Benjamin Reichman
Forum Replies Created
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Kevin,
What is the recommended process for upgrading to Premiere CC 2014 and After Effects CC 2014 if you have a project with many embedded AE comps? I’m hesitant to take the plunge because of this.
Also, could you please comment on whether breaking compatibility like this will happen every year? Will CC 2015 apps opening CC 2014 project files cause them to be updated to an incompatible version?
Thanks a lot–it’s great for all of us here to have Adobe reps answering our questions directly!
Ben
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I’m curious about this, too. But I’m guessing things will change significantly after tomorrow’s Adobe keynote. Wringing every bit of performance out of the Darth Mac is surely near the very top of Adobe’s list of priorities for Premiere.
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I’m going to ignore the FCP X debate, and just say that this is a very cool trick–thanks! I use Premiere quite a bit, and I’ve been meaning to open Prelude and try it out, but this is a great alternative.
It’s funny, but I suspect that FCP 7 XML will far outlive FCP 7 itself…
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Dustin, this isn’t quite what you’re looking for, but in case you’re not familiar, in the current version of Premiere CC you can shift-click a video track padlock icon to lock all video tracks (or do the same with an audio track to lock all audio tracks). Still mouse-based, but better than having to individually click each padlock.
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Shravan,
Check to see if you have In and/or Out points in your timeline. If you do, Premiere will use those to determine where to place your clip, NOT where your playhead is.
Traditional editing is often called “three point editing,” where you set an In and Out point on your clip, then either an In or an Out point in your sequence (timeline), which makes three points. (You can also do it the other way: set an In and Out in your timeline, and then just an In or an Out in your clip–either way, you have three points.) Then when you press period for overwrite edit or comma for insert edit, Premiere will use the In or Out in your timeline. Does that make sense?
Basically, if you have an In or Out point set in sequence, Premiere will ignore your playhead position.
And that’s your answer for your second question. Either position your playhead or set an In point between the two clips in the sequence. Then set your In and Out in the clip you want to cut in. Press comma and it will make a ripple edit.
If you try this and weird things happen, check your track targeting buttons at the left side of the timeline.
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Re: the MXF file debate, it’s worth mentioning that Avid actually uses nothing but MXF files behind the scenes! But there’s a big difference between an Avid MXF files in the Avid MediaFiles folder and one generated by a C300 or C500. MXF is just a wrapper, like MOV or AVI. It can contain many different things.
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Danielle,
For safely transferring the media from cards to hard drives, I highly recommend ShotPut Pro: https://www.imagineproducts.com/?main_page=product_info&products_id=2
It does extra verification that simply dragging and dropping the CONTENTS folder would not include. It also makes it easy (and reduces the chance of human error) to copy to multiple drives at once, which of course you need to do! Don’t wipe a card before it’s backed up in AT LEAST two places, three to be truly safe.
EDIT: To address your other question, so far I’ve worked as an assistant editor on three TV documentaries shot with the C300 and cut on Media Composer. As far as I know, there’s no workflow difference between the C300 and C500, though I’ve never personally worked with C500 footage. So here’s what I do. Apologies if you know this already–but maybe someone else will read this and find it useful. So here goes:
1) Use the Link to AMA Volume command and point Avid to the folder with the full C300 media (the CONTENTS folder with intact card structure. This is very important–if the card structure is damaged in any way, you will have real problems). Link all the cards’ clips in one bin.
2) Once all cards are linked, Avid will automatically “stitch together” any spanned clips (say, for example, that you have an interview in which a subject’s answer was kind of long, and/or a card was nearly full, so the camera automatically switched to recording to another card during the recording. In that case, you need to link to both cards via AMA in your bin to ensure Avid sees all the parts of that long clip and combines them into one single clip in Media Composer). When this happens, you can see the Media Duration number quickly getting bigger as Avid figures it all out.
3) Now, you have two options: you can either consolidate the footage or you can transcode it. Consolidation will take the clips and put them in an MXF wrapper and stick them into your Avid MediaFiles folder (on whichever drive you pick). What it will NOT do is change the codec used. I personally don’t recommend this, because it seems a little slow and glitchy in my personal experience. But some people swear by it! What I do is transcode, using Media Composer. If you have MC 7, you can transcode in the background on your laptop while doing other things in Media Composer, so you really don’t need a third-party app for transcoding.
Ideally, you have the space to transcode to DNxHD 175 or 220 (depending on your framerate) so that you’ll be cutting ‘online quality’ clips and your final timeline in Avid will be ready for color correction, etc. But if you’re space-constrained or there are other considerations that make it impossible, then you can transcode to an offline quality level, like DNxHD 36. Then when you finish the edit, you’ll need to relink to the AMA clips. Only do that if you need to; it works, but it can be a bit of a hassle.
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Thanks for the tips. I’m back in that office again (I’m a freelancer so I come and go–you know the drill). Anyway, now we’re seeing footage that is corrupt when played back in Canon XF Utility, QuickTime Player, and Premiere. The footage in question was copied directly from the CF card to a reliable hard drive(s) using ShotPut Pro with MD5 verification.
If even XF Utility shows a glitch with the ShotPut Pro-verified media, does that mean the problem is happening in-camera? Or are there other tricky variables I’m not thinking of?
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Oh, my gosh, that’s brilliant. Hilarious (and surprisingly informative!).
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Are you looking for stock music? There are a lot of good sources out there. Recently, I worked on some offroad racing videos and we found some good hard rock on Premium Beat: https://www.premiumbeat.com/
And the prices are very reasonable, especially given the quality of the clips we found. (Not everything there is good, of course! But we were pleased by what we found.)
