[Tim Dutton]

I had the same thing happen to me. Optical flow worked well when viewing in Premiere, but wigged out on export. I switched to Frame Blending to fix it. The motion was not quite as nice, but the artifacts in the export were gone.

Your solution is perhaps a better one – to turn to another product to achieve the smooth slow down. In your case, you tried After Effects which worked for you.

It would be helpful if Premiere would give an accurate representation while editing, so that you know more surely whether it will work in export or not.

[Tim Dutton]

The Find N Replace extension worked perfectly!! I couldn’t be more pleased

It can find and replace, add prefix, suffix, remove characters, sequentially number… I am happy. 🙂

[Tim Dutton]

I’m going to give the renamer extension a try and see if it’s worth the $20.

https://www.provideocoalition.com/find-n-replace-a-very-useful-adobe-premiere-pro-extension-for-batch-renaming-of-clips/

I fairly often have the need to rename bulk clips. I try my best to have files named and organized before import, but not always successful. It’s usually an assistant editor that doesn’t follow the file scheme set up and imports anyway. Anyway, I’ll try to come back and post how it goes.

[Tim Dutton]

You need to use Proxy Video files. Proxies are smaller video files that play back smoothly in high-demand editing, or with less capable computers. You turn on proxy view for speedy editing, then switch back to full-res for export. Premiere does this automatically.

This will show you how:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b8VtZX62XA
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=create+and+view+proxies+in+premiere

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[Tim Dutton]

+1 for locked horizontal position while moving vertically. It’s really the simplest most foolproof and quickest option.

I use all the workaround techniques mentioned in this thread, but I’m still missing that constrain horizontal position while moving vertically.

Logic Pro does this awesomely – best of both worlds. Not a modifier key, but a preference checkbox “Constrain movement to 1 direction [in timeline]” . That way if you pull horizontal it only moves horizontal, pull vertical and it only goes vertical. If you need both, do one and then the other. All simple mouse drags without needing any modifier key. This is what I want in Premiere in addition to the snap, playhead, and other features mentioned. Why not make it better?

[Tim Dutton]

In my opinion retiming isn’t necessarily the best solution. It may work kind of in some situations.

I do a lot of audio mixing for music video. This consists of multiple camera angles shot over multiple takes where the artists perform the music in sync to playback audio that they sing along to. On each take the playback audio may start at a different point within the video frame so that, for example, if there is a click at the top of the song to bring the performers in, on take one the click may be at the beginning of a video frame, on take 2 it may be .5 frames later within a frame, take 3 may be .25 frames later within 1 video frame. When you line up the video and audio in post, you can see that the best alignment you can get for that first click is +/- .5 frame of video so it’s likely that video from each separate take is a quarter to half a frame out of sync. I have noticed that to get the best looking result even a quarter frame matters. You can start to subtly notice something “wrong” when picture and audio are as little as .25 frames off. I will mix audio in Logic Pro and I will often shift audio by one, two, or 3 quarter frames until it just looks more “real”. Also, I am often using live tracked audio so I know the audio is what the singer sang when that video camera was recording – not sync imperfections by the artist.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I have an idea. Maybe more experienced editors could chime in here. What if you tried making your sequence/timeline settings be double or even quadruple the frame rate that your source footage is at. So, for example, if your source footage is 29.97, double it to 59.94. Then, couldn’t you edit with .5 frame accuracy (compared to your source footage)?

Would this be practical/a good solution? Like I say, I haven’t tried it yet, but I have thought a lot about this problem. To completely solve it, either the original playback audio has to be synchronized to video frames WITHOUT synchronizing to the SMPTE TIME position (cameras are running SMPTE on time of day timecode, audio playback is not) OR trying my (untried) idea of making smaller frames in the timeline to edit at subframe accuracy.

Please, someone smarter than me tell us if this is a good idea, or why this won’t work. What do you think?

[Tim Dutton]

No Adam, You are not unclear. I think the one point that Robin didn’t get is that the proxy files don’t stay connected when any part of the file path changes name – so when you have BIGDRIVE/MyProjectFolder/Media/Final Cut Proxy Media/ at your office with the RAID, Final cut is happy and sees the proxy files, but when you copy your project and external proxy files to the portable drive, final cut automatically no longer sees them. Only the drive name has changed, for example, to PORTABLEDRIVE/MyProjectFolder/Media/Final Cut Proxy Media/ and that alone causes final cut to lose it’s connection to the proxy media. That is what Robin is missing. It seems that Robin was assuming that the connection remained intact, so I can understand the confusion in that case.

I have nearly the SAME issue! In my case, my project is almost the same size as yours, and I have 4-5 editors working on the project. We cannot be on the same physical network, so each editor has a drive with a copy of the original media, library and proxy media. Like you say, the Library file this way is ~20MB – very manageable compared to ~100GB per Library with the proxy media stored inside which is much much much less convenient to manage making quick copies back and forth.

I really like the suggestion to name the portable drive the same as the main drive. I think I will try that work around for now.

You know, I have this issue with Logic Pro as well. Any time I back up or move a Logic file, I have to reconnect media. It’s not too uncommon to see two different audio files with the same name connected to the same project. That causes headaches. I wish these editing files would have a relative file path setting which would allow you to designate a main project folder below which ALL the files would ALWAYS remain the same RELATIVE to each other allowing complete portability.

Cheers