[Petros Kolyvas]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the note.

Part of what we do is use our Video I/O for in-studio chroma key and/or interviews – for which we need a card that can acquire 1080p23.98PsF reliably (in AJA’s case I believe we’d use their applications VTR Exchange.)

I believe all cards are sluggish on the timeline in Premiere – the MXO2 was nearly unusable so we would only playback sequences on it when it was time to do CC and the edit was nearly complete.

We also still use FCP7 for legacy projects and plan on running future versions of FCPX alongside Premiere Pro/Production Premium so the reason to move to AJA is both about reliable video capture in addition to monitoring.

We’re been struggling with the MXO2 for years now and it’s just not worth it (for me anyway – mileage will vary) to continuing using a device that I can’t/don’t trust to work the way it should.

Again though, thanks for the heads up!

All the best,
PK

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Thanks Tom! We are/were heading that way… this did help seal the deal though. 🙂

We were looking at AJA for edit “B” for some time as a replacement to an aging Matrox MXO setup (not the MXO2 the discussion above caused); now we probably go whole hog and get AJA cards for both…

The MXO2 went up for sale after that conversation with tech support. With what we can get the MXO2 with MAX for used, the LHi will cost very little as an upgrade/crossgrade and Media Encoder on a Quad or Six core mac as almost as fast (sometimes faster!) than “MAX” and isn’t tied to MOV containers (I prefer MP4). Bonus.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Our three workstations all have Production Premium (or Master Collection) and Motion5/Compressor4. It doesn’t work and it would seem that one is required to have the Motion 4/FCP7 engine installed and available in order for this to function as you noted.

Great find though… 🙂

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Hi Danny,

What platform are you on?

One good idea, in the future, is to export a “Master Version” (something in either Uncompressed, Cineform, ProRes, DNxHD, AVCIntra, Etc.) so you can make changes like this quickly when you need to export multiple highly-compressed copies, or make changes. If you export to a codec like that, you only need to spend the time it takes to encode to MP4, and not re-render the whole thing. Just a thought/unsolicited advice… take it for what it is.

However, if you are on Windows (or have access to Boot Camp/Parallels/Fusion) MP4Muxer will do the trick.
https://www.dvbportal.de/projects/mp4muxer/

While I’m predominantly an OS X user, I don’t know of any really good tools to do this on the Mac side of things.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Hi Paul,

I believe he means re-muxing new audio without affecting/transcoding the video.

QT Pro could/can do this (though it wasn’t totally straighforward), and there are tons of Windows/Linux Tools available (MP4Muxer is one.)

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Wow, you summed up my rambling quite beautifully. And, yes, that is the idea.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Thanks Tom!

Was trying to squeeze in answers between client calls…. I’ll try to be more clear. Perhaps a screen-cap would be more efficient.

1. Before sending a clip (or set of clips) to AE, make a copy of those clips on the same timeline and disable them. You’ll have the original clips in PrPro in case something happens and you need to go back to them; there is no “revert” function for dynamically linked clips at the time of this post.

2. Send the clips to AE. As Tom mentioned, have the single AE project open already or, if this is your first dynamic link for a project, plan on using this same project for almost everything unless you have a real reason not to (of which there are, but we’ll stick to this case for the time being.)

3. Once your dynamically linked comp opens up in your AE project, select all the assets of the active comp (platform-appropriate select-all shortcut) and pre-compose it. Name this pre-comp something meaningful. This way you can give the comp a good, descriptive name. When you want to work on it in AE (with or without Premiere open), you won’t have to go searching for a comp named “PRProject.pproj/DynamicLink289” (paraphrasing). Instead you will find “The Comp I want to Comp Comp”. This becomes all the more important because of step 2 – where you’re using one AE project for everything. If, like me, you send a lot of clips to AE from Premiere Pro, making sure you don’t spend forever trying to find comps can be major time-saver.

4. Create a bin to hold the original Dynamically Linked Comps – you need them, as they contain your link back to PrPro, but since you’re working with your well-named pre-comps (which are just nested comps at this point) you don’t need them crowding your workspace.

5. Edit your nicely-named comps, knowing that they’ll still link up in PrPro.

Hope this was clearer – if I made any errors and/or blunders, let me know!

All the best,
PK

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Might I add one other piece of advice?

Because you can’t rename comps and have them reliably re-connect I do two other things in addition to the “Single AE Project” tip, (one of which Tom encouraged in a previous post.)

1. This was suggested by Tom: Before sending to AE, copy the clip and/or clips in question and send the copy to AE, disabling the clips but keeping for posterity/security/safely on an another video track(s). (In my former life as an FCP/Shake(er), FCP would do this automatically with Shake comps (but not Motion comps).

2. In AE, because I can’t re-name a dynamically linked comps, I will usually Pre-Compose all the elements into yet-another-comp which I can name appropriately and then return to work on without wondering which automatically-generated (but generally meaningless) number is the comp I want to continue working on. I Bin all the dynamic links and don’t touch them, usually continuing to work on the now clearly-named pre-composed version of the same items. Think of it as nesting for AE. 😉

All the best,
PK

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

It looks to me that, in that second picture, the timecode is showing as NDF, where in the first image the timecode is clearly DF.

The odd thing is that you screen-cap of the bin also looks strange with just that particular clip; the bulk of the time codes indicate DF, but the Video In and Video Out points seem to be showing NDF timecode (though it’s hard to tell since the dotted lines might be obscuring the semi-colons).

One disadvantage of Premiere’s willingness to play anything (normally a good thing) is that if there’s an issue here (and it may be with just that single clip) it doesn’t show up until you need Premiere to play nice with another app.

If you remove that clip from the equation and test with other clips that are consistently DF on a DF timeline, can you roundtrip with FCP and get the cuts you expect?

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Thanks for Sharing Ken… I’ve never heard mention of this. Which Motion versions work with PPro?

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger