[Joe Bender]

It looks like the issue is with moving from one drive to another. Media files have to be relinked for each project file in the Production individually. So you can have one project file open with all media linked, and then you open a second project file in which the media is unlinked. What I think is happening is that Premiere then has two conflicting paths in memory for each piece of media, and makes you relink all the affected files, even if they were correctly linked a moment ago.

So far the only solution I’ve found is to open each of the project files in the Production in turn and relink each of them. Which means you wind up relinking all the media multiple times, a huge pain when you have a big archival-heavy film!

Wish there was a way to relink all the media across the Production at once instead of piecemeal!

[Joe Bender]

This Production is on Premiere Pro 2021 across several macs, ranging from 16-core new Mac Pro to 12-core 2013 Mac Pro and several iMacs. Data is stored on a QNAP NAS over 10gbE. Media cache database and media cache are local to each machine, render files are stored on a flash network volume.

I’ve just had this recur on one of the iMacs — I opened a project within the Production that I was working on with all media linked yesterday afternoon and all the media is unlinked. The network volume is mounted and files are linked in other projects open in the Production.

[Joe Bender]

Yes indeed, and that’s what I typically do as well. However for this film I am hoping to get a head start on the conform and color before picture lock, so my idea was to move the whole project into Resolve and finish from there.

If the audio mismatch prevents that workflow, does Color Trace work well enough to transfer to an updated XML if the cut continues to evolve? Is it able to transfer over scaling etc? I’ve tried to use the Compare Timeline tool for this in the past but on complex edits I find it doesn’t work particularly well.

Joe Bender
Director of Photography · Producer
Third Party Films
thirdpartyfilms.com

[Joe Bender]

I am currently dealing with a similar question myself. I typically shoot with Slog3 on the FS7 and a custom color profile on the a7s2 dialed in to match my usual 1-light LUT for the FS7. That’s served me well. However, I have a job coming up where I have to shoot in REC709 on both cameras, so the differences are more apparent. I have tried matching them empirically using a chart and scopes, but without great results. I’m not super skilled with all the color profile settings and don’t want to reinvent the wheel if someone has already solved this problem.

Anyone have settings for an a7s2 picture profile that match well with the standard 709 profile in the FS7m2?

Thanks in advance!

– Joe

Joe Bender
Director of Photography · Producer
Third Party Films
thirdpartyfilms.com

[Joe Bender]

Hi Andrew,

As Charlie suggests, Transcriptive is a good option if you’re willing to pay the price of entry, but bear in mind that the machine translations are just a starting point and you’ll still need a native speaker to edit the transcription and break it into logical subtitle-length units.

My workflow for this situation on several feature docs in other languages has been:

1. Make a stringout of my synced dailies, e.g. for multicam and/or external sound
2. Bounce that for the translator with sequence timecode
3. Have the translator subtitle the synced stringout in a subtitling program like Belle Nuit Subtitler OS or Aegisub (both a bit archaic but free) and export them as an STL or SRT file. STL has the advantage of being basically a CSV file, so more easily human-readable and editable — you can easily open it in a text editor, strip out the header info, and then open it as a spreadsheet for a searchable timecoded transcript.
4. Use a utility called premiereTitles (or the older psTitles) by Andreas Kiel to generate/import the subtitles in Premiere (either as layered TIFF files or as Premiere titles) using a style template of your choice and lay them back over the synced sequence, then pull selects/cut from the subtitled sequence.

This is definitely labor-intensive, but it lets you edit with individual subtitles which I find much easier than using the closed captions tool in Premiere — the captions tool gives you one item in your timeline containing all the subs, which is very cumbersome. The downside is that if you want to change the style of your subs after the fact, you have to either change every title individually or export an EDL/XML and strip the text data from that or the individual files if you’re using TIFFs. Kiel’s premiereTitles has a function to export Premiere titles from Legacy titler or Essential Graphics to STL/SRT, but I haven’t gotten it to work myself — I use a custom Python script to strip the text data from the layered TIFF files.

Resolve also has a vastly improved tool for subtitling that lets you manage the subs in a dedicated track, change the style of all titles at once, etc. Since Resolve is free, it might also be possible to have your translator create the subs in Resolve, although I’m not sure off the top of my head whether you can export them as an SRT/STL to generate and import in Premiere.

Hope this is useful, and good luck!

Joe

Joe Bender
Director of Photography · Producer
Third Party Films
thirdpartyfilms.com

[Joe Bender]

Yes, that’s the nominal workflow, but when following that Resolve Studio was not deinterlacing my clips, just making them ‘wavy’, misinterpreting the fields or something. Resolve only correctly deinterlaced the clips when I turned video field processing on. I’ll try again to verify, but that’s the behavior I was experiencing.

[Joe Bender]

Hi Massimo, thanks for your reply.
I enabled video field processing because as far as I could tell that was the only way to get Resolve to deinterlace the archival footage correctly. Is there another method that I should use instead? If there’s something else I missed there please enlighten me.

Thanks again,

Joe

[Joe Bender]

You can probably do at least part of this using a method I use to generate subtitles with a utility called psTitles by Andreas Kiel: https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/psTiltles/index.html

You can create a spreadsheet with three columns, Timecode In, Timecode Out, and Contents. Then you export the spreadsheet as a CSV file, rename it to .stl, and use psTitles to generate TIFF files according to a template. psTitles also exports an XML sequence file. When you import the XML into Premiere, your titles are laid out in a timeline with the appropriate in/out/duration. You can then copy/paste those subs over your edit.

I don’t think it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but it lets you quickly generate and import a large number of text items from a spreadsheet.

Hope that helps!

[Joe Bender]

Thanks for the thoughts, Marc. I’ve been going back and forth with Blackmagic support. The strange thing is the free Resolve runs fine, very well in fact, with the same project, while Resolve Studio barely runs at all and crashes all the time. I’ll update with more if I get to the bottom of it.

[Joe Bender]

Thanks Walter,

Are any of those programs that I can run on my system and that the projection designer can trigger remotely over the network?

Do you know what kind of playback software can be triggered over the RS422 serial port on the Ultrastudio?

Thanks again,

Joe