One last edit: You might ask, “why the hell would I want to do that?” Well, to go back and forth to After Effects via sequence import or Dynamic Link. You get the full power of AE and still able to tweak your edit if need be. It doesn’t have to be locked coming out of Avid (or FCP for that matter).

Last night, I was working on editing the first trailer for the new doc Unheralded. It’s been many weeks, indeed months since I worked out the bugs between my Avid to Premiere workflow. I’d forgotten and had to relearn what I did. So, since what I want to do isn’t really documented anywhere, here’s what you want to do:

FILE > EXPORT

Once your sequence is edited in Avid, go to FILE > EXPORT. You have a few different options. I select simply Link to Video and Audio. You can select a few options deeper down and/or deselect anything you don’t need. This will create your AAF for you.

FILE > IMPORT

In Premiere go to FILE > IMPORT select your Avid exported AAF. Premiere will ask for the link to your files. At this point, you can leave ‘em offline or link ‘em up right there to your online clips. Adobe actually recommends a slightly different route if you want to continue to use your DNxHD stuff (here). Then in Premiere, double click on the newly created sequence and you should have your all your edits neatly ready to go.

That’s Not My Name

If you ingest any footage into Avid, it will rename the new transcoded clips on your disk. There is a character limit as well. My .M2T clips are ridiculously long. Without renaming those, Avid overwrites the last several digits like this:

ORIGINAL: 01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T
AVID: 01_0045_2009_10-28_4B3C0996.mxf

If you’re relinking to different media such as an offline/online scenario, this isn’t as big of an issue as it seems and you don’t have to spend hours renaming things before you go into Avid because:

The clip names in the Premiere bins are the same as they were in Avid which is the same as they were originally:  01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T. So no matter how many times you go back and forth you always know the name of your original (in this case online) file when you’re inside the application (unless of course you renamed those for whatever reason).

Premiere, unlike Avid, allows  you to relink to any source file you choose. So while the dialogue screen when relinking says “Where is the file “01_0045_2009_10-28_4B3C0996.mxf?” You can relink that offline clip in the bin to “01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T” and Premiere won’t throw a fit.

*as an aside, make sure those new clips are in a different folder on your disk otherwise Pr. will default to your proxy media, so no orginal (or online) files in subfolders of your proxy media*

Adobe’s vid won’t embed so here’s the link

Tags: .m2ts, after effects, avid, premiere, video, workflow

The following is entirely on Mac using Adobe CS4 and latest updates.

Premiere Project Preset with Cineform

After much testing becuase I couldn’t find anything on the web (save for complaining) and I asked David at Cineform and he didn’t have anything; I found that you don’t get perfect playback of Cineform .MOV files through Adobe on Mac, but it’s good enough for me. Especially in regards to post: coloring and GFX. My native files are HDV and those don’t hold up AT ALL. Yes, everyone wants real-time performance with no rendering but since I started editing video many, many years ago, it was all render, all the time. That’s been significantly decreased. Anyway, here’s what I found is the best project preset in Adobe:

For a little variation (something I do when I’m editing on my MBP, use the Red Project preset (download free plug-in from Red’s website)- almost the exact same thing but adds a playback resolution selection in your viewer on the desktop. It may be mental, but when I kill the resolution, it helps the playback (on un-rendered timelines; playback is fine on rendered timelines).

NOTE: When using First Light, your changes WILL STICK if you render the timeline (if I recall correctly). That blows. I haven’t tested copying the rendered timeline to a new unrendered timeline or using an EDL in a new project to see if there’s a workaround yet.

You should see yellow bars above your timeline. You’ll have to render the entire thing to get real-time playback out of it, but it works. Any time you later another view track over the existing yellow or green timeline, you’ll get red. It’ll still play back like a yellow timeline. Again, it renders super quick on my 8-core and okay on my dual core MBP.

The MXO with Cineform

On my Octomac, I have a Matrox MXO- as you probably recently heard, Matrox released a bunch of new drivers for the MXO2 line that fully support Cineform. Well, guess who just got hosed? Yup, me. At the time I bought the MXO, there was no talk of the MXO2. The MXO2 Mini would have met my needs and cost me far less. At this point, if I sell the MXO, I’ll be taking a huge hit only to turn around and get the MXO2 Mini. I would contact Matrox about it, but I’ve limited success getting larger companies to listen.

That said, you’ll get good playback by leaving your display settings set to Secondary Display at your monitor’s native resolution. Mine is a Dell at 1600 x 1200 (or something close to that)- I can set the MXO to play it 1:1 and if your monitor’s properly calibrated, it shouldn’t be an issue.

In Conclusion

I don’t think there is a perfect solution out there. Just options with trade-offs. Keep using what works for you. Currently, Cineform on Adobe on Mac certainly has it’s faults, but it’s what’s working for me now. Will it cause me to switch back to Windows? Maybe…at this point Apple has more to do with that than Adobe.

For what it’s worth, I think Cineform has better performance on FCP on Mac…not sure since I don’t have FCP at this point. And certainly Windows. Most of the FCP guys are using ProRes anyway, but I like Cineform as it is multi-NLE compatible unlike ProRes which is more Apple monopoly. #AppleFail

So I hope this helps. I couldn’t find anything when I was looking.

Tags: .m2ts, cineform, hdv, video, workflow

You’re going to see the word “much” in the following post many times…

Naturally, since I’m shooting all my work in HD I thought it’d be awesome to have HD master files I could throw (and keep) on the PS3 at home; watch ‘em at 123″ in all it’s HD glory (I’m sucker for HD), and show of my mad skillz to all my friends (sarcasm intended). I don’t have a blu-ray burner on the Octomac but I heard tell that you could burn blu-ray to regular DVD’s with programs like Toast (such talk is also a lie).

After much annoyance not getting that to work, I gave up. But the last few days I was faced with CS4 not properly deinterlacing my footage out of Media Encoder like it’s supposed to (the same files came out fine in CS3) . So after much more testing today I discovered that ME’s .m4v blu-ray files came out looking like I want them to. But after searching the nets, I couldn’t find a way to encode them for my PS3 (this seems to be another on-going Adobe issue). At the same the time I wondered if I could convert the BRD file to something I could use on the web.

So after much more testing, I came up with the answer to both.

For the PS3, take a the .m4v and .wav files from the Media Encoder render and import them into Encore. From Encore export a Blu-Ray folder. Inside the folder, you’ll find another folder called “Streams.” That folder contains the .m2ts file that’ll play back on the PS3 just fine.

Incidentally, that also fixed my issue. I opened Media Encoder and dropped the .m2ts file in and rendered out an .mp4 file. Well, believe it or not (and I suggest doing it yourself), but that file looks WAY better than the file rendered straight out of Media Encoder. It defies my logic, but my eye says it’s true.

In fact, I’ll post the vid tomorrow. It doesn’t “premier” until Sept. 26, but most, if not all of those folks don’t read my blog

Tags: .m2ts, .m4v, encore, ps3, video, workflow