[Declan Smith]

As the footage source is DV, even if you capture from your device into Prores over firewire, you won’t increase the quality one bit (I guess you know this already). The only thing you gain is less time taken to capture into your desired format.

I would suggest that you could capture to DV then transcode to Prores using Compressor and therefore incur no additional costs (other than the time overhead).

I too prefer to normalise all my footage into the same codec. It makes the entire process much easier.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

I had a similar issue with 300 video clips and about 1800 audio files, although I had no timecode to sync to. The only way I could sync was to match the separately recorded audio to the main camera audio, so this may or may not be relevant.

I tackled it this way. First I reviewed all the video and named them appropriately (Adobe bridge bulk rename really helped here) and luckily my sound files had shot/take in the file name (which were mostly correct!), so I knew which audio files went with each video (i.e. scene1 take 1 etc). This is just to make the job easier so I can look at the filenames and know which ones are associated with it. This process took about 3 hours.

Next I used pluraleyes to sync each video clip individually with it’s respective audio, then exported the trimmed audio to a new directory. Note that pluralyeyes will only embed two channels with a video clip, hence having 8 channels (which is what I had also) means you need to create trimmed audio. These trimmed audio clips match the in/out points of the video. I then repeated this for all video clips.

This again will take a little while, perhaps 2-4 hours depending on how much you have because there is no batch facility in pluraleyes, and you will have a few clips that you will need to manually sync BUT, doing this will save so much time later, particularly if you are editing drama. I simply don’t think any tool would have been able to help if I left this until after the main edit and tried a sync then (because pluralyeyes can’t cope with breaks in the edit from the same sound file etc).

When you have created trimmed audio for all your clips, open up Premiere import all your video and all your TRIMMED audio. Next you can create merged clips with Premiere. Each merged clip contains one video + the 8 track (or 6) tracks of associated audio (easily identifiable because of the naming done earlier).

When you drag a merged clip to a sequence, it’s a mess and way too many audio channels, so, what I have done is to make a sequence per clip which contains the merged clip and all its audio. I then use this 1 clip nested sequences as my source clips for the main edit by dragging them to the timeline and edit like a normal 1Video 1 Audio clip, makes the main timeline very slim. Later in the edit when you are ready to hone the audio, you can simply go into the merged clip and select which audio you wish to use (by muting the other tracks). Your main timeline stays simple.

The things you lose doing this are the ability to storyboard your project in the project window icon view (as you will just see a sequence icon), and if you were hoping to roundtrip to resolve for colour grading, resolve won’t understand nested sequences. There are ways around this though. Also, you won’t see an audio waveform displayed on the main sequence until you click ‘Sequence->render audio’. This creates the waveform peaks.

So although there was an initial outlay in time to organise and sync the footage, it will now be so much easier in the edit. I can choose easily, which channels I want to listen to, I can control the mix between the boom and the lav mics on a clip basis, and more importantly, I can picture edit first and sort the sound out later knowing I have no major issues to worry about.

Hope this helps

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

I haven’t heard of an official fix yet so for now I am sticking to 6.0.2. However I have noticed this version seems to crash more on exit. It can’t be a big fix and I would have thought that a company like Adobe would have adopted an agile development strategy by now and could just rattle out this bug fix that they introduced.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

Ok, I have gone through this and 6.0.4 still crashed, although did allow me to stop the tape deck and close the capture window. On going through the uninstall / reinstall and then upgrading to 6.0.2, things seem to be stable, so for now, am sticking to 6.0.2

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

I have found the link on the Adobe site, I’ll update with progress when reverted.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

Hi Peter,

It is indeed 6.0.5. How do I revert it back to 6.0.4 ? Incidentally, the camera is Canon XLH1

Thanks

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

A job for after effects.

Here is a good tutorial for a similar effect to get you started:

https://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/motion-graphics/building-a-grid-like-layout-using-basic-expressions/?search_index=2

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

It’s a difficult question to answer as it depends on your project and what codecs are installed in your computer. I would need to know what format your existing MOV files are in and what size they are (in terms of video size eg 1920 x 1080 or PAL or NTSC etc) to properly answer this.

If you are talking about FInal Cut Pro 7, then really, you want to be exporting as Quicktime files using the ProRes 422 codec. I can’t vouch that everything will be ok. The XML is an interchange format, and one that is quite loosely specified meaning different systems provide different levels of support.

Generally, I would import the XML into an empty Premiere Project first to see whether it all hangs together.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

I would suggest that you should output them to the same format as the majority of your existing sequence clips, or choose a codec such as prores (which will be compatible with final cut pro, assuming you have access to prores).

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[Declan Smith]

Perhaps a better solution for this application would be to use the date function and animate epoch (time passed 01/01/1970). The modified code below takes an epoch time as an input. First add an expression control of type ‘Point’ to your text object. This will display, x & y controls. We are just using this as a way of getting data into the expression that can be animated (a slider doesn’t go big enough).

We only need one of the values to drive our expression, so we will just use the X value. If you put 0 in here, your clock will start at 0. If you put any other epoch time in, then it will evaluate this. For example, put 1379939441 in X on the point control, and it will display:
43:09:23:13:30:41

(if you are unfamiliar with epoch times, go here: https://www.epochconverter.com )

So if you want to countdown from 93 years backwards, then your first value for the X parameter of the point control will be 2934748800, and you can animate via keyframes back to 0 or anywhere in between.

Let me know if you want me to post up an example project.


function pad(num, leading) {
num="" + num;
while (num.length < leading) num='0'+num;
return num;
}

// Variables
slider=effect("Point Control")("Point")[0]*1000;
date = new Date(slider);
years=pad(date.getYear(date)-70,2);
months=pad(date.getMonth()+1,2);
days=pad(date.getDate(),2);
hours=pad(date.getHours(),2);
minutes=pad(date.getMinutes(),2);
seconds=pad(date.getSeconds(),2);

counter="" + years + ":" + months + ":" + days + ":" + hours + ":" + minutes +":" + seconds

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”