Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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Hah, yeah, the sketchy things we’ve all done to get the shot…
Once, while filming a tactical team practicing helicopter tactics, I ended up dangling a few hundred feet off the ground on a rope under the helicopter, with my camera just on a shoulder strap, to get POV b-roll of short-hauling. GoPro footage just wasn’t gonna cut it, you know? I was harnessed up, but…doing dangerous things in the safest way possible doesn’t really make them safe, right? Later in the day, while riding in the bird filming the guys firing at ground targets, my contact on the tactical team told the hotshot ex-military pilot to see just how much fun I could take, so he goes “hold fire, please,” and then put us through the most extreme series of maneuvers he could wring out of the Jet Ranger. I’ve got a good stomach for motion so I earned some points from those guys that day. I did not tell my wife about the shenanigans until long afterwards.
Also, the company I work for makes hunting gear. I have video from two separate bear hunts of angry just-shot bears running towards either the hunter or the camera guy (not me, fortunately), and only dumb luck, good camo, and nerves of steel keeping the bear from seeing them and/or running right into them and ripping them up. I don’t go on bear hunts.
Last one: early in my career, I was on-location as a sound recordist to get tape of salmon conservation measures in the Columbia river. One day, we were at a dam where the local sea lions had learned that salmon congregate under the fish ladders, and so they all hung out there at the sea lion buffet, eating every salmon they could find. The Army Corps and local Native American tribes had teamed up to harass them, so the DP and I went out with them in a small aluminum boat, where they roared around the river firing explosive shells out of a shotgun to scare the sea lions away. The DP was shooting one of the big early shoulder-rigged Panasonic Varicams, so he was really top heavy, so with one hand, I had to help him stay stable with one hand, hold the boom with my other one, while we tried to stay on our feet as the boat pilot blasted around the river chasing sea lions and the other guy firing explosive shells into the water. That was a wild day.
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I think it’s likely that you are operating under incorrect assumptions of how the consolidation process works. It copies the relevant source media to a new folder, and if you’ve selected the Transcode option, transcodes those clips to the codec you’ve chosen. However, it takes the entire clip because Premiere needs the whole clip in order to keep your timeline correctly referenced.
Premiere is built to set an in-point and out-point based on the number of frames since the first frame of the clip–so if Premiere expects your clip to start on frame 37 of the source media, that’s what it does. If you do a Render and Replace in the timeline with no handles, you can get a file that starts the clip on frame 1 of the transcoded copy, and ends at the end of the clip.
If you want to transcode and package up ONLY the relevant sections of the clips, without the original source media, I’m pretty sure this procedure will do that:
1: Flatten your multicam timeline
2: Select all clips in that timeline, and do a Render and Replace, with appropriate settings for the clip handle length and your desired codec
3: Remove the original media from the project bins, so that only your new transcoded media remains in the project
4: Use the Project Manager to Consolidate the sequence (but no need to transcode)
I believe that should get you what you want.
Personally, this workflow terrifies me: are you planning to delete your original media (arrghhhhh nononononono) to make space on your main drives? Why not pick up two of the incredibly cheap 1 TB drives available out there today, and just archive the entire project on it (with a backup copy)? This would be a lot easier than going through this whole process, and would keep your original footage available. I am REALLY not a fan of destructively archiving the project this way, and I hesitate to even suggest the method, but hey, it’s your call 🙂
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I don’t know if I was the dumb one in this story or not, but here goes:
When working my first full-time gig as a production/post-production assistant, we had a producer headed to Africa to shoot the last few days, and afterwards straight to DC to do the final edits with the network, without coming home. So he left me a box of his stuff to ship out to meet him there. I dutifully got it in the mail just in time to get there. Good job, young Blaise, you’ll make Associate Producer in no time.
Well, a couple days later I get a phone call–he’s absolutely howling into the phone that I’ve effed up everything, how could I be so stupid, I better fix this. Turns out he had packed his laptop in the outside pocket of his duffel bag, facing the outside of the box, and I had, uh, NOT GONE THROUGH HIS PERSONAL STUFF to determine this, and also not repacked his personal stuff that I didn’t go through in the first place.
Next, I had to break into his house to retrieve his backup drive to send that out, all the while thinking “of all the fired that anybody has been, I am going to be the most fired.”
I wasn’t. But, coincidentally, this was a fairly old laptop getting on in years, the production bought him a brand new laptop, and he got all the relevant data he needed off the backup drive, and I never heard about it again. I wonder to this day whether I was the scapegoat or not.
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Seamless looping isn’t hard, but requires a trick: the loop happens in the MIDDLE of the clip, not the ends:
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Yes, it will flatten the dynamically linked AE comp, but that’s the idea. If you need transparency, just render the AE file to a codec with an alpha channel, then it will composite just as it would if you had a dynamic link. ProRes4444, Cineform 12-bit with alpha, DNX with alpha enabled, or Animation are all great options, though Animation will be enormous. Once you know you have the lower thirds locked, it will cut down on your need to render previews in the sequence, too.
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I’d suggest the Open Captions in the future for subtitling. They are such a better solution, and allow way more global editing of things like font size and positioning. Fewer options overall, but for any lengthy subtitling, it works really well.
The solution you propose will be an issue if any of the text lines gets large enough to go beyond the borders of the 1080p size. Otherwise, there’s no reason it wouldn’t work.
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Dynamic linking adds a level of complexity to timelines, and I’ve seen similar issues when exporting with live dynamic links in the timeline. I would suggest either doing a render-and-replace in the timeline in Premiere, or rendering off final VFX files from AE and manually replacing. It generally saves time at the back end.
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Without seeing an example, we’ll all be just guessing.
My guess is that this interview was filmed somewhere with fluorescent or LED lighting? Or was the camera set to an automatic or programmatic exposure (like Av, Tv, P, instead of Manual exposure)?
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I think I’ve dealt with this before. When I did, it was because the main sequence (where the Multicam Source Sequence gets placed to edit it) inherits the properties of the clip when it’s created using that clip. So you’ve created a Mono main sequence from your Mono multicam sequence, which means that it defaults to playing the audio from the left speaker, and always will.
To fix this, create a new main sequence as a Stereo sequence. Then you’ll need to drag the multicam sequence in, and in the Audio Clip Mixer, pan the audio of the multicam clip to the center. Do this BEFORE you do any multicam editing.
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Wait…the spec sheet says that you need to edit in 29.97, but deliver in 59.94? That sounds like it’s creating the problem, and would make it difficult to do a frame-accurate export. If I were you, I’d try to copy the whole timeline to a new 59.94 native timeline, and export from there. That way you can set it to export to the exact frame you want.