Offline/Online Workflow

[Todd Kopriva]

Here’s some information about online/offline editing in Premiere Pro.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Matt Doe]

Thanks for that link!

Question though from a FCP 7 based post house perspective looking towards the future as far as our software horizon goes with FCP X being what it currently is.

Is it possible to capture from tape at a lower resolution and on the back end only capturing what was actually used in the show plus some handles in HD, perhaps using the Batch List function?

ie. using FCP 7 media manager to create an “offline” sequence of a locked show at HD resolution and batch capturing from there in HD.

Capturing the hundreds of hours of tape based material we go through for all our shows currently in post production to then compress into proxy files (and then starting the edit) is not an option given the space/time required for those compressions, even with our 150tb XSAN.

[Alex Udell]

Hi Matt…

this should be doable right now.
the specifics (codecs, etc) of the workflow will vary somewhat depending on the hardware you choose for capture from tape.

But for example, you should be able to capture long media clips in DV 25 (as an example)

Edit your sequence, then use PPro Project manager to create a new trimmed project and make it offline.
(this means the media is offline, not the project quality, Ironic I know)

then you can batch capture the clips in that project at the online resolution.

A word of caution. Make sure that all your frame rates and deck control are set up properly in the initial capture. I made that mistake once and had to manually recapture the online material. Not fun.

A suggestion is also to export a file of the offline edit and lay it in on the ONLINE timeline, just so you can do a visual match to your offline until you get a 100% confidence in your workflow.

see this:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WS1c9bc5c2e465a58a91cf0b1038518aef7-7c72a.html

[Matt Doe]

Thanks!

[Ht Davis]

Is this what you’re saying:

Capture all clips in a single timeline (captured video) to a single location (xsan or storage location; set in the project prefs), and then archive all offline (using the offline transcoding) as a single sequence transcode (thereby making a BATCH VIDEO, in one file, of all of the clips)?

For strictly theoretical purposes, great work.

A single project can be used like a database with a single sequence or many, depending on how you want it to work. If you set a single sequence up and place every video inside it, render out a preview of the clips in PROXY size (will give you a large set of files that isn’t searchable or usable on their own), you can actually speed up the output of the proxies from the initial render of the work area. You can then use the exporter to quickly (using Previews) render a full proxy to a useable file for any other work. If you make them all sub clips and tag them, you can search, render, and even add more very easily. I’m going to look into this workflow. It has potential. The only caveat I can see is the settings that denote where the previews are kept. I’ve seen two settings that affect this. One in the preferences of the app, that allows you to select where previews are kept in general, and whether or not they are kept next to the originals; and also in the project setup itself. It’s difficult to tell which would take over under which circumstances. For instance, I could keep my project file in one place (it is small enough to be on my main drive) while the files are all kept together on XSAN, I can have the project on the xsan in the same folder as the files and have both backed up recursively (several different backups). With a Raid 5 type system, a rebuild could be done at any time (but would take a while), and with both situations, there would still be a backup otherwise. The only problem would be whether or not the rendered previews would be detected and if not, how long it would take to re-render them (compression takes a while). If you split the clips across sequences with date ranges, however, this becomes less of a problem, and you can still bin a bunch of sub clips with tags for easy search and export; you just check the source of the sub clip to see if you have any rendered previews, if not, you know it will take a while to render out.

A lot of possibilities there.