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New to PP – Sporting Highlights – Any advice gratefully received
Hi guys,
Hoping to get some tips on general process for using AE and PP for creating and editing sports highlights. I recently took on the job of press officer for my local sports team, and one of the duties is recording and editing footage from the games.
I’m really a rookie when it comes to PP and AE – I’m just hoping you guys could offer some advice. I’ve browsed the forum, read some articles and realised, frankly, how much of a beginner I am (I don’t understand a lot of the abbreviations and shortcuts on here I’m afraid…..)
Particularly for the computing, I know the hardware isn’t the best but an upgrade is not possible. I’m sure there are a few optimisations I could make to the entire process but I’m really not sure. Happy to add any further info as required, and thanks in advance for reading this – I really appreciate it ☺
Recording equipment: Panasonic HC-VXF990
Computing equipment: Custom Laptop / Win7-64 /Intel i7-4710@2.50GHZ/ 16GB RamGoals
1) Streamline and generally improve the recording and editing process
2) Decrease encoding time if possible
3) Improve PP export reliability (having some failures – detailed below)
4) Reduce filesize of AE outputOutput Requirements
1) One file containing the entire match (end product about 100 minutes) in minimum 720 – this must be done first, soon after the match is completed.
2) One edited highlight file of about 10 minutes, containing AE effects, trims, titles in minimum 1080.Current process:
1) A 90 minute soccer match is filmed in 4k (Realising this may be a luxury I can’t afford) on a class10 memory card. With some moments before/after/halftime – around 100 minutes of footage is filmed. The output files from the camera are around 9 minutes each.
2) PP > New Project > New Sequence > Present HD720 -29.97
3) Insert files > Scale files to frame
4) Export – This is taking around 3 hours and is regularly failing – often creating a 1kb file. This could be a hardware problem but I can’t figure it out. There is enough storage space – the files are not being used during export.Moving on to the second “highlights” file
5) PP > New Project > New Sequence > Preset 1080
6) Insert files > Scale files
7) Edit – titles, trim, etc
8) In AE I have a pre-purchased set of templates for sports graphics. These are rendering in 1080 and generating massive file sizes – 5gb for a 30 second render – is this normal? RGB+Alpha selected – no other settings changed.
9) Render all AE graphics as appropriate
10) Drag output AE files in PP composition
11) Complete edit
12) Export – 10 minute file composition takes around 40 minutes to exportI’d be really grateful for any help or advice anyone could offer – happy to provide more info where necessary. Thanks everyone.
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1 Reply
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A few tips:
1) Don’t shoot in 4K if not absolutely necessary. 4K video is the equivalent of FOUR streams of 1080p. This is exponentially increasing the computing workload on the PC to process 4K and scale to 1080p or 720p. Taking way longer than a 1080p source would to export. Depending on the camera, might be recording larger files as well.
2) Rendering from AE – you are exporting UNCOMPRESSED video. Don’t do that, files are MASSIVE as you’ve already noticed. Try Cineform with Alpha (found under QuickTime), or DNxHD (.mxf) with alpha codecs for instance, these are already in Adobe software. Visually lossless compression – same quality, but much smaller file.
3) Hard drive – where are you storing the video clips? Hopefully not the C: drive, never use C: drive for video. For any video editing software, you always want to have a fast, DEDICATED hard drive for that. In your case being on a laptop, a fast external USB 3.0 drive, like a small desktop RAID (a RAID is 2 or more drives combined for more speed, in a single enclosure). RAID 0 would be common for an inexpensive 2-drive unit. Check with LaCie, G-Technology, Glyph for fast, portable RAID solutions suitable for video content work. If your laptop happens to support the new USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 ports, those drives would be even faster.
4) Exporting entire match – realizing that cameras typically break up the recording into several pieces, depending on the format the camera is recording, if you record as 1080p you *might* be able to just quickly join those pieces together into a single file without having to encode the whole works. For instance, there are lots of free software apps for this purpose – look online for “mp4 joiner” or “how to concatenate video files”, stuff like that.
5) What GPU (video card) is in the laptop? You want to make sure that the GPU Acceleration is being used in Premiere if at all possible (supported hardware required, might need some setup to utilize). This especially helps with scaling the exports.
These things should help you out
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers
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