MediaStorm Guide to Through Edits in Premiere Pro CC

This article is part of a new series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Production Pro after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. Today's post was written by MediaStorm producer Eric Maierson. Premiere Pro CC, Adobe’s followup to CS6, is stuffed with all kinds of great new features. One of the most useful additions is the ability to see through edits, a feature available in Final Cut Pro 7 but curiously absent from the previous Premiere Pro iteration. A through edit is a marker that indicates where you’ve made an edit but no frames have actually been omitted. To turn on this functionality, from the Sequence menu select Show Through Edits. Now, when you first make an edit, you’ll see the through edit icon. Adobe has conveniently used the same icon…

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MediaStorm Guide to Creating Subtitles in Premiere Pro

This article is part of a new series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. Today's post was written by MediaStorm producer Eric Maierson. There’s a critical difference between the title tool in Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro. In FCP, one could slice a title that’s already in the timeline, open it in the Viewer window, then change the contents so that you now had two distinct titles. This does not work in Premiere Pro. In Premiere Pro each title is a distinct instance. So, if you splice a title in the timeline then change its content, you will also change the content of the first title as well. Both titles will say the same thing. The only way around this…

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Three Quick Ways to Make Your B-roll Better

As a producer, I log hours and hours of video. There are three mistakes that I frequently see. They cut across all levels of experience. Fortunately, they’re easy to fix. Don’t Talk When Shooting B-roll It’s easy to think that you won’t need audio when you’re shooting visual sequences. But the truth is, b-roll is far more dynamic when it includes natural sound. B-roll with sound can be used for pacing between sections of your project or to cover interview sound bites and provide a rich texture. If you talk while shooting, you lose this opportunity. You’re left with just visuals. While you can sometimes get away with this, say when you use music, it’s far better to have the option of using natural sound. If you have it, chances are that you’ll find a use for it. Remember, no matter how softly you speak, the camera microphone will hear you. So…

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Finishing is the Hard Part: The Details

In a previous post, I described some of the psychological challenges of finishing a project. Just as we're ready to be done, we must once again see our work hyper-critically in order to complete the final stages of production. In revisiting this topic, I'd like to offer a more detailed list of the steps we follow once the picture edit is complete. Keep in mind as you move through these steps that finishing a project is a non-linear process. You may be mixing audio when you discover an image that needs recropping. It’s OK to make that change, but try to stay on task as it’s easy to get distracted. Audio Mixing Audio generally requires less render time than video so it's a good place to begin. Add tone between interview bites Mix interview, tone, b-roll, and music Add one frame dissolves to the head and tail of all audio bites Fix…

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MediaStorm Guide to Installing Missing Final Cut Pro Codecs for Premiere Pro

This article is part of a new series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. This great tip comes from Jonathan Grubbs via Josh Meltzer. Should you install Premiere Pro on a machine without Final Cut Pro, you will find your machine missing some key codecs such as ProRes. The solution is straightforward. Quit Premiere Pro. Download the ProApps Quicktime Codecs from the Apple site. You’ll receive an error if you try to install the codec package without FCP on your system. The workaround is to first install the free application unpkg. Drag the ProAppsQTCodecs.pkg file on to the unpkg icon. Unpkg wil extract the components to your desktop. In the Finder select Go > Go to Folder… (Command-Shift-G). Enter /Library/QuickTime. Drag the…

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