Premiere CC: has anyone here used it for historical documentaries and similar archival-heavy projects?

[Doug O’connor]

Hi,

I am fairly new to Premiere Pro, having worked on Avid and FCP for many years. I am finishing a long-form historical documentary with hundreds of archival shots, mostly stills but some moving images as well.
The sequence currently has low res temp archival, and I now have the hi-res masters to match in. I would like to do this without having to re-make the moves on the stills, and without having to go through the sequence shot by shot. Is there a good work-flow to find and replace these elements?

I could do it all manually, but there must be some ways to make this easier.
Can I create a bin view that I can sort by elements and do my swaps there?
Please keep in mind I am still learning the capabilities of Premier.
I appreciate any suggestions you may have.

Doug
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[Jamie Pickell]

I worked on many of the videos that are now in the Smithsonian’s new Museum of African American Culture and History and we used Premiere for all our editing. As you can imagine we used a large amount of archival film and stills that came in all kinds of flavors and sizes. I did onlined most of my offline edits so I have experience with most of your questions. I’ll try and answer them below.

1. I haven’t used EditShare so I can’t speak to that specifically.

2. As with most screener clips, the timecode is garbage so you’ll need to eye match the shots. I’ve done this multiple times and have gotten pretty fast at doing this. You’ll run into the same issue regardless of which NLE you use.

3. Do yourself a favor and spend the $99 on Intelligence Assistance Sequence Clip Reporter. You export an XML of your sequence and it will take it and kick out an AEDL (annotated edit decision list). The APs and Producers love it. What used to take hours can now be done in seconds. You will have a very clean Excel spreadsheet with all the info you need.
https://www.intelligentassistance.com/sequence-clip-reporter-cc.html

4. You shouldn’t have any issues get a file to your color correction system of choice. I’ve found that each colorist has their own specific way they want something delivered. Sometimes it’s a video file with an EDL, sometimes with an XML and sometimes it’s the file with all the edits added back in with transitions and then media managed with the project and handed off (much more involved, but not the place to go into the specifics).

5. Haven’t used Filemaker Pro, so not sure. We barcoded all of our media and with the barcode could designate what assets were low rez and what were high rez. I believe we used Google Docs.

6. The biggest issue, and this is just Premiere in general, is that if you have a lot of assets (media, render files, cache files, etc.), then you need to have A LOT of RAM on your system. An iMac with 32GB of RAM will start choking after 12,000 assets (had a problem a couple of years ago and posted about it on the Cow, you can search for it if you’re interested). My personal system has 64GB of RAM which allows me to cut a documentary with a lot of assets quite comfortably.

7. Using stills in Premiere is pretty easy and to replace the low rez with the high rez is a piece of cake because of the way Adobe treats the position parameters. Place a low rez, small image on a timeline and you have to increase the size to get it to fit the screen then make your moves on it as usual. Once you get the high rez version, place it on the layer above, drop the opacity of it down to 50%, copy the motion attributes of the low rez and paste them on the high rez. The moves will be identical, but now the sizing is way off. This is where dropping the opacity comes in handy. Go to your first keyframe on the high rez, now adjust the size so that the high rez matches exactly with the low rez. Do this with each sizing keyframe and you’ll have a perfect replica of your move. Bring the opacity back to 100 and you’re good to go. So much easier than when you had to completely rebuild the move in FCP.

Hope this helps,
Jamie Pickell
Freelance Editor

[Doug O’connor]

Jamie,

That helps a lot. And the sequence clip reporter looks great.
I can’t believe I have never come across it.

Many thanks,

Doug
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[Dan Callahan]

I’ll go through Point by point to the best of my knowledge

1) Does it work smoothly with EditShare so multiple editors can work together?

I’m not familiar with EditShare, but Adobe just implemented Team Projects in CC2017, so that might be a good place to look to see if it’s a fitting replacement.

2) How reliable and straightforward is the offline/online workflow (so that screener footage can be replaced by master footage, etc.)?

The proxy workflow is essentially the same as FCP or Avid, you can ingest the footage and set it up to proxy out to h.264 automatically, uncompressed, etc. Relink once you’re ready to output the final, essentially the same as FCP.

3) Associate producers and archival researchers often ask me for EDLs of the latest cut (which I clean up in MS Word to make more readable). How reliable is EDL export from a complex Premiere project?

We have done EDL export for several programs, no issues outside of plugin compatibility and things like that.

4) We often work with online houses that rely on Avid Symphony for color correction. Is that a no-go for a Premiere project? Or is there some way to get from Premiere into Symphony? If not, is Resolve the preferred tool?

Premiere has Lumetri and Speedgrade for Grading. I’m not familiar with Symphony, but that may not be a compatible option with Premiere. Avid is a direct competitor so I wouldn’t bet on Adobe trying to get cross platform compatibility solid. EDL or XML output is still your best bet.

5) What other issues and problems have you faced in doing this?

Nesting is a bit of an issue, but as someone who came from FCP, I think there are so many ways that Premiere has beaten Final Cut 7 in terms of the functionality they offered and how they implement it across their programs. My boss is actually an Avid certified editor who worked on Avid for over 20 years, he went over to Premiere due to cost and the streamlining of so many different elements under one umbrella of programs. What used to take 5 programs across 5 different manufacturers has been consolidated down to one company offering a single suite of programs. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than Avid’s habit of charging thousands of dollars per feature set.

6) On the flip side, what are the real advantages?

Native compatibility with After Effects is a huge advantage, especially for docs. It would have been a dream back in the FCP days to be able to see a live preview comp of your project with effects and everything without having to output to an intermediate. It really is hugely beneficial towards getting a completed project all under one system. Also, a lot of codec support and the ability to composite in linear color using Lumetri. The list goes on. It’s absolutely a fundamental shift from Avid, but if you’re familiar with FCP then you’re already in the ballpark.