Switching from FCP 7 to Adobe Premier for 10 edit stations

[Barry Cohen]

Most likely Speed Grade would be the software choice for Color Correction, unless the built in Effects Tools in Premiere satisfy the variant needed to work on the show as did FCP 3-Way Correction and RGB effects as well.

However, the show is edited on a workstation across town the the project needs to get to another workstation not connected in any way for continuing the workflow. I am eager to hear of your ideas. I wish it was as simple as collecting all the material on a removable G-Raid drive now available and hand carrying it to the other workstation.

Thanks for your responses Shane and others.

[Michael Nielsen]

There is a project management option that allows you to collect and condense projects using only content present in sequences, handy for both archiving and moving large projects between systems. You can even decide for using handles or not, although that does put a strain on re-export.

[Michael Hendrix]

Most solutions will work as long as the folder structure remains. You did not say if your workstations are PC or Mac. I have started buying these:

https://www.g-technology.com/products/g-dock-ev-thunderbolt

The dock is Thunderbolt and the drives are USB 3 when they come out. The only downside is the drives are only 1 TB. They have performed well for moving projects around.

Most projects that I work on travel to multiple locations so I will use shared storage as more of a backup tool and work off of the EVO dock. The solution you mentioned above seems like your are copying to many times. If you edit off your SAN, copy to a drive (like a G-Tech) that you can plug into your other system and edit from. This would keep you from the second transfer. After the final, as long as you haven’t created any new media, you should just be able to move project files around and re-link. Keep in mind your preview files will not go with the project files so any timelines that need rendering will have to do so.

I see your biggest challenge is organization and redundancy. Keeping everything organized will be crucial to making sure you have no missing media. I always keep a clean copy of original footage. Editing natively means Premiere is touching your original footage alot. I haven’t had any issues, but a few have had corrupted files which may not be Premieres fault, but a corrupted file is a corrupted file. A crash in the middle of any read/write function could corrupt. The good news is, keeping a copy of 35 mbps footage is much more efficient than 220 mbps ProRes.

Hope this helps some!

[Don Hertz]

Hi Barry,

We moved 15 workstations to Premiere CC from FCP 7 last year with great success. We are using shared storage (NAS with 1Gb connections) and the exact same formats you mentioned – XDCAM 50Mbps 422 in both Quicktime and MXF containers and ProRes422. I sometimes take projects home to do some work on them and we will often send in-process projects to our NY office for another editor to take over. As long as you are well organized with your SAN and have everything inside the project folder then its a pretty simple drag and drop to an external hard drive. We use the G-tech drives mentioned in a few other posts for portability. Workstation wise, we replaced all but 5 workstations with iMacs and they run great. The other 5 are still running the older Mac Pros but we have a “test” system in house for the new Mac Pro and will likely be transitioning those remaining systems over this year.

Premiere’s 3-way color corrector is our go-to tool for most of the color adjustments. It works just as well and is just as fast as FCPs. We just took a Speedgrade class and may start using that for some higher end projects as it’s very powerful and the new dynamic link functionality look promising. We stopped investing in a lot of third party plug-ins like Magic Bullet. It was getting expensive to maintain them across 15+ workstations, make sure everyone was on the same version when we moved a project around, etc. The combination of Premiere’s 3-Way color corrector and the ability to build Looks in Speedgrade that can be imported into all of our Premiere systems and applied directly in Premiere has replaced what we used Magic Bullet for here.

We love Adobe Media Encoder. Unlike FCP and Compressor, you can queue a project over to it and then flip back over and continue working in Premiere while it encodes.

Personally, I discouraged our editors from switching to FCP keyboard layout. I found many of Premiere’s shortcuts much faster and after a month on Premiere I just changed the individual few that were still bothering me to something else.

If you are considering switching or have just switched I can’t recommend the book “Adobe Premiere Pro Studio Techniques” by Jeff Greenberg enough. It’s a great introduction to Premiere, but unlike a lot of books assumes that you are coming from a firm background of NLE editing in another application like FCP or AVID so it doesn’t waste a lot of time explaining basic editing concepts and gets right to the need to know information. It’s also fairly new and covers all the CC features up to last falls dot release.

Sincerely,

Don Hertz

[Barry Cohen]

Don-
Thank you for the response and detailed account of your switching over to Premier and Speed Grade. I am encouraged to hear of your success and the situation being so similar to ours. It really gives me a valuable insight into what we can expect and how to go about the process more effectively. We really are getting a picture on the Adobe Suite and what it offers us in our workflow. Having the G-Raid EVO drives will be a great benefit an time saving solution to moving projects across MAC workstations.

We really appreciate the Forum and you taking time to share your experiences.

[Barry Cohen]

Thanks Michael,

I really like the G-Raid products and recommend them all the time. I am impressed with the EVO drive system and will probably adopt that as our means of exchange (although they are pretty pricey for a single drive) it will save us a few hours a week I expect.

I will try to get our editors into good habits of consolidating media into a project/episode folder for accurate transport to the finishing station, habits need to be developed as you know.

Thanks for the response and sharing your experiences on the Forum.

[Barry Cohen]

Don-
Thank you for the response and detailed account of your switching over to Premier and Speed Grade. I am encouraged to hear of your success and the situation being so similar to ours.

[Barry Cohen]

That’s the feature I have been looking for. It is a necessary process in our workflow.

Project Management

[Kevin Monahan]

Hi Barry,
You can still use the Project Manager. However, it currently won’t trim Long GOP media. That’s the only drawback. If you must consolidate media in your handoff, you can transcode that footage to an intraframe codec on ingest. Unfortunately, you are duplicating media through this process.

Please make a feature request for the Project Manager to consolidate Long GOP media. I would also like to see this feature in Premiere Pro. Here is the link: https://adobe.ly/feature_request

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan
Online/Social Customer Success Lead DVA
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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