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Large number of angles (multi-cam)
I’m editing a music video I shot a few weeks back. It uses 16 different tracks of the band playing from different angles, different motion (steadicam), and closeups. I’ve got all the tracks synced to the music in a timeline. But stupid me (though I sorta knew this was coming), even with a professional editing workstation (though it’s a few years old now), it just can’t handle the load. I’m not sure any computer could, really. It’ll play maybe 2 seconds at a time, then seize up for 10.
So I’m wondering what my options are. The clips are AVCHD MTS files, which aren’t quite native to premiere (yellow line with mercury playback engine on). Is there a way to render out each clip individually, so it’ll play with little overhead in the multi-cam monitor?
If all else fails, and the preview monitor just isn’t an option, what are some good alternative processes to editing a large number of synced clips?
Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com -
1 Reply
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Got it! Proxy! Never had to do proxy editing before, since my work computer has always been pretty responsive and our engineers have always updated it if it starts getting slow (I should ask them to do so soon).
Before I go into detail, I just want to ask a quick question upfront: I want to find the most CPU efficient codec I can possibly have. I’m running Windows, if it makes any difference. So I’m thinking AVI 640×480 with Microsoft Video 1? Or would QuickTime JPEG/PNG be even better? Curiously, since it’s being done in the style of a silent film, the final version will be 4:3. I’m editing in 1440×1080. I ran a bunch of tests before I started this project to make sure each step along the way worked (in Premiere and After Effects), that paid off because I haven’t been faced with any gotchia’s… well, except for this!
I’m going to have to be a little careful because this video uses a bit of framerate trickery. I shot at 60p with the musicians playing the song at 2/3rds speed, then told Premiere the files were actually 90p, dragged them into a 30p sequence, and the result is 3-frame skip with an old silent-film-sped-up look that syncs with the original track. I’ve synced all the footage and it looks great, worked perfectly! Unfortunately, I may have to do some extra work with the proxy editing, since Premiere’s probably going to try and re-establish the actual framerate of the proxy files. Ahhh, I’ll re-encode them at 20fps, then load them into Premiere and tell them they’re 30fps, that way they’ll be smaller and more efficient.
This would actually be hell on normal editing, but with multicam I can get away with some things. Because of the framerate trick, I’m not going to be able to follow the normal proxy procedure of relinking the original clips. I’ll be better off Alt-dragging the clips onto their HD twins and vice-versa. I’ll need to extend the start time of every clip to its very beginning when doing this, because alt-dragging doesn’t respect the original In/Out points. But since we’re in multi-cam, that’s not much of a problem! I can just slide the entire sequence out and pull back the in points on all clips together.
Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com
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