Quick-Start DSLR Editing Workflow for Final Cut Users/Switchers (updated for CS5.5!)

[ADOBE TV PRESENTS] [mechanical clunking and whirring] [JASON LEVINE] [clunking and whirring continues] [KARL SOULE] [clunking and whirring continues] [SHORT AND SUITE - ON THE ROAD WITH JASON AND KARL] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Short and Suite. My name is Jason Levine, worldwide product evangelist for Adobe's video and audio tools, and today we're going to take a look at DSLR workflow. There are many videos on Adobe TV about DSLR workflow. In fact, I even have a few from the CS5 days. The point of this episode, however, is to showcase a really fast way to allow you to go directly from the camera to the timeline, do some basic editing, basic motion, basic moving things around, and then exporting it through the 64-bit Adobe Media Encoder. What I'm going to showcase today is all some footage that I shot on the Canon 7D here in different frame rates and frame sizes, so a mixture of frame rates and frame sizes, things that the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro can handle very easily, very seamlessly. We've already shot some footage here, so what I'm literally going to do is take the CF card directly out of the camera and use a card reader to pull my media directly into Premiere Pro. Remember, in CS5.5 there is no transcoding. You can literally shoot your footage, take it off the card, you don't even have to copy it to an external disk, and begin bringing that media directly inside to your timeline. So let's go and do that. I've got a card reader attached. If you pay attention to the Media Browser, you should see in a moment that a new drive will pop up that says something like EOS Digital. And there it is. And now we can actually see the card that houses all of the media that we just shot with my Canon 7D. And this will work the same for any kind of DSLR camera that you're shooting with. So I can go to the folders here. We'll go into DCIM, 70, and now I have the ability to preview all of the content on that CF card. So by simply double clicking on the first clip, it brings it into the Source Monitor, and there you can see there I am moments ago being shot by some of the guys in the studio here. We can scrub through this. We can play it. And you can see that it plays brilliantly right off the card. So again, we haven't even copied this over. We're truly going from the camera to the timeline. So at this point I can set some in and out points. I can use these icons here to mark the in or out, or I can simply use shortcut key I and O. These are some of the few shortcuts that I actually know. They're fairly standard in all of your NLEs, and we can do that right here. So I can set in, set out, and drag it into my Project panel. Now we have a clip that we're ready to begin editing with. It's that simple. At this point you can also see the attributes of those clips, so once again, 1920x1080, aspect ratio 1.0, 4 seconds, 23.976 at 48K. Very cool. So let's take a look at some other footage. Here again I can double click on another one. This is a kind of cool artsy shot here. It looks pretty neat. So again, I can set an in point here. Let's go ahead and play through a couple seconds of this. Something like that. Set an out and drag it in. Done. These are both 1920x1080 or 1080p. Let's go ahead and add some 720p footage as well. I shot a couple of clips at the end here, so if we take a look at this one, this is actually me shooting into the studio. There's the boom mic ahead of me. [male speaker on recording] It's really funny be-- [Levine] Okay, something like that. So once again, I can wind back, I can set an in, I can set an out, and I can drag it in. And now you can see this is actually 720p footage. So at this point we're ready to begin the process of cutting these things together, and we can choose any number of additional clips. In fact, we've got a couple of shots here when I was being made up earlier. I wanted to look my best for you on camera. Maybe not that one. Here, let's take a look at one of these here. All right. Again, reading it right off the card. There is our lovely makeup artist, Esther. So again, adding some makeup--much needed here. I'll go ahead and I'll set an in point, set an out point, drag it in, and we're done. Okay, so now we want to begin the process of actually building the sequence. Traditionally, you would go to the New Item button here, go to Sequence, and actually choose a preset. You can do that. The cool thing is in 5.5, as you may know, we have this new feature called New Sequence From Clip. So without bothering with this dialog here, I can literally right click on a clip and choose New Sequence From Clip, and it will build a sequence for me in the correct frame rate, frame size, and pixel aspect ratio. If you're mixing media together at different frame sizes, chances are if you've got 720p and 1080p, you probably don't want to scale the 720p up to 1080p. You can, and sometimes it can look okay. Generally, though, you want to scale down. So if that's the case, if that's actually how you want to work, we can take the 720p clip, right click on this, New Sequence From Clip. Now we have a 720p sequence. And if I take another one of my 1080p pieces of footage, I can drag that in, and of course the problem now is it's too big, right? It's not fitting the frame properly. So another cool feature is I can simply right click and choose Scale to Frame Size, and it will automatically scale that footage down to fit the proper aspects of that particular sequence. Real simple, real easy. Go ahead and add a couple more clips in here. Let's go ahead and maybe add this one at the beginning. We can move these around just like this. Maybe we'll shrink this up a little bit. And again, I'm just dragging my cursor over the edges of the clips, and you can see that I have the ability to trim the edges. If you hold down the Command key, or Control key on the PC, you'll see that you have new options for ripple trimming as well. So again, lots of different key modifiers to allow you to change the way that you're editing. Keep in mind, of course, that you also have your tools housed here, and this Tools panel can be docked and moved around the interface as well. So let's go ahead and grab some of these other clips. We'll just drag those in just to build up our sequence a little bit more. And again, I keep shrinking the sequence here so I can see everything in full view. Let's grab the last one here. So we've got about 20 seconds there. And if we want to do some simple effects like adding some fades-- fade in, fade out, or crossfading between the clips-- these can all be accessed via the Effects menu under Video Transitions, Dissolve. New in 5.5 is the new Film Dissolve. This is also known as a linear light dissolve. If you've ever seen the way things typically dissolve when you're watching film or sort of fully produced movies, this is sort of the type of dissolve that people typically want. So this is new in 5.5. It looks great. Traditionally, when I go from the first clip, I'll use something like the basic cross dissolve here just to fade up from black so you can see what that looks like. And again, if we want, we can simply take one of these filters and just drag them between clips to crossfade. You'll see here that it's not allowing me to crossfade the edges here because we don't have enough space between the beginnings and ends of the clips. So once again, I can hold down my Control key or my Command key here, I can do a little bit of a ripple like this, and now when I drag my Film Dissolve, now it's going to allow me to crossfade between them. If you find that it's not allowing you to actually see a crossfade between the two clips, shrink the edge and the beginning of the adjacent clips together so that you have more space to crossfade between the two clips, all right? Something like that. So we can do a couple little trims on the edges here. I'll grab my Command key and we'll shrink this one up like that and do the same on the edge here like this, grab our Film Dissolve, dissolve between the two, dissolve like this, and then we'll do a little cross dissolve at the end. So now as we cross dissolve between the clips, you can see what that looks like. It plays very smoothly. Something else to keep in mind: We're playing all of this in real time, and one of the brilliant things about working natively with DSLR is that because we're not transcoding, we can read in those H.264 files natively, you don't have to worry about, "Well, what type of file format do I need "to get the best performance?" We're going to do all this work for you. But if you're having any kind of playback performance issues, this is where you can leverage what's known as the fractional playback resolutions with the Mercury Playback Engine. From within the Program Monitor here under Output, you'll see that we have fractional Playback Resolution and Paused Resolution. And here's where you can actually set how you want to allow your machine to handle the playback of this footage to give you the best editing performance. Currently I'm playing back everything at half resolution. We're not destructively throwing pixels away, we're not changing the media, we're just changing the way it's displayed on screen during the editing process. But when I pause or when I stop, everything is being displayed in full resolution. So again, the brilliance here is that it allows you to customize playback. We're editing 1080p HD. I might not be able to edit multiple streams and multiple clips of this in full resolution all the time on a laptop, per se, or even on a desktop. So I can say, "Okay, let's go ahead and play it back at one-quarter res or one-half "but when we pause, let's display it at full." And you can see that probably with the machine that I've got here if I go to full quality, let's go ahead and wind this back and hit Play. Yeah. On this particular system, it works brilliantly. The key is you have these tools, you have the ability to change that playback resolution to give you the best performance possible. Very cool, very simple, very easy. Once you've started doing all this and you've started finessing these things, lots of different things that you can do with Effects. Typically, the next step would be adding some kind of color correction or color grading. You can simply type Color into the search field here and you'll see all the different types of color effects that we have. The ones that you probably want to focus on are things like the Fast Color Corrector, the RGB Color Corrector, and the Three-Way Color Corrector. And you'll also notice that these have 32 next to them. So one of the other cool things in Premiere Pro CS5.5 is that we were always working in 32-bit floating point. Again, this is one of the benefits of us being able to work natively with all different types of footage. You don't have to transcode to an intermediate codec to get greater than 8-bit depth. This is one of those misconceptions that people have had for years. And in other NLEs, it's true, you have to do that. But in Premiere Pro you're always working in 32-bit floating point. Here's something to keep in mind. If you are adding color effects and different types of effects to your clips, if you mix 32-bit effects like the Fast Color Corrector with something like Color Balance, which is not 32-bit, you're effectively going to be working again in 8-bit. So if you're going to mix lots of different effects together, you want to maintain 32-bit depth, you want to keep 32-bit effects on all of your clips. If you mix them with 8-bit effects, you're now going to be working at 8-bit. The point here is that this allows you to move very seamlessly between Premiere Pro and After Effects and consistently work in whatever bit depth you want. Okay, so here's where you can find all your color effects. Another thing that people ask me is, "How do I just move these clips around?" "How do I adjust opacity? How do I time remap or change timing?" Well, you'll notice that we have these little yellow handles here on the clips. And by default those handles handle the opacity. An easier way to access those controls is simply to select a clip, go up to Effects Controls here, and you're going to find that you have something here called Motion and something called Opacity and Time Remapping. Naturally, the Opacity is going to control the opacity of the clip, and of course that can be keyframed over time. You can see that it just added a keyframe there for me. And here's also where you can adjust position, scaling, rotation, anchor point, etc. Here's where you access all of that. I can simply click and drag if I want to. Let's go ahead and undo that. Again, vertically or horizontally. All of that can be keyframed. Here's where you can adjust scale, and here's where you can do things like fly clips in. If we wanted to, say, scale this down and then have it fly over to the side, I can simply click on Motion, and now I can freely move this clip very simply, very easily. So lots of different ways to work with these clips, keyframe them, and actually create some motion on the clips right inside this Effects Controls panel. And again, it makes it very easy if you want to use multiple clips to do something like a picture in picture or just fly different layers over top of one another. You'll also notice with regard to opacity that this is also where you can add blend modes. And if these blend modes look familiar to you, well, they should. They're the same blend modes that you already know from Photoshop. So again, a lot of similar techniques and tools that you know from other Adobe applications applied here directly to your DSLR footage. Okay. If you wanted to begin adding things like lower thirds or text or titles, you can do that with Photoshop files, or you can use the native Premiere Pro Titler. If you wanted to create a new Photoshop file directly to be used inside Premiere Pro, you can do that here. You can also import PSDs directly to your DSLR footage right inside Premiere Pro. And in another episode of Short and Suite I'll show you how you can bring those elements in. You also have the ability to use the Premiere Pro Titler where you'll choose the basic attributes of the title based on the sequence settings here. We can call this Intro, something like that. Okay. And this will bring up our Title Designer dialog here. It's a little scrunched in this particular resolution. Here's where again you can begin typing a title. We can just call this In The Studio... Again, you can justify this, you can decide how you want it to look, you can add a drop shadow if you want. Let's just overdo that. We'll use the default here. I can click this to close it. It's created that title right there. I can drop the title on there. If we wanted to have that fade up and fade down, I can simply go to our Dissolve here. Let's go ahead and cross dissolve this up, cross dissolve it down, wind it back, hit Play, and there you go. You've got a really simple title. Not brilliant, just very easy to do. Okay, so at this point now let's export this. Let's actually see what this DSLR content looks like, and you've got a couple of different ways that you can do that. The traditional way, of course, would be to while you're in this sequence here go up to File, Export, Media, and that's going to bring you into the Export Settings dialog, a familiar dialog to those of you who have used Premiere Pro before. In here is where you can choose the multitude of different formats to export to. If you go up to Formats here, you'll see here's all the want that we have in the menu, including things like H.264, which is going to be probably your most common export format whether you're delivering to Blu-ray or to the Web or to a tablet device or really anything. H.264 is very flexible. It'll play on anything, play anywhere. Also, all of your MPEG-2 variations, MXF, P2 Movie. Remember that you can also do PNG and TIFF sequences here and you can also do audio only, so you can even just export audio directly from a Premiere Pro timeline using the Adobe Media Encoder. So if we chose something like H.264, you'll notice that one of the great things in 5.5, lots of presets to get you started. Where is this media going to end up? Are we trying to devise a piece of media to be watched on something like YouTube or Vimeo, or is the main goal to watch this on an iPad or a tablet? Well, you'll see that we have lots of presets in here to get you started. So if I wanted to go to something like the iPad, I can use one of the higher bit rate variations here. I can choose this one. Of course if you go into the Video or Audio tabs here, you can see that you've got complete control over changing all of the different attributes of that when you're actually exporting. A couple things to keep in mind here. You'll notice that we have a couple of check boxes: Render at Maximum Depth, Maximum Render Quality, and Frame Blending. So Render at Maximum Bit Depth. Again, you can see what this does. It's going to improve the render quality. Of course it's going to take a little bit longer. I typically always keep this one checked. The one that I will always keep checked, particularly in the case of exporting something that's 1080p or 720p down to the iPad, is Maximum Render Quality. Why? Because this is going to give you the highest quality scaling when you actually export this down. So these two check boxes, for me, it's worth it to take a little bit of hit in time for encoding just to make it look better. If it's going out to YouTube or to the Web or it's a low bit rate piece of media, you don't have to keep them checked. They'll export that much faster. Of course you can do that here. And if you want to stay in this modal dialog, you can choose Export Immediately. This is going to use all of the resources in your system, and it's going to perform an extremely fast export right in front of your eyes. The issue there is it's modal, meaning that you can't really do anything else. You're basically locked out of the application. So in that case I might want to use the queue, and this is going to allow us to send this media to the Adobe Media Encoder. We can export and process in the background and keep working in Premiere, keep working on additional edits. So if I choose the Queue option, you'll see that it will automatically send it directly to the Adobe Media Encoder. And there it is. You also have the option--and this is really cool-- if you don't want to go through the Encoder dialog at all, let's just choose this sequence here. I can click and drag this 6136, bounce over to the Media Encoder, and just drag and drop it in. If you want to go back, however, to make changes or to create your own presets, simply by clicking on Format or the preset highlights--you can see them there-- it's going to take you back to the Export Settings dialog where now you can make those necessary changes, click OK, and they'll update here very simply. So once you've done that, now we're ready to actually export this content. Something else to keep in mind: If you have some of our competitors' NLEs on here like Final Cut, like Avid, if they're on the same system you'll also be able to tap into all of their codecs, things like ProRes, things like DNxHD or Meridian, and those are all accessible by leveraging the QuickTime format. So again, if you have FCP or Avid on your system with Premiere Pro and you want to export to ProRes 422 HQ or ProRes 444, choose the QuickTime format and then under Video Codec in that Export Settings dialog you'll have access to all of those different flavors very simply right there. Okay. So now at this point we want to export these. We'll choose where we want them to go. Let's just remove that last one. I'm going to place this on the desktop here. We'll just leave the name as it is, click Save, and hit Play. You'll see that now right inside the dialog it shows you what's happening. Of course this is 64 bit. This is happening in the background, meaning that I could go back here and I could keep working in Premiere, and you can see that it keeps processing and then it finishes. It's done. So very quickly we've taken footage shot on the 7D, we didn't copy it, we didn't transcode it, we took the card right out of the camera, placed it in a card reader, used the Media Browser to drag the footage in, set in and out points, create a new sequence from clip with the right click option, start putting pieces of footage together, adding transitions, adding color correction, adding motion effects, changing scaling, adding blending modes, adding titles or Photoshop files, dragging it into the Media Encoder, and spitting it back out to place it on the iPad, to place it on the Samsung Galaxy, to place it on a BlackBerry PlayBook, to place it on the Web, on Blu-ray disc, or wherever you want. It's that simple and it's short and sweet. That is the essence of our DSLR workflow. Thank you ever so much. My name is Jason Levine. We'll see you next time. [Executive Producer - Bob Donlon] [Producer - Karl Miller] [Director/VFX - Kush Amerasinghe] [DP/Post-Production - Erik Espera] [ADOBE TV PRODUCTIONS - tv.adobe.com]