Premiere Pro CS6 “Make reference movie” equivalent to Final Cut Pro 7?

[David Mcgavran]

Hi John,

I agree with your points. If you want to render to a proxy up front, and you want to continually create preview files in a matching format, and you want to go back out to the same format then ref file export is very powerful. I do see the need for this workflow. As Walter mentions most of the feedback we get is people using broadcast formats that work natively with smart rendering or use native formats like h.264, red, XAVC, avc intra etc. With Mercury GPU and other options waiting to the end while a workflow adjustment is usually a win. Happy to continue the conversation. I am actually interested in a simple rendered EDL type workflow that would replace ref movies. Anybody out there have feedback on something in that area.

Cheers

Dave

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David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
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[John Heagy]

We are still an offline/online house so once the Avid proxy is made we have plenty of time to produce ProRes files, so there’s no penalty in our case.

We shoot sLog so that all needs to get a one pass color correction. There are other factors that prevent us from using the camera media directly.

Our deadlines are frankly ridiculous. Shows are fibered out with less than 15min to spare routinely. We really need to do everything possible to smooth the online process.

We also rename and meta-tag the files so they can be linked via our custom software. Filenames like 2E001.mxf in the case of P2 are not good enough and will eventually repeat. This process also allows for partial file restore.

John

[Erik Lindahl]

There are situations where smart rendering doesn’t solve the same problem. We’ve done a few web projects with 500+ edits of 4 minute music videos.

– Reference movies will take at the most a few 100 MB’s
– Smart render to disk will even with a lower bandwidth ProRes format take 200-300 GB’s.

Also, with reference media I might have X sources needing updates. I my case I might have the same logo at the end of these 500 edits.

– In the reference scenario I update one media asset and all 500 edits will be updated automatically at the same time.
– In the smart render to disk scenario I still have to write and / or render 2000 minutes and a few 100 GB’s of data to disk.

I’d imagine referenced media can be used in more scenarios as well. Yes, it’s true the above requires us as creators to be careful HOW we create our assets and edits. I wouldn’t go mixing H264, R3D and ProRes in the same edit. I probably wouldn’t even mix two native QT-codecs and esp. not mix different frame sizes or frame rate.