[Ht Davis]

The steps are: F in the timeline on the subclip, then select the source panel (not project files but where they are previewed and clipped etc) and F again, which will match the frame of the source of frames (subclip) and show in source panel, then match source of source panel to file it originated in. Subs on subs means you could be doing this a long while, matching frame through a longer list. Thats why logging is so important. It lets you name original long files in short fashion, then add meaningful adjustments to the name of a subclip. By adding onto a short name in short fashion, subs of subs gets easier. Now the original is the shortest name, and subs are easy to find, along with subs of subs. In a name sorted list they will all line up sub next to step-up source. It’s a bit OCD, but it’s why my first operation is always the ingest/log-transport, no matter who or what i work on. Then, any oddities of the NLE are less likely to stop production, even if they slow it a step or two. Thats all built into my pricing also. Add 4 hours to how long a few hours project will take, and a day for a single days project, and at least half a week for a week-long project. Old star trek engineers wisdom–never tell them exactly how long it’ll really take if you want a reputation as a miracle worker. Also, it may buy you the extra time to get around a sudden issue.

Premiere doesnt house data the same way as other apps. It forces you to take the time to define your processing in more data-logical rather than emotional-logical terms, more like breaking down the process of being up to batt so you can control your swing and play better offense instead of swinging and praying it makes it over the fence somwhere. Both batters are very necessary but for different play-styles or different strategic points of the same wholistic stragety, like moneyball. Together, they also make the game more exciting and immersive.

For the more “log and transport” or OCD type person who plans out edits in stages, the stop-go step by step way helps keep their overly reasoned structure clear, reduces nervousness and allows them to bring more emotion into their work that completes the clarity of the message. If you are more of a cut it all on the fly, or your work demands it that style, premiere may seem a little bit of a shock or like an elastic band that pulls you back as you try to stretch into the work. Dont worry, some work is that way (take your common style, “that way” refers to its opposite) even if the editor person isnt; we try to adapt, and when we do, we learn, and we grow our skillset. Thats how new or Avante Garde styles are born.

[Ht Davis]

Old thread but here goes…
The Select Every Nth will do one thing really, but has two pieces to the action.
Piece 1:
Get Selection\Comp, put in variable “SELECTION”
Piece 2:
Process every Nth layer within SELECTION by Selecting it, or probably more accurately, looping through all layers one at a time and testing the loop variable for equivalency to the Nth term before altering those that DONT match to be Unselected. Really a great tool.
If you want to select every of this, then every of that, etc, you can copy the programming into another script, and give it a number instead of an Nth term. You’ll have to do this multiple times in your script, and change the given Nth term, then add what you want to process. You can give it a Comp to start with and input your desired effect or process, but you’ll have to apply your effect selected item using another loop to go through all the selected items, and then deselect them before you start another Nth term loop.

[Ht Davis]

There is no Wrong way to do things; though there are tradeoffs in different methods.

Define your goal clearly. If all you want to do is digitize, usb will work, giving you OK but not necessarily discernable results. If you want something more discernable, you can go DV passthrough, which will force an output at 720×480 in most cases, and it will be interlaced video, giving you only 240 effective pixels in each field and creating a blocky motion in some areas, with a blurry motion in others. Really old VHS tapes shot at 24 frames, in interlaced 48, and had to be Telecined to 29.97 in broadcast, with what is often referred to as a 3:2 pulldown, which used the interlace by pulling down one set of interlace, to create another set for an IN-Between frame, that created the new frames necessary for 29.97 frames. This was originally developed as a means of averaging mechanical function in exactness, in the NTSC standard. Though this also resulted in signals that were rarely similar in color field once dubbed, giving the standard another acronym for a nickname “never the same color”. After a while, only one or two camera makers could actually compensate for the signal differences, either by developing a process to maintain equipment or developing a mechanism that maintained itself. The quality of the images increased, while the size of the data began to decrease.
For home movies, you’ll have a lot of work to do to clean them up. No matter what plug you use to output the signal, you’ll get noise, color degradation, signal degradation, and a host of other issues to contend with, along with the standard INTERLACE issues. For best quality:
1. Use a player with SVIDEO out, it splits the data up into several pathways. Rather than composite, which doesn’t split the video data, just jumbles it together, and makes for noisy transmission, S-video outputs the video information in separate streams that are combined in the next device in the chain, where any added noise can be filtered out. The sound is output as well in most instances, but some require the use of the composite sound (despite the added composite, these are better, more split in the video data and it’s cleaner).
2. Use a device that supports S-video, and selection of standard. This will allow you to set the standard your video will output to.
3. Run the video through twice on interfaces that upscale for you, once using the upscale, once not. Compare the results with an upscale you run in after effects.
Once in After effects:
A. If you know the format was in 24frame format, you can interpret the footage first, and remove a 3:2 pulldown. The first set is the most common. You can try several different ones to see what gets the best result, then delete the others (import the same video several times and interpret each one differently, or just duplicate it).
B. Start with a comp at the same size as the video, run deinterlace if you wish, but you may opt for a motion estimated plugin to fix it properly. Try this twice, and set both an upper and a lower field order. The best looking one is your starting point pre-comp.
C. Place the pre-comp into a comp at your output size, apply any detail enhancement or color adjustment, then upscale. The detail retaining upscaler works well on its own. You may put your first precomp into a second, at the same size, then apply detail work. Afterward, place the second into the final and upscale. This layers the adjustments so they are done in successive passes, retaining more detail, though it will take longer to process out. Once your results show ok in the previews, you should be able to farm it out to media encoder without a problem. You can even compress the new stream, in progressive video format.

[Ht Davis]

I know it’s an old thread. Thanks for the info, Nick Ag. I’ll have a look at that and get back on what to do. I’m a novice with AE, but not photoshop. I’ll try to explain the above guide for you. It has a very Photoshop feel.

Basically, it wants you to dupelicate the CHANNEL layers in LAB mode. You’ll have Luminance channel instead of RGB. You’ll dupe this 3 times: shadow, highlight, midtone, and then remove areas from each channel that don’t apply. Now you can feather or blur the edge of these to allow the transition areas to be mixed. If there are specific or special areas that need to be tracked\traced, make another copy for that item (3 copies actually, since you’ll be applying this masking separately, and they will only contain the information from that object or person for highlight, midtone, shadow). Now you can apply a high-pass or edge detection filter to the masks (this is the feathering from before, but you can blur the edges further if you want). Once that is complete, you add sharpen filters to each mask to increase the noise for each channel, and check in between to see the result before attempting it again. In photoshop, you’d do this in layers. Unfortunately, there isn’t any counterpart in AE.

Here’s another AE way that actually came out of a photoshop technique (WARNING it also uses photoshop and a lot of scratch space):
First, create a comp by dropping footage onto the button or right click the clip and choose create comp from selection. This will give you a comp to work with. Now drop the video file onto the comp so there are two copies of your video. Use the INVERT effect on the top layer to reverse it’s data to a photonegative. Set the blend mode to color dodge or linear dodge, you’ll get pure white. Apply a Guassian Blur and adjust until you see mostly edge detail. Now we have options. We can go simple and just let the midtone\shadow areas go smooth, while we tighten up the edges a bit, or we can work on the midtones a bit. Repeat the above procedure, but take the blur to a point where some of the midtone data is there. Using these two precomps, we’ll need a third, so you can actually just use one of them to create it. Put the edge precomp (the first one) layer on top of the extended edge\midtone precomp. Invert the edge layer, like before, and set it to Color Dodge or Linear Dodge for a blend mode. This comp is now the Midtones only.
Now we can use the edge and midtone precomps to do two things. We can operate on the edges and midtones to apply noise or affect the transition weight (as you get closer to the edge of something, the light transition goes to an almost black, then alters to the new hue from there outward; the weight or speed of this transition to black and how far black it goes can be indicative of the distances between objects, and it is often referred to as microcontrast). If you choose to affect the smoother areas of the midtones, you may want to simply add noise. This can be done easily enough. Since you already have the base noise in the precomp, you can sharpen this precomp as a video layer in another comp, or just add some random noise, but use a a light touch, as too much noise will distort your image rather than improve it. You could just as easily run a darken operation (a burn of the shadows) on the layer, and use that to bring out areas of your midtones rather than adding noise, or do both. Once they are done, you drop them on a main comp with your video layer underneath, create a shape (for your main mask), and apply a blend mode. I would go with black as your shape color, because you can then Paint in the areas you want to affect most. Using the mask will also let you rotoscope quickly, so you can mask out the correct areas and make only a few adjustments. Now use the midtone layer in the mask, and you should see the midtones get more noisy, using a luminance, or darken type of blend, which will make minute details show more clearly. You can use the opacity of the midtone precomp to decide how strong or weak the effect should be. You can do the same with the edge detail. I’d go ahead and use the sharpen tool or the unsharp masking tool. These will both work close in on the main transition area. However, you are best off to go one more step, and make this a Black and white, so create another comp and drop the edge detail comp into it, use the B&W effect and now you can use this new comp to adjust the transition more normally. Repeat what you did with the midtones. You can apply more noise or sharpening, but try to keep the edges from thickening too much. We want some dissolve areas. So, there is an easy way to do this. You can make the lines thick, then apply a blur to feather them until only the main edge is all black. Now use this precomp in the comp that has the midtone adjustment and the video layer (your main output comp), apply it using a shape mask like before.
If you prefer the photoshop path, you can set up your edge and midtone details, then output those to image folders for photoshop to batch process. If there are common areas in the images (IE the camera doesn’t zoom or move), you should be able to mask out areas by simply erasing them in an action script and applying that script to entire sets of images, saving them back out to be overlayed on top of your video. Using the same blending mode and shape technique, you can apply your adjustment. To sharpen the edge, you darken the microcontrast, to soften it, you brighten up the microcontrast.

[Ht Davis]

Ok fellas, here’s a how to.

1. Dupe your sequence twice. Yes twice. This is important for later. Do it 2 times. Name the first LCN and the second SC. LCN is Linkage Control Nest, but that doesn’t matter, LCN will do. I will refer to them as LCN and SC from now on. SC is subclipper.
2. Place the two of them in a bin, and name it for the sequence you’re subbing. I’ll Call it Sub Bin for now.

3. In the LCN, delete everything. It should be empty. Do the same in the SC sequence.
4. Drag the main sequence you want to subclip into your LCN sequence. Leave it nested there. Anything you do to this sequence should carry right over into this nested sequence. It only controls that consistent linkage. It will grow and shrink with the sequence nested in it.
5. Drag the LCN sequence to the SC sequence. Now you can cut a portion of it using the razor tool, right click the cut section and select NEST. It will open a dialog to allow you to name that sequence and should place it in the same bin, if not you can move it to the bin later. But wait!!! We’ve put that nest into this sequence! How can we cut more? Simple. Drag the LCN sequence back over the top of itself in the SC sequence. It will replace what’s on the timeline. You can now cut it again at similar or at different points, and nest it again, giving it a different name. You should be able to create your own marker type or color, and call it whatever you want, then use the comments in that marker type to feed in all your information. Even a simple comment marker will do.
6. Get the all markers panel for premiere. It will allow you to view all your markers so you can search them easily. You can also just name your new nest sequences with some extra information.

I recommend that when you finish “subclipping” your sequence, you export them all with media encoder right back to your intermediary format. It should be fairly quick. Save your project too. While they are working, you can add more media or whatever to your main sequence, and repeat the action to get more subclips together. If you copy your LCN and SC to another bin, you can continue to use them to cut more.

Downsides:
Your SCN will change with your main sequence. Your subclips may change if their corresponding position in that main sequence is changed (because that will change the SCN at that location and change the nested clippings). This means you can only really add to the end of your main sequence if you want to keep the clips intact. It also means that effects will be more difficult if your subnestclips encompass multiple video file clips or subclips. You may have a more difficult time finding where to place transitions.

Alternatively to this method, if you have many clips to tie together, use prelude to put them into rough cut sequences. This is almost always preferable. If you do this first, you can trim them in prelude down to what you need in each rough cut sequence, then put them in bins and transfer the whole kit and kaboodle to premiere afterward.
SOUNDSYNC:
Okay, I don’t know what methods you use or what, so I’ll just get right to it. If your in camera\from camera audio is any good at all, start rough cutting. Some use pluraleyes to run sync, which gives you a lot of options. Just go with me on this one, you can link your audio later if your in camera is at least understandable. Rough cut then go to premiere and start sequencing.
You can sync sound by waveform slate or let pluraleyes check for consistentcies. When you’re ready, here’s a useful convention I roll with. For each location, set up a sequence, sync all footage from that location in that sequence, then unlink and link to the better audio for each clip, and nest this to a subsequence that you then export. When you export these good sound sources, give them a name the same as their corresponding footage name, but put in a subfolder called SoundSync. If you ingest your footage all to the same folder, you are ready for the next step; make that sound sync folder inside the footage outer folder. For those with tens to thousands of clips and dailies, this step is necessary. Save your project, close it. You will put all the original footage in a new folder with the name “Original Footage Old” and then move your sound synced footage to the outer folder to replace it. Open your project, and it should relink just fine as long as the names were all the same. You do this by putting the original file name on the nest sequence you make when you sync the sound for that clip and link the video to the better sound. That’s it. Once your footage is relinked, all your roughcuts have the better audio, and you should be able to work with them. Any nesting or subclipping will carry right over and you can focus on your edits.

[Ht Davis]

Try this…
First cut up at least one clip into subclips with markers in Prelude. Send those along with your master clips to premiere. You can add comment markers with the subclip markers to make sure they align. Now align your master clipA and Master clip B. IF you cut up your master clip A and B with markers for subclip and comment so you can align the subclips, you’re all set. Align subclips for masterA on a track and subclips for master b on another track, delete the masters from the tracks. You don’t need pluraleyes if you have a slap lock spike, but if you don’t have that, you’ll have to either EXPORT subclips or align by comment\subclip markers. It’s faster to use Pluraleyes to align, but you would have to export your subclips in order to align them.

[Ht Davis]

I’ve made the jump to PC, but I worked mac for a long time (about a decade).
Your permissions for active folders are stored in memory, but non active folders do not. The backup feature uses an inactive folder call (ie it doesn’t automatically load the folder for backup until it’s needed, then it releases it). It keeps the load down (though, not by much). On windows 10, this happened to me a few times with an earlier CC, just after a major update to windows. I had to set the programs to open in administrator mode to get it to stop, and set it to happen for all users, not just my own account. If you are using an SSD, the problem may be that your transistors are wearing slightly, and you may need to run some maintenance. If an HDD, you may want to run a heirarchy and permissions repair. Fix the journaling on the disk, which is similar to a windows master file table. I used to run that fix once a month to keep the journal fresh. That file is where most apps will get the data from, and if it isn’t found fast enough, you can get an error.
Run the full disk repair and a permission repair from your restoration partition, then try this again. IF it continues to happen, I’d suspect that it is an error with the folder call.
Also… Try running your backups to an external disk where Permissions are ignored completely. You can set this using the get info command on the external, and then selecting ignore permissions on this partition. If it still happens, it’s a bug in the folder call or the running mode of the app. Try a reinstall, and if that doesn’t work, submit a bug report to Adobe.

[Ht Davis]

Many people have been coming to me from here and other sites about VFR. They complain that it’s so common and blah blah.
I output to files that will play on old players, new players (disc\settop), broadcast, and digital, all at once. If you only have one output target, get Vegas or another cheap title. They rip up audio during editing, and when you finish, you can up to youtube just fine. Youtube will reprocess the video, and fix the VFR their way. It’s quality varies and i’ve heard a rumor or two that they are planning to remove it from the free services.

Some have actually mixed up VFR with another problem, mixing frame rates in sequencing and comps. You can mix frame rates all you want, but your output will conform to your sequence\comp settings. Here are some things to note:

If you upconvert your frame rate from 24p, you’ll have to create new frame information for the missing frames, or you can speed up your video. When you create the frames, you want them to be transitional, or they might introduce jitter motion. Using frame blends when you have more motion or faster motion helps. When you have light or little motion, frame sampling works fine, as there isn’t enough of a difference in the motion to cause jitter. You can apply different methods to different sections by using cuts in premiere, or clipping up your video in AE and setting different methods in different comps so the method matches the video motion.

When downconverting, it’s much easier. You can INTERPRET FOOTAGE in Premiere or After Effects so that your footage will use a frame-drop pattern to fit into the same area. Another way is to slow everything down. If you are at 30, you want to come down to 24, you’ll need to come down to 80% speed. IF you are at 60, you’ll come down to 40% to get to 24, which will put your video in slow motion. If you have 60 and 24, you’re best off using 30 as a medium, and then setting both up with blends.

The long way:
This is a long method that will actually perform a blend of several frames, weighted for time, when converting down. First, put your footage, as is, into your comp\sequence at your chosen rate, and then adjust the speed of your clip in the sequence. Going down, you’ll slow down, so the speed is 80% 50% or 40% depending on the drop (30-24, 60-30, 60-24 respective). Once you’ve done that, nest the sequence\comp in another comp, and speed it up. It will be 120, 200, or 225%. When rendering out, set interpolation to FRAME BLENDING in the export dialog. This will blend those frames that are in the same frame time, weighted to the one that is in that section the longest, and give you a transitional frame.

The main rule:
You are usually better off with the long way, and converting down rather than up for frame rate.

[Ht Davis]

When you change your aspect ratio (PAR), the pixels change shape. This can create a blur, stretch or other problems when you are starting with square pixels and then changing them. Also remember you are downconverting. What you want to do first is downconvert to a squarepixel variant of the resolution. The pixels are rectangular in a 1.46 par. So your height would be 1, your width would be 1.46. Multiply 720 by 1.46. That’s 1052. So now you are 1052×576. You see? Your Par didn’t convert down, you blew it up in an odd way. You want to convert to a new PAR, find out the exact size of your video at a specific par. 1050\1.46 is just over 719… …You want to use the 719 value, not 720. You’ll need a custom size. Now, set up a sequence for 719×576, place your video. Set up another sequence for 720 if you want, and place the 719 into it, then scale to frame size. You won’t have any more problem.

[Ht Davis]

Adobe has now provided something better. You can now export markers to a text file with a CSV extension, but tab delimited lines of information in audition, and, I expect, Premiere. Though I’m not certain how different marker types are handled yet, I will be testing this out and getting back to you. All who still have questions about these functions, please leave them here.

So far, I’ve exported files from LOGIC PRO that have lower sample rates, then imported their markers onto files with higher sample rates once finished. Since they have the same decimal timing, the sample count is irrelevant, I would guess, and the import only reads the text of the file as an absolute decimal. This makes perfect sense, and as long as your files are the same amount of decimal time or movie frame time, the markers line up.
Logic pro has an issue with WAV files… …It will not BOUNCE anything over 3.5gb due to the fact that it uses the old 32bit WAV file format (in a 64bit app!?) and even when splitting the files into separate channels, it will only force you to use CAF. This is unacceptable in a 64bit world. However, Audition still has a problem when recording where it can lose audio files, so I do much of my recording and mixing in logic.

I’ll test premiere with an old file, but I’m sure it’ll work much the same. So long as the frame counts are the same, the markers will import just fine, and you’ll be happy trails. I don’t recall if FCPx or any other editors actually have this function. But… …IF you export a single set of markers of each type from premiere, you can add markers from other editors via copy\paste into the text file that’s created by adobe software. Once finished, save the file exactly as is, and import it to adobe premiere to add the markers to your sequence. Seems like it would be straightforward enough. Perfect? Nothing is. But this gets very close. If your editor has a similar function, just use a find\replace and make it like the adobe file. Save it and import to your project, it should be useful.