Need Some Direction Please

[Kylee Pena]

It mostly sounds like the editing part of your workflow is fine. Are you having issues that are causing you to ask for guidance, or are you just wondering if you’re doing it correctly? Because that part sounds fine to me so far.

If you’re looking for music, one resource that a lot of people use is incompetech.com. But you’ll hear those tracks everywhere. You might look into buying some music from Digital Juice (like Stacktraxx) or using Sonicfire Pro or something like that. Things you can put a little money into and get a bit more use from.

With the After Effects part, the process you describe (taking a shot into After Effects, doing the work, exporting it, and dropping it back in) is how we used to do it before Dynamic Link offered to do that process for us (and a lot of people still do it the long way because Dynamic Link has forsaken them, or their systems can’t handle it, or both). I still think that’s a solid way to do it (as long as you do those AE comps after your edit is locked), and I even used that method for a bunch of stuff this time last year, exporting shots from After Effects as ProRes files and importing those into Premiere.

In Premiere 2014, “render and replace” was introduced, which means you can send a shot with dynamic link from Premiere to After Effects, do the work, go back to Premiere, and “render and replace” the shot, so it’s playing a flattened version instead. It’s basically automating and simplifying the old-fashioned way, so that might work for your current system.

blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
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[Ivan Myles]

Here are a couple of points to add to Kylee’s sound advice:

– If you plan to export from Premiere Pro, consider pre-processing (or, more correctly, parallel processing) the source files in AE rather than going back and forth between the applications.

– Music rights can become tricky depending on how you want to share the finished video. Royalty free agreements typically provide synchronization rights that allow music to be incorporated into a video. Many licenses also grant limited distribution rights. However, this does not necessarily mean the video can be played for other people. Depending on your situation, it might make sense to acquire public performing rights so that you can show the finished video freely.

[Brady Lovell]

Thank you so much for your reply! I haven’t had any training except for whats free on the web, and the workflow I mentioned above is what I’ve come up with after all the trial and error. It’s nice to know I’m on the right track!

I guess what concerned me the most was mixing the 60FPS and the 30FPS video clips into the same sequence. I didn’t know if that would mess anything up, or if I should do something with the “interpret footage” option, which I haven’t used and not sure what it means.

But anyways, thanks again for the prompt response!

[Kylee Pena]

Okay, I guess I do have a question. Are you editing at 60fps or 30fps? When I read your post originally, I thought you mentioned editing at 30fps, but you only mention exporting it at 30fps.

If a vast majority of your footage is 60fps, usually that’s what you’d want to choose for your sequence’s frame rate. My first instinct is that the under-the-barrels camera is kind of low-fi and not use as much in the edit? Is that right? In that case, dropping that 30fps clip into a 60fps timeline will mean Premiere will try to write the extra frames. It might look funky. But it might not, if it’s the kind of camera I’m thinking of. You could also try to use a tool like Twixtor to convert that to 60fps if you wanted.

BUT I would really consider editing at 30fps so you can utilize the extra frames in the GoPro stuff for slow motion effects. Shane Ross wrote an article about GoPro workflows that mentions how you can use interpret footage which would probably be more helpful than me trying to describe it. That would be cool, and it might make your editing life easier. But if you’re not having any difficulties, you’re probably mostly doing everything right. Yay, internet!

blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com

[Brady Lovell]

When you say “editing in 30fps”, what exactly do you mean?

I haven’t figured out how the 60fps and slow motion work together. I understand the concept (i.e. 60fps = more frames = smoother motion), but not sure if I’m editing in 60fps or 30 fps.

When I start a new project, I’ll drag my 60fps footage down to the “create new comp” button, and it creates a new sequence for me that matches the footage (60fps). Once I make all my edits and slow motion parts, I’ll then render it out to 30fps.

Does that mean I’m editing at 60fps or 30fps, and am I utilizing the extra frames correctly to get the smoothest slow mo?

You’ve been extremely helpful! MUCH APPRECIATED!!!!

[Bret Williams]

And fwiw, Digital Juice doesn’t sell music anymore. They sell subscription packages. Their old store is down and their new format is in beta. Right now the options are pilot members, which is a pretty decent deal. For $500 you get access to everything they’ve ever made. In fact, they’re coming out with about 4 -6 new products a day! Every Monday they tend to release 3 new songs, and the rest of the week they release new AE projects, backgrounds, Motion projects, Photoshop documents, etc. Their music isn’t the best, but it isn’t the worst. About the only limitation would probably be reselling it.

[Kylee Pena]

Sorry, I’m totally skipping steps in my explanation and I didn’t mean to 🙂 When you look at your sequence settings, what is your editing timebase? If you’re creating a new sequence by dragging a 60fps clip to the new sequence icon, then your editing timebase is likely 60fps.

So no, you’re not using the extra frames. You can try something like this: create a new sequence by going to file > new. In the settings, choose something like AVC Intra 100 1080P, with an editing timebase of 29.97 fps. Then drop a 60fps clip you want to do some slow motion effects on, and play around with remapping time — that allows you to have a clip that is regular speed then suddenly slows down (or the other way around). Here’s a good Adobe resource about time remapping because it’s kind of weird to do at first and I’ve always been really bad at explaining it.

But to be clear, you’re putting a 60fps clip onto a 30fps timeline, so you can use those extra frames for real slow motion. What you’re doing right now is putting a 60fps clip in a 60fps timeline, so when you slow it down, you’re decreasing the frame rate below the sequence’s timebase, which doesn’t give the best results.

Does that make more sense? Again, if what you’re doing is giving you acceptable results, that’s great. This is something to experiment with for sure.

blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com