[Jimmy See]

I guess nobody else wants to do this, or there just isn’t a way to specifically do that. For posterity, though, I figured out what to do as a workaround, and it’s simple enough.

Initially I hoped I could set a keyframe to before the clip starts when in the effect editor, therefore skipping the entire ‘ramp-up’ movement and cutting in to the clip when the effect is mid-stride and already at a constant velocity. However, even though you can see clip segment span to beyond the in and our boundaries represented in the effect editor window, it wouldn’t allow me to put keyframes there. Hence me posting my question.

What didn’t occur to me until after though, is that you can set a keyframe anywhere you like within the in and out boundary, and then alt+drag it out of that boundary after. It’s annoying, because you can’t move the position indicator within the effect editor window outside of the in and out span, thus you cannot figure out where you’re placing this keyframe by an exact amount of frames, only roughly with mouse gesture movement, but it’s good enough. Of course you could also trim the clip back at the head by the number of frames you want the movement to begin, set a keyframe at the beginning of the clip, set the keyframe to fixed, and then trim the head forward again to your original starting position, but that’s more of a hassle and wasn’t very satisfactory to me.

[Jimmy See]

Do you mean you can hear sound, but you can not see video? How did you import the clips in to Premiere? It is possible that you don’t need to convert the files. Depending on the camera, and how the files are stored, you may just need to do the import again, but this time use ‘media browser’ in Premiere, to import them. For many camera files, it is important to use the media browser when importing, and NOT using drag and drop or file and import.

[Jimmy See]

DVDs are encoded in to MPEG 2 which is native to a lot edit software, even ones that in the past used to require a transcode for successful import like FCP7, therefore you can probably have some degree of confidence in that it’s not unheard of to do this. However you’re right to have suspicion because DVD is MPEG2 Long-GOP which makes it efficient for compression and space saving, but not so good for editing because the processor has to work harder on a given frame (if that frame isn’t an I-frame) because it has to look at the frames on either side of the cut, to construct or predict the frame. It also has to do that anytime you scrub through a clip, which is where the extra strain is most evident. Long-GOP works okay for playback but makes life hard on the processor when editing.

However, on a modern machine, with fast storage, you’d actually probably be okay because while the above is true, DVDs are only standard definition and in addition to that are pretty low bitrate, so in terms of the actual amount of work the computer is being asked to perform to create the frames, the workload’s fairly light even if it does have to work a little harder because of the long-GOP codec. Personally, despite the risks, I’d be inclined to go ahead and edit the VOBs if Premiere will let you import them, depending on how much time and storage you have.

The equation then looks like this:

[Jimmy See]

Hey man, 4 years later, I hope you’re still around. I just found this thread and something you said is very interesting to me. From time to time, there are situations where the ability to insert filler in order to push clips on the right-side of an edit further down the timeline by an arbitrary amount would be quite helpful.

How do you set source tracks to ‘gap’, I’ve found no other mention of this anywhere other than your post. Would doing this be like inserting filler?

I know it’s already possible to achieve what I want without the need for using filler to create gaps. You can lasso select all clips that need to be moved in this manner and drag with the mouse or move by a typed timecode value. Or if the timeline is long and complex you can also use the select track(s) forward tool to achieve the same thing without needing to zoom out too much. However, there are times when it would be faster or less disruptive to flow, to simply be able to specify the duration of some filler and then ripple it in to the timeline at a precise spot, thus creating a gap of arbitrary size and pushing clips to the right of this insert point; further along the timeline. The main usefulness of this approach is that if you have your sync locks arranged in a specific manner than you can reliably predict what will and won’t be affected by the insert edit of this filler and therefore ripple forward only certain select tracks without the need to specifically go through and click to specify which ones you want with the select track(s) forward tool. It also just ‘feels’ better to me.

[Jimmy See]

Awesome! Unfortunately I seem to be operating 8.8.3 here at this facility but this will be good to know moving forward as I finally figured out how to select segments using only the keyboard recently, by mapping the ‘select in/out’ command to my keyboard. Selecting segments with this command and then nudging them up and down will be great.

Thanks for your help once again Michael

[Jimmy See]

Bummer, hope it makes its way in some decade. I’d also love if they could implement some kind of ‘smart bins’ too that collect clips based upon saved searches and update whenever new media is tagged with characteristics matching those searches. That latter idea I thought was something clever I’d thought of but then I saw a forum post somewhere suggesting the idea back in 2005. Evidently Avid were not keen.

Thanks for letting me know anyway.

[Jimmy See]

Thanks Brent, actually my problem is that I want to save and load custom bin views in the find/search window, the one accessible by typing ctrl/cmd+f. In fact I discovered shortly after posting something I swear wasn’t happening before, which is that when you choose which columns to view and which to hide in some search results, those same choices persist the next time you perform a search, automatically. This actually almost answers my question except, it doesn’t do this after closing Avid which means at least once a day it’s necessary to manually select the columns. It also doesn’t help if there are multiple custom bin views one might like to use for searching but in my case that’s fine.

[Jimmy See]

[Trevor Asquerthian] “But you can work on a 2-track multichannel sequence and expand it to 4/8/whatever later.”

How do I do that? In the specific scenario I was in where there was a sequence that was ready to roll and correct in every respect except that there were two stereo tracks instead of the 4 mono ones I needed, is there a better way to fix the situation than what I did? Because I had to lay the source clip back in again and it seemed a bit silly to do that, again in the particular instance, it wasn’t a big deal, but if the sequence were more complicated or the number of tracks and clips higher it would have been a big waste of time. Would it have been possible to change that existing sequence somehow so that the audio was configured as I needed it?

I probably wouldn’t mind always using mono track presets because it’s more like how I’m used to working anyway, but the keeping stereo things stereo idea does make sense and I should get used to it, however if it means having to re-lay all the audio before export then it’s not really worth it. Or am I misunderstanding you?

[Jimmy See]

I mean load it in to the sequence monitor while the timeline itself remains visible as one of the pancakes in the stack. Imagine you have Sequence A at the top of the stack of pancakes and Sequence B at the bottom. Now imagine you move the playhead, in Sequence A, and then Sequence B. The way it currently works, you only get to see the result of your scrubbing action in the program monitor, regardless of which sequences you’re scrubbing. If, when you’ve finished scrubbing in sequence A, you then begin scrubbing in Sequence B, the Program monitor contents is overridden so you no longer see the last frame you rested upon in Sequence A, but instead see what you’re doing in Sequence B. Of course that’s not a massive problem it’s just that having stringouts treated like clips, with the associated capabilites of master clips can be quite powerful. It’s good for making match cuts for example, or sometimes for conforms it’s handy because you might be moving sections of a near-finished complex edits from sequence to another, doing so by simply dragging the sequence in to the source monitor will work, you can scrub to where you want to start and mark in and where you want to stop and mark out and then insert, but when there’s many many channels and tracks things get complex and it can be beneficial to actually see simultaneously the track layout of both the source and the record timeline so you know what you’re mapping to what. It’s something that since you’ve not really had the feature before it might be hard to envision the usefulness of, but once you’ve worked with, you prefer not to do without. While Avid doesn’t actually have the feature I’m describing it does have the ability swap the contents of the timeline window between source and record via a button-press so you can very quickly check and then switch back, it also previews scrubbing operations performed in the ‘source’ timeline in the source monitor and the scrubbing operations of the ‘record’ timeline in the ‘record/program’ monitor. I’m envisaging a poaching of that Avid feature and combining it with Premiere’s ‘pancaking’ feature to make it something better than both of them. I know it’s possible because as I said you can actually already do it, it’s just that there are too many steps involved and that makes it kinda of a pain in the arse.

What would be useful would be if you could load sequences A and B in to the pancake stack, but nominate one as the ‘source’ and the other as the ‘record’ so that when you scrub the timeline at the top of the stack (Timeline A), the source monitor previews the frames that the playhead moves over in Sequence A, but when you move the playhead in sequence B, which is at the bottom of the stack, the program monitor previews the frames for that timeline’s scrub operation. It actually is already possible to do this in Premiere via a workaround, but it’s too much hassle to make it worth it. The workaround is to open the media browser, and navigate to the project file itself for the project you’re working in, this will allow you to see the project’s structure in the media browser including bins and sequences, and you can then load the sequence you want to be the source. Doing that opens a new timeline window which you can stack like pancakes just as one would the usual pancake method. It’s really great when it works, but the thing is one is switching source and ‘record’ timelines all the time so it’s not practical to have to keep loading the media browser over and over just for the small efficiency increase of having both the source and program monitors in conjunction with displayed timeline windows.

[Jimmy See]

I generally can’t think of a project that wouldn’t benefit from decent metadata, but that said I tend not to bother with it much when dealing with mostly interview, or if the project is a small enough scale that keeping a handle on what footage is what and where it is in the project is fairly easy to do mentally in conjunction with some well organised workflow techniques.

Good to know that the subclips do not affect conform, that was something I wasn’t in a position to test. Still though, the lack of ability to match frame back to the original master is a sin not easily forgiven. I discovered that to be the case when using them in an edit of stand up comedy, it sounds like a small thing, but it’s infuriating, maybe because it’s a small thing and just seems like it could so easily be fixed. But what annoys one person intensely is minor or irrelevant to another.

Pancake method is cool, I’d never heard of a name for it, I like it. This is something Avid can’t do either, I think I hit upon the idea when I saw you could have two timelines open when I was first trying Premiere out, ultimately I didn’t make much use of it though, I should maybe renew interest in it. One thing I think would make that feature great would be if you could have one of those sequences load in to the source monitor window, and the other load in to the program monitor. This would make it equivalent Avid’s fantastic toggle source/record timeline function, only better because you could see both timelines at all times, rather than switching between. I should probably point out that for my home system Premiere is my personal choice so I definitely like it, I’m just aware of the flaws. Probably the best thing about it is the rate of improvement over time, now and then I noticed some problems that I think are unforgivable and extremely bad and they’re gone in the next version update. There were concerns this is exactly what would stop with the subscription model in play, while I hope that doesn’t turn out to be the case, I’m pleased that thus far it doesn’t seem to be. With Avid, a problem will be a problem for a decade or more and might still not be fixed.