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Keeping your project clean, responsive and stable on large HD projects.
I’ve started a gig on a documentary series. Mostly HDV edited on Premiere CS4. Each episode is already at a rough-cut stage by their last editor, and now I have to come in and finish everything basically.
I’ve worked with Premiere on and off for a bit, so i know my way around it. What i want to know is the do’s and dont’s to make large projects stay stable and responsive.
Each episode is handed on it’s own HD, weighing over 700 gigs. It had tons of duplicated media, duplicated music files, unused files, half-done renders, badly named files and poorly kept back-ups. Inside the project, there where nested sequences of nested sequences everywhere, bad timeline settings, poorly named bins, etc. Obviously, it was impossible to edit anything.
I copied everything to a HD of my own, unplugged the original HD they handed me and spent a day cleaning everything up, deleting unused media, and making a trimmed “project manager” version that was just 70 gigabytes. Then i cleaned up the project from inside Premiere, assigning different tracks for graphics, lower-third graphics, subtitles, video tracks, b-roll, audio, music, audio effects, etc. THen i cleaned up and reconnected everything. Backed up the project files to my main computer HD and to a fourth thumbdrive I keep just for project files. So far, so good. Project is running smoothly.
In FCP i’d convert every external audio clip to AIFF before importing, and id scale and convert every image, photo or whatever to one unified timeline-friendly size and format. I assume i should do the same with premiere, but is there anything else im missing? I’ve seen huge projects in premiere turn into nightmares because of bad habits such as using compressed audio, mixing framerates and all that, and I intend to avoid all of it. Any tips?
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