Film workflow in Premiere

[Richard Cavell]

Hi. I usually work in video that has a fast turn around time. It's unusual for us to have the time or inclination to colour correct video, let alone do anything more fancy with it. It's a bit like electronic news gathering - we shoot it, cut it, broadcast it, and then the clip is forgotten forever.

Now, in film, it's typical to shoot scenes multiple times, where the director has complete control of each take and has planned each shot for months. The clips, whether they are shot electronically or on real film, are individually catalogued. Films have a long turnaround time.

If one had the luxury of time and money, and had several takes of each scene to consider, I wonder whether the clips would be imported and used as usual, or whether one would do something different.

What I would want to do is to import all of the clips and separate them into bins. Then for each clip, create *its own* sequence, and apply initial filters - colour correction, cropping, etc. Then create a sequence for each scene and place all of the candidate clips in it, to show to the director. This sequence could have global-scene colour correction, vignetting, imported audio, overlaid graphics, etc. Then, once the film is finalized, apply global filters to that (audio compression, etc).

Is this too ambitious? Or is this the right way to do it if you have the time?

Richard

[Peter Ferling]

Richard, in such a production, you would need to identify the clips that best tell the story to create an Edit Decision List (EDL) first, and then the grading/color work would be done by someone else, etc.

However, even in a one man band, in order to reduce your workload, I would not bother until you and/or the director have identified the shots that will work for the script. When making these cuts you want to work with native files to have things play back in real-time without the degraded performance from applied effects and filters.

Years ago, with weaker systems, you would have to create proxies, (much smaller and low res files), to achieve real-time playback for a director to do his or her job in creating the EDL. Then you would swap out the proxies with the full res prior to exporting or performing your own effects and corrections.

You can group different takes of the same scene into it's own bin or folder in the bin. Then review those clips while in the bin, placing the selects on the timeline as you go.

For premiere, you can then export a trimmed project via project manager, or just use the remove unused command, before moving on to color correction and effects.

-Pete

[Richard Cavell]

Peter,

Thanks for your reply. I guess Premiere does kind of still have the "proxies", because it habitually works with "preview files", the resolution of which is changeable on the fly and could be much lower than the final product. Having preview files of a lower resolution is, for me, the difference between my-computer-can-do-this and uh-oh-my-computer-has-frozen. Yet, the preview files still give me an excellent idea of the final product. You can easily decide where to cut, dissolve, etc, at quarter-resolution.

While we're on the subject, is there a way to export a Premiere CS 6 project, preferably through Project Manager, such that it can be read by CS 5, or FCP 7?

Richard

[Peter Ferling]

Correct, Once you have the story in place, and have done all work with regards to timing (cuts, trims, and slow motion, etc). Then you can go back and apply effects and tweaks.

Sometimes, during the first edit, you might have to apply an effect or fix to determine if a clip will work. Once done, I then disable the effect to keep the rest of the edit running smoothly.

For the sake of common sense, there is an order in life to make things easier. You wash the car before you wax. You sweep the floor, then you mop. You perform cuts, then you pile on the effects.

Regarding interoperability with other applications. CS4, 5 and 6 could be a mixed bag. It depends on applied effects and plugins and if they would translate. A cuts only project, or one using native or basic plugins that other versions recognize/use should not be an issue.

For Final Cut or a competing product, you would have to export an EDL. Which again, is why you only want to perform cuts only if your going to hand the project off to someone else for additional work or reference.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Originally Posted by Richard Cavell

- we shoot it, cut it, broadcast it, and then the clip is forgotten forever.

...
What I would want to do is to import all of the clips and separate them into bins. Then for each clip, create *its own* sequence, and apply initial filters - colour correction, cropping, etc. Then create a sequence for each scene and place all of the candidate clips in it, to show to the director. This sequence could have global-scene colour correction, vignetting, imported audio, overlaid graphics, etc. Then, once the film is finalized, apply global filters to that (audio compression, etc).

Is this too ambitious? Or is this the right way to do it if you have the time?

Richard

What you need is Adobe Prelude CS6 - which can ingest, log and transcode files on the go. You can add notes, update metadata, and even do basic editing.

A prelude project can be opened in Premiere CS6 for editing, with everything intact.