-
Speedgrade as a Conform Utility for Premiere
I’m trying to fine tune a commercial finishing pipeline and would like to put this out to the Creative Cow community to see what ideas people might have about it.
I use Premiere and After Effects (with the Immigration script from aescripts.com) to conform EDLs or XMLs to DPX Sequences for finishing in Premiere, AE and Nuke. Premiere is the timeline for work, export and delivery to tape.
The big bottleneck in the pipeline is conforming. Smoke 2013 and Hiero both scream through conforms because they can take an XML or EDL with offline media and very quickly match it to DPXs using the metadata (reel names, timecode, etc) embedded in the DPXs. Those apps also have very good processes for comparing the conform to reference media.
Speedgrade is EXTREMELY close to providing this same functionality. It conforms an EDL to DPX sequences as quickly and easily as either Smoke 2013 or Hiero. The UI is a little clunky and it doesn’t seem to have any tools for comparing the conform to a reference file, but it’s miles better than AE with Immigration.
The problem is, just like Smoke and Hiero, there’s no way to get the conform to Premiere except as a self-contained DPX sequence, which does me no good if my clients need to make any changes to the cut, which happens all the time. My hope originally was that XML would handle this. However, the XML standards that are out there are all FCP-based and don’t properly link to image sequences. You’ll only get the first frame of the sequence playing as a still for the duration of the original clip in the cut. There’s an extensive discussion on this here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/365/202
I’m going to make – and encourage others to make – a feature request for Speedgrade to add the capacity to send a conformed timeline, with linked media, to Premiere. If that functionality arrives in a future release, or via a script for Premiere or AE perhaps where those apps could import an IRCP, then Production Premium would be an extremely full featured tool for finishing on par with Smoke.
Anyone have any thoughts or similar ideas?
Jon
-
14 Replies
-
You may want to look into using DaVinci Resolve for the time being and let it be the final stop. With Resolve you can re-conform new footage based on timecode (You can with Speedgrade too if I recall, reload the reel) which takes care of reconforming effects shots. Resolve also has ColorTrace which will apply one timeline’s color grade to another timeline based on timecode, something I don’t believe Speedgrade has a function for.
Angelo Lorenzo
Love my answer? Do me a huge favor and check out my Kickstarter project The Librarian, starring Jennie Garth of Beverly Hills 90210.
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Thanks for your response Angelo! Unfortunately I’m not using Speed Grade in this case for grading purposes. I love Resolve, but have run into the same issue with it as far as trying to use it as a hack conform module for Premiere.
I’m strictly trying to conform DPX files that were graded elsewhere (which I receive from telecine facilities like Company 3 usually and in the case of the project I’m on right now, The Mill LA) and send the conformed sequence to Premiere rather than go through the laborious shot-by-shot and eye-matching method required by conforming in AE with Immigration.
If you conform an EDL to DPX files in Resolve and try to export an XML, you’ll get an error that it can’t do XMLs for image sequence-based media, only clip-based media.
It’ll be exciting to see how far Adobe goes with Speed Grade and Premiere re: conforming. Production Premium becomes as powerful as Smoke on Mac, maybe moreso, if it can add a good conform workflow.
Jon
-
Honestly, you got me stumped. Premiere can’t relink or load image sequences on its own; bringing in an EDL is useless at that point no matter what program it comes from. The only way I can see it working is how you have it: Conform in After Effects with the help of the immigration script and File > Export > Premiere Pro Project.
I do agree with you, conforming is terrible currently. Speedgrade helps, but I’d hate to tackle a feature on Premiere because of it.
Angelo Lorenzo
Love my answer? Do me a huge favor and check out my Kickstarter project The Librarian, starring Jennie Garth of Beverly Hills 90210.
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
I think you can render the individual clips out of Resolve to a different codec (with possible handles) that keep the original metadata that you can link it back in a NLE.
-
Hey there,
Premiere can import image sequences as easily as After Effects (minus Immigration). Not only that, but it reads timecode, reel name, and any other metadata attached to the DPX files, just as well as Smoke or Hiero. The problem is that it can’t relink a clip-based file to an image sequence. Immigration can do this, but has been coded to only compare file names when replacing the clips with the image sequences. Since After Effects has access to metadata just like Premiere does, it seems possible that Immigration could be coded to add search parameters like reel name and timecode, in addition to file name, when replacing clips.
I’d love to see Adobe craft a conform feature, especially since Speed Grade already does this and is part of the Creative Suite and they’ve already built a Premiere to Speed Grade workflow (albeit one that generates new media). The solution might be in a Prelude-type app that only does conforming. I’d love that to pieces.
Also, for a quicker way of getting a comp from After Effects into Premiere than File > Export > Premiere Project, you can simply highlight all the clips in the AE comp and copy/paste them into a Premiere sequence. This way you’re not creating an additional project file to manage and saving a lot of keystrokes.
Jon
-
Hey there Tero,
Yes, Resolve can do this but unfortunately it doesn’t address the feature I’m searching for, which is a way of getting a conformed DPX timeline (like what Resolve can generate from an EDL pointed to image sequences), into Premiere, linking to the same media. I don’t want to create new media in this case because of file management issues. In this workflow in particular I can’t transcode into a different codec because of color management concerns. Also, I’m doing compositing in Nuke, which is optimized for working with image sequences over movies.
Jon
-
Hey Jon…
I don’t have much experience here, but would adding
“Cineon/DPX Pro for MacOSX” from Glue tools into the mix help at all?
https://www.gluetools.com/products.html
Alex
-
Thanks for the input Alex! The problem with GlueTools in this workflow is that it lets applications that don’t normally read image sequences, like FCP, read them by putting them in a quicktime wrapper. Premiere can read image sequences just fine without help. Also, I’m trying to stay completely away from Quicktime because of color issues (the infamous Quicktime gamma shift is a killer for broadcast delivery) and keeping things friendly for Nuke, which is significantly slower and crashier with clip-based media than it is with image-sequence based media. When Nuke reads in a quicktime file, it has to analyze the whole movie for every frame it plays back. So if you have a 30 frame shot, as a quicktime movie it would have to run analysis on all 30 frames to play back 1 frame.
Jon
-
At the very least, both of our analysis of the subject leads to the same conclusion:
1) Premiere needs a “this is an image sequence” checkbox when replacing media. That solves the majority of the headache. This box is missing if you try to link a clip (created by an EDL, but in general as well) to an image sequence, or if you use the replace footage command in the bin.
2) Premiere needs to look at other metadata like reel and timecode to help automate the link/replace which would make relinking large products less of a hassle. Perhaps an integration of the “Reload from folder” feature in Speedgrade.
I’m putting a feature request in for both.
Angelo Lorenzo
Love my answer? Do me a huge favor and check out my Kickstarter project The Librarian, starring Jennie Garth of Beverly Hills 90210.
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
100% agree with you Angelo. Thanks for making the feature request! Hopefully enough of us do that to push the good folks at Adobe to add this functionality.
I’d also add three things:
– Premiere should have automated relinking (ala FCP, Resolve, Speed Grade, Smoke and Hiero) by searching a directory for files matching specified criteria. Right now the manual relinking is maddening if you have to do it for a large number of files.
– Both Premiere and After Effects should be able to see image sequences as compiled sequences rather than a list of sequentially numbered files. This capability must already exist since Immigration adds this to After Effects, so it would simply (as if I know what I’m talking about) be a matter of adding “view files as sequences” (ala Nuke) option in the import and relink windows, or add a separate “import image sequence” or “relink to image sequence” option entirely. This could also be added to the media browser (which has a ton of potential vis a vis conforming).
– It would be great if Premiere had a similar import capability as Speed Grade and Resolve, where it can search a directory and its subdirectories, as specified by the user, for any media. The Media Browser already does this if it recognizes the file structure as belonging to a known camera (ala RED, Canon and Sony).
It’s oh so close as it is. I hope it’s as easy to make this happen as it seems like it should be. Thanks again for your input Angelo. Great to know I’m not the only one hoping for these features!
Jon
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up