Raw Files into Premier CS 5 - how?

[Kent Beeson]

Easiest way for my client to import video and audio of the raw BPAV clips from my EX1R camera? Says he's only getting audio - will Adobe Premier edit with the MXF files?

He has Premier CS 5...thanks

[Thomas Gregory]

Kent, I shoot EX1R. I take the cards out of the camera, dock them into my laptop cardslot, transfer the files to hard drive, import the files to the CS5 bin, and edit immideately. Premiere handles them better than any other system. I also have a full-tower system running CS5 and it goes just as smoothe there. At the station I work for they have a FCP6 system, and it sucks for EX files.
I really don't have any idea why it won't work for you.

[Kent Beeson]

Very weird then...he's on MAC OS X laptop (don't know if ti's Lion or what)...so how to take the raw footage on one SxS card and import into Premier CS 5? How to transcode the files into .mov if that will work? Or how to do this using XDcam Browser 2.0?

I myself use FCP 7 and I know how it works with that.

[Thomas Gregory]

Kent, Ok, my experience with FCP, The whole BPAV file needs to go to hard drive, then on FCP you need to use the "log and transfer" process. Took me awhile to get this right myself on FCP. No idea why final cut can't handle it like premiere, it's much easier. I create a folder for each shoot, seperate sub-folders inside that if there's more than one card used, and in each sub folder (card1, card2...) I put the entire BPAV folder from the card.
In Log & Transfer, tell it where to look for new clips. then select them, drag 'em to the bottom to get rewrapped so FCP will handle them. Hope this helps...

EDIT
Sorry, just reread your post, you know how to handle them in FCP. My only advice now is to throw away the mac. No experience with premiere on a mac, guess I'm kinda useless to you,.....so sorry. I have a custom built PC that will run circles around a mac, and for less than half the cost.

[Jack Zhang]

Use the Media Browser within Premiere to open up the BPAV folder. It should auto-recognize it is an XDCAM EX file structure and will display clips instead of files.

[Steve Kalle]

Originally Posted by Kent Beeson

Easiest way for my client to import video and audio of the raw BPAV clips from my EX1R camera? Says he's only getting audio - will Adobe Premier edit with the MXF files?

He has Premier CS 5...thanks

You shouldn't have any MXF files, which is where the problem could be. The raw clips are MP4 within the BPAV folder and Premiere Pro automatically displays the MP4 files as clips and also connects any recordings that span across 2 or more files.

[Kent Beeson]

Client says he has an Academic copy of Premier and it only imports the audio(?) from the XDcam clips...not sure but as a work-around we're going to rewrap all clips as .mov files and it'll work this way - yes?

[Jack Zhang]

MOVs require Final Cut to be installed to work with Quicktime's XDCAM codec, I think. (if you want to keep the compression as MPEG-2)

If worse comes to worse, compress it to Apple ProRes 422 HQ using MPEG Streamclip.

[Kent Beeson]

so does that mean .mov's won't work in Premier CS 5?

[Jack Zhang]

Originally Posted by Kent Beeson

so does that mean .mov's won't work in Premier CS 5?

Apple ProRes MOVs will work with CS5. Try using MPEG Streamclip on the raw files. Note that this will not combine spanned clips.

[Kent Beeson]

So me using XDcam Transfer (as I just did) to make all XDcam clips into mov's won't work in Premier? They are XDcam codec of course. I was going to give these new mov's to client but will they not work?

[Jack Zhang]

Final Cut must be installed for it to work with MOV files from XDCAM Browser. MPEG Streamclip should be an option if it works.

[Luc De Wandel]

Just for the sake of general knowledge: there's no such thing as 'Premier'. This magnificent piece of software from Adobe is called 'Première', with an 'e' and it is French for 'first run'. In English it is also written with an 'e', by the way...

I see this mistake very often in other discussion boards too, and it means that Adobe marketing made a bad choice when picking this name. Brand names should be simple and straightforward, in as many languages as possible.

[Steve Kalle]

Your client obviously doesn't know what they are doing. The 'academic' version is NOT a separate version. It only refers to a special price. If they can't get it to work, then trying to tell them to re-wrap the video clips isn't going to be any easier.

Tell them to install Teamviewer, you install Teamviewer on your computer and then log into their computer and determine what is happening. I use this software for free on all of my computers as well as any friend or family member who needs me to fix their computer rather than me drive to them every time the screen resolution gets changed and they don't have a clue how to change it back (I'm not kidding).

FYI, MOV is simply a wrapper, but Premiere Pro on Windows cannot handle many codecs wrapped in MOV even though PPro can handle just about every non-MOV codec. (AVI is also a wrapper and does not refer to any codec) One example is MOV files from the nanoFlash which do not work in PPro and AE on Windows without an $80 plugin. If anything, it sounds as though this client used XDCAM Transfer which imported and wrapped everything into MOV files. I can only assume how frustrating this must be for you.

Side note: on one of my workstations, when I open a clip into the Source window, the image is blank but the audio plays. I fix this simply by clicking in the timeline and then clicking on the Source window and everything works. This issue only happens when first opening PPro. This particular 'bug' is due to my Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme 3D card and associated software.

[Walter Brokx]

For Premiere you only need to copy all the files from the SxS card into a folder (call it 'footage' or 'footage-card1' or whatever) on the harddisk you use for editing.
In Premiere:
- Import [CTRL/Cmd + I]
- Browse to the folder containing the BPAV-folder
- Select folder ('footage') and press 'Import Folder'

Premiere imports all files from the folder and recognizes the files as being EXcam-files.
(It still says some files can't be opened, but that are the metadata/xml-files: don't worry about that notification).
In the projectwindow in Premiere you now have a folder called 'footage' (or whatever you named it) with all the clips, but without all the subfolders that are found when browsing the BPAV-folder).

Are you sure you client has CS5?
It sounds more like a CS2-problem when EXcam was not yet supported (because it was brandnew when CS already existed).

So you don't have to rewrap or transcode at all.
However, using the Sony EX Clipbrowser can be usefull to copy the files, because it does check the copied files for errors.
Sony Clipbrowser is also the quickest way to easily watch the footage without moving through sub-subfolders all the time when it's not imported yet.