as Shane mentioned, ProRes, DNx, and/or AVC-Intra. The more timeline effects you apply without rendering, the tougher performance becomes.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Fábio Rodrigues]

Thanks, Shane.
I’m getting mpeg, mov and avi.
I want to convert them for editing.
After that I would like to use the original files for a better quality work,
but I don’t know how to procede on this last.

[Fábio Rodrigues]

Thanks, Oliver.
Nice reel!

Should I export clip by clip?
After exporting and editing them, how to substitute for the original files?

[Shane Ross]

[Fábio Rodrigues] “I’m getting mpeg, mov and avi.”

Those are containers….just FYI. Like saying “I am getting a can, and a bottle, and a tin.” What is IN those tins? MPEG is more specific…that can be MPEG 4 or MPEG 2…so that’s a better description. But MOV…that can be H.264, or DNxHR, or ProRes, or Cineform, or any number of codecs. AVI is more limited, but still, can be H.264 or any number of codecs.

[Fábio Rodrigues] “I want to convert them for editing.
After that I would like to use the original files for a better quality work,”

Then look into the Premiere Pro PROXY workflow. Highlight all those clips and have PPro make proxies of them, something easy like ProRes Proxy or LT (if on a Mac, PCs can’t do ProRes)…if on a PC, then DNxHR LB…and then one button allows you to switch between the two.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Oliver Peters]

[Fábio Rodrigues] “Should I export clip by clip?”

Thanks for the kind words.

If you follow the internal Premiere Pro Proxy workflow, you can easily toggle between proxy files and full resolution files after the proxies have been generated. Premiere simply changes where the media clips are pointing to on your drives.

In addition, Premiere takes care of correctly tracking size changes. For example, if your originals were 3840×2160 (UHD) and your proxies are 1280×720, Premiere will calculate the math based on the original size. If you are editing in a 1920×1080 timeline, then “set or scale to size” will work as if these are the full resolution UHD files. This way, when you toggle the proxies on and off, transform settings stay correct, except that the image quality gets better when you are looking at the full resolution files.

Is that what you were wondering about?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com