Premiere, Native formats

[Nicolas Hanson]

MXF is the native format for Avid, meaning they can be read without transcoding directly from the AvidMediafiles/MXF/# folders. That saves me a lot of time compared to importing files and even fast-importing files. How does this work in Adobe Premiere? Can Premiere work with a drag-and-drop folder structure like this? Any native formats that can be read without transcoding the same way as MXF for Avid?

[Bruno Mansi]

The native format in Avid is MXF OP-Atom to be exact. This is the variant where each video and audio track are separate files. The good news is that Premiere Pro reads it happily.

If you export an AAF from Avid with linked media it will import into Premiere without problems. Premiere will handle both video and audio, although Avid effects won't be translated. Audio rubber-banding does come through, although if you've set any clip gain beyond +6db, it will get clipped back to +6, which tends to upset your sound mix.

As far as as other formats are concerned, Premiere Pro users generally expect to just be able to link to their files, and I know that Adobe supports a lot of formats. The reason Avid users traditionally imported/transcoded their media to OP Atom was to do with playback performance, as Media Composer struggled with lots of AMA (linked) clips. Things have improved somewhat with today's modern, multi-core processors, however Premiere uses the graphics card CUDA technology to give you real-time playback of your clips. Mac users might also be interested to know that the latest versions of Premiere now have Apple Metal GPU support. Premiere is likely to struggle to playback in real-time on older computers, or where there's formats that require lots of 'muscle' to decode (4K or highly compressed long-GOP), so recent versions of Premiere have included proxy workflows, where you're transcoding to a more friendly format.

[Nicolas Hanson]

Great answer, thank you! I'm not taking about a Avid to Premiere workflow, but finding a proper format to edit in for Premiere. The reason why I'm asking is playback performance, and I would never rely on a software to read everything I throw at it. So the question really is; Our company gets many different camera formats to deal with every week, what format should they all be transcoded to for editing in Premiere for good quality and good playback performance?  if MXF DNxHD 185, could I put them in a folder structure (like in Avid) and read them natively from there without the need of importing them?

[Bruno Mansi]

I would honestly use the proxy workflow built in to Premiere, rather than manually transcoding yourself. There should be tutorials available on the web that explain this in detail, but the basic principle is that you use the new 'ingest' tab to copy the source media off your cards/portable hard drives to a convenient location on your media drives. At the same time, you instruct Premiere to make proxy versions of the media to a separate location on your media drive. Once ingested, your clips will appear as normal, and can be edited onto a timeline, but you can choose the full quality or proxy versions by simply hitting the 'proxy' switch. This means that you can seamlessly switch between full resolution and proxy at will, whilst you edit. Premiere handles all the linking between the versions for you, and when you want to output the final sequence, Premiere will use the full rez media unless you tell it otherwise. There's also the added benefit that you could potentially take the project and proxy files onto a laptop and continue editing, knowing that when you bring the project back to your main workstation, Premiere will be able to link back to the full rez media.

As with all new things, I would test the workflow out before you commit to using this technique with a client!

As to the proxy format you choose, it's going to depend on the power of your workstation and how complex your project is going to be, to guarantee full speed playback. Something like a lower bit rate  ProRes or Avid MXF should do the trick.

[Nicolas Hanson]

Great! So Avid MXF and low bit rate ProRes is among the proxy options? The only bottleneck I can see is time. Does it take a long time to create the proxies? If this is a process who takes time it's basically the same as transcoding and in a professional environment that is something that takes place on an another machine to not use the editors time.

Edited November 5, 2016 by Nicolas Hanson

[Bruno Mansi]

As I understand it, Premiere actually hands off the task to Media Encoder, so any codec you have installed should be available to you. On Windows machines, this would mean that ProRes wouldn't be an available encoding option, but you should be OK with all flavours of Avid DNX, assuming you either have Media Composer installed or you've downloaded the Avid codec pack.

As far as time is concerned, the time it's going to take will be dependent on many things (CPU cores, disk speeds etc.) but shouldn't be much different to any other way of transcoding. Plus, as Media Encoder is copying/encoding, you can carry on using Premiere. There's a progress window you can bring up to see how the encoding is going, and as soon as a clip's done, it's available for editing, so you can leave Media Encoder running in the background whilst you edit. I'm guessing you can start editing with the full rez files to begin with, switching over to the proxies as they become available.

Remember, if you manually create low resolution files outside of Premiere, you're going to have to create the workflow to re-link back to the high quality media once the edit's complete. Having Premiere create the proxies, means it's just a click-of-the-button away. This method also gives you the ability to work on the high quality files if (say) you're creating an effect that requires you to have the best quality available (eg. green-screening) and then switch back to proxy mode to give you the real-time playback.

I also read that if you use Adobe's creative cloud to store your project and proxies, you can effectively create your proxy files on one machine, whilst editing on another. I don't know much about this, or whether you can create a 'cloud' on an internal server or NAS, which would mean not having to send/access files over the internet.

[Nicolas Hanson]

Thank you Bruno for helping me understand this. It looks like a great solution for one-man-show boutiques and indie stores. I was hoping Adobe found a way to eliminate all time used on transcode / ingest. In most professionals environments you would never let the editor suites handle these tasks and work on high resolution footage would be treated in other software packages like color correctors and online tools. 

[Bruno Mansi]

7 minutes ago, Nicolas Hanson said:

Thank you Bruno for helping me understand this. It looks like a great solution for one-man-show boutiques and indie stores. I was hoping Adobe found a way to eliminate all time used on transcode / ingest. In most professionals environments you would never let the editor suites handle these tasks and work on high resolution footage would be treated in other software packages like color correctors and online tools. 

Yes, that's true. In modern post facilities, shared storage is the order of the day and offline editors would always hand-off to online editors, colourists  etc to complete the project. It's one of the main reasons that Avid still rules in these sorts of environments. There are companies now offering shared storage solutions and project management for Adobe products. Have a look at ...

http://www.studionetworksolutions.com/solutions/premiere-pro-storage-workflow-adobe-nas-san-shared-network/

These sorts of solutions are going to cost thousands of dollars, but I think it won't be long before we start seeing total Adobe post houses spring up, who will need this sort of infrastructure.

 

[Nicolas Hanson]

Thanks for sharing your great insight!