Long form project suitibility

[Baz Leffler]

David

I do many doco’s for Animal Planet using Premiere 1.5 with some extremely busy timelines and it never chokes on me. Go ahead, you will never look back!

baz

[Marisu Fronc]

David-

It does get balky when you start to get into the 1000’s of clips range, or when your timeline becomes too long, especially if you have lots of layers. Media management is pretty much a nightmare when you have lots of sources (unless you LOVE scrolling endlessly). Another possible problem area is timecode – if you have both DF and NDF sources that you need to access by TC I’d give it a pass (unless you’re a LOT better than I am at converting DF to NDF or vice versa in your head – you can only have one or the other in a project, you can capture both but it converts the TC into the chosen type). If you only want a single channel of audio that is also tricky.

As far as workflow goes, I have found that long-form is really only manageable if you are VERY organized on the way in – the better sorted and ID’d your clips are the easier it will be to locate them. Certainly if you aren’t comfortable with Premiere I’d expect to take significantly longer, especially as there are often 3 or 4 places to do things (like adjust audio levels).

You also need to consider disk space – you need to leave as much free space as you use or risk crashing and burning, so if you have 200GB of media in the job you need at least 200GB free. This could be a serious consideration with the overhead HD requires.

slainte,’
marisu

[David Cherniack]

[marisu fronc] “You also need to consider disk space – you need to leave as much free space as you use or risk crashing and burning, so if you have 200GB of media in the job you need at least 200GB free. This could be a serious consideration with the overhead HD requires.”

Hey, Marisu, I know about the scrolling Project manager blues – Gawd you really wonder who input on the design of the project window – but I’m not aware of the double your storage requirement. What’s with this? I also hate the audio conforming thing into a non-standard file format.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Marisu Fronc]

David –

The double the space thing is necessary if you ever want to consolidate through project manager (not that I’ve ever gotten it to work, but theoretically it needs double the space). However, I noticed that even without trying to consolidate when I got over the half-way point on space the project becomes more and more sluggish (beyond the regular freezes, etc) and begins to act more erratically than usual. One biggie I’d warn against is auto saving, every time it auto saves while it’s trying to render it freezes forever and eventually you end up back on the desktop – manual saves eliminated that particular bone of contention at least.

One particular workflow no-no that drives me bonkers is the inability to pull a clip from the timeline to the source viewer and reuse it – you need to relocate it in the bins, also if you cover the video you can’t get it back simply by pulling the clip back into the bin – you only get the audio (even if they are linked) – again you need to re-edit it from the bin.

The bottom line is that Premiere does work, but it’s got its own pecularities that can be especially frustrating when you are working against deadline on a long and/or complicated project, at least until you figure some of them out!!

slainte,
marisu

[David Cherniack]

[BazinoZ] “I do many doco’s for Animal Planet using Premiere 1.5 with some extremely busy timelines and it never chokes on me. Go ahead”

What do you think about Marisu’s observations – especially about the free disk space crashes?

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Larry Sherwood]

I’m not trying to be beligerent or make excuses BUT since all you do is right click on the clip in the timeline and choose “Find in Project”, I don’t find this to be THAT big of a deal.

My 2 cents
LS

Larry Sherwood
Sherwood Post Production
Austin, Texas
512 219-8721
larry@sherwoodpost.com

[Marisu Fronc]

Larry-

It’s not the finding of it that’s a problem – it’s the re-editing it in that takes more time than it should – like I said, it’s doable – but when you covered and then re-edited in the same talking head 5 or 6 times it gets REAL old REAL quick.

slaine,
marisu

[Baz Leffler]

[David Cherniack] “What do you think about Marisu’s observations – especially about the free disk space crashes?”

When doing doco’s there are not normally many layers so it really isn’t an issue. “Free disk space crashes?” – dunno about that one either. But maybe it is my technique that avoids these issues.

What I do is digitise all the tapes complete in DV mode as “off line”; that way I get about 30 x 40 min digibeta tapes into a 300G firewire drive (normally we have about 50 tapes per doco).

After the off line is complete I use the project manager to create a new “trimmed” version onto another firewire drive as and archived backup. Then I do another project manager to create a version of the project MINUS the media (Premiere creates media for this version if any clip has no reel number so anything that was captured manually gets copied across eg timeline vo records etc).

I then take this “trimmed minus media” project into one of our uncompressed Premiere Pro systems and create a new project and import the off line project. Ten all I have to do is batch capture the off line media and I have an uncompressed on line version of the doco. Out to digibeta it goes!

I hope that helps with what you are trying to do.

Baz
(ps. we also use Premiere Pro for doing multi layered compositing and again, not too many problems but remember, the capture card plays an important roll with a lot of this stuff)

[David Cherniack]

Baz, a couple of questions.

When you go to on-line doesn’t PPro re-capture all your clips – not just your trimmed versions? I understand that’s what it presently does(!?)

How do you manage the seperate audio track issue raised below in the “Except everything we need” thread – or because it’s animal planet the need to work with two recorded mono tracks in sync just doesn’t arise that much?

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Mike Cohen]

I agree the workflow takes some getting used to.

For example in the Media 100, let’s say I have 6 source tapes. I digitize them all at low-res (at 20 kb/frame you can fit a boatload of video on a drive), make my selects on a timeline, drag the new clips to an empty bin, do my offline edit, then batch digitize the program at hi-res.

You can essentially do that in Premiere except for the low-res offline – hey every software is different. But the effect controls and multiple tracks more than makeup for the adjustments in workflow.

Mike