Track level FX

[John Wiley]

I've recently migrated from Vegas to Premiere and one of the big things I miss is track level fx support. I am currently on CS3 (I got it off a friend to get used to the Adobe workflow, with the view that I'll soon be getting CS5) and was wondering if there have been any changes or added functionality to allow track level FX in newer versions?

I shoot concerts and weddings, and edit using one track per camera and switching back and forth between them. In Vegas my workflow was to sync, cut the clips up, then add CC to match each camera using the Track FX. Then I would touch up individual clips if they needed it - say when a cloud passes overhead at an outdoor wedding and it got a bit darker - using the Clip FX. Then I would use the Output FX to create the overall 'look' or final grading.

With Premiere, my first wedding I edited I started cutting it up, then realised I needed to CC the whole original clip. So I pickout out one event, CC'd it then copy and pasted that onto all the other clips on that track. I kept editing away until I realised there was a slight difference between the footage still and I needed to adjust it - this meant deleting every individual effect from each event on that track one by one, then redoing it.

Since then I've edited a few more wedding with CS3 and tried a few different ways - applying effects/CC first before cutting (this slowed down my computer too much, and if I bypassed the effects then I would still have to go through and individually switch them all back on. Plus if any minor adjustment was needed I would be back where I started in the first project) as well as using nesting, placing the full clip into a seperate timeline then nesting that into the main sequence, then doing all CC on the original instance, but this seemed a bit slower at times as well.

Am I missing something? Is there a "bypass all fx" button which will allow me to do CC before cutting then easily swtich everything on or off as I please to improve performance? Or some hidden way of applying track level FX? Even a way of deleting a particular effect from all the clips it has been applied to would be extremely useful - the same way you can copy and past effects to multiple clips at once. I love the overall workflow/organistation of the Adobe suite, and I've come to love the shortcuts and keystrokes, but Premiere is missing a few things compared to Vegas that really seem to slow me down when I'm editing.

[Kevin Currie]

Are you using the multi-cam feature or physically cutting it up as you go? That wasn't clear in your post. If you are using multi-cam, you can go back to your original comp with the different camera layers and add your CC there. The FX will carry over into the cut up multi-cam sequence (works the same when nesting sequences as well).

And it is possible to turn FX on and off once they have been applied. In the FX Control panel, just toggle off the "fx" symbol beside the effect. When you're done, toggle it back on. Another tip if your clips are getting too effects heavy and slowing down your footage, is to right-click on your preview monitor and set your playback resolution lower than Full.

[John Wiley]

Sorry Kevin, I'm not using the multicam feature, just seperate tracks for each camera and cutting them up on the timeline.

I'm aware that you can toggle the FX off but my issue with that is that you have to go through at the end of your project and check that every effect is switched on again before you render. And my preview quality is permanantly set to 'draft' because otherwise even with 1 track of HDV with CC it stuggles to playback smoothly (on a Core i7 860 2.8ghz with 8gb RAM and 1GB graphics) Another thing I miss about Vegas was the ability to scale the preview so well. Even with 4-5 tracks of HDV and CC on every layer you could just turn down the preview quality to one of about 12 options and enjoy perfectly smooth playback. There was also a button which would let you switch off all the effects on every clip of every track for smoother playback.

Maybe multicam is my answer? I'll have to look into that more closely I think. Once the footage from the various cams is synced, is there a way to just skip a whole section (say when there is a 2 minute break betweed songs at a concert that I want to cut out completely) or am I only able to switch between cameras without trimming/slicing/etc?

[Adam Gold]

Yes, you can easily trim out the dead spots either before or after you do the actual multicam edit. I do it after, in my secondary sequence.

Also, if major color correction is needed (and if it's uniform along the entire length of the original clip) I find it's best to do it in the stacked original sequence before you nest it into your multicam sequence. This will all make sense when you read up on multicam and nested sequences.

So in my case, I stack the four clips from our four cams in the first timeline and sync them. If the color on one or more tracks doesn't match the others, I correct at that point, but then switch off the effect for editing purposes in the original clip. There's no reason you have to do that now, of course. You could do it after the multicam edit is finished. (I also do my audio mixdown at this point, but that's another thread.)

Then I drag the first sequence into a second one, enable multicam and we're off to the races. The editing out of the dead spots I do absolutely last so I don't run the risk of losing sync or otherwise screwing up my original timeline.

Then you can go back to your original sequence and re-enable the effects right before you render.

By the way, if you wanted to apply effects to an entire track, even after it's been edited into thousands of little tiny clips, you could nest it again into a third sequence and then drag the effect to this new track. The effect would treat the track as a single clip. Obviously this only is practical if you want the effect or effects to be uniform along the whole track. If each shot needs different effects or different degrees of an effect, you'd still have to do that shot by shot.