Chapter 8. Workflow Management

Author: Tim Kolb

Making a movie is like going to war...(they) are always putting obstacles in your way.

—Norman Jewison

With the growing variety of acquisition systems and formats used in equally diverse production projects, optimal production workflow means something different to nearly every user of Adobe’s Digital Video applications. In this chapter I won’t be talking as much about procedure as perspective.

Information on the functionality of Adobe applications is widely available, but it can be helpful to work through the process of evaluating how everything from what format you’re shooting in to how to plan to divide tasks among colleagues and collaborators to come up with the best, most practical approach to completing your project.

This chapter is full of larger and smaller pieces of the workflow puzzle. It’s not attached to a single project; instead, it’s meant for you to implement in your own projects. As you think about applying some of these techniques, it is crucial that you consider doing two things: Write out your workflow from camera to delivery and then actually test to make sure things work the way you intend.

Consider these guidelines when handling camera data:

Have multiple versions of your raw footage is obviously the best way to protect your considerable investment in acquiring it. Making two or, better yet, three copies on separate storage drives immediately when transferring from camera media in the field is standard practice.

Vault and maintain your camera media. If you need to recycle camera media for continuing production, it should never be erased until the data is verified in more than one location.

Transfer media as soon as you have the chance instead of waiting until the media is full. Every moment that you have recorded material in the camera is a moment when you have only one copy, and a camera malfunction or power glitch has the potential to wipe out whatever hasn’t been transferred. If there is downtime on the set for a scene or a lighting change, why not transfer the data in the camera at that point and reduce your vulnerability?

Don’t trust any digital storage, ever. Hard drives are cheap and they fail. Most nonproprietary camera media is cheap and it fails. Your expectations of durability have to align with the cost of the device. With the cost of hard drive storage so low relative to even a modest shooting budget, there is no reason to risk your work product due to not having enough backup copies.

Store data copies in separate locations, not in the same place. Unfortunately, luggage gets lost or damaged, equipment cases fall into rivers, and occasionally, the production assistant on your medical shoot forgets that the first letter in MRI stands for “magnetic” when he decides where to park your gear cases. Try to keep your drive copies apart from each other whenever you’re not transferring, preferably in different physical locations.

Make a plan for data organization and stick to it. Keeping the drives safe and then not being able to find the media you’re looking for is more frustrating than losing the drive. Housekeeping may seem like a minor point, but maintaining some system for how the camera data will be organized on the transfer drives is critical. It doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. Something as simple as saving transferred media in directories by shoot date and/or location may be all you need to be able to find the shots you need later.

For larger projects with multiple collaborators or even multiple editors, properly organizing your media to make each step as efficient as possible is certainly possible in Adobe Premiere Pro alone, but Adobe Prelude does fill in some gaps for many users.

Adobe Prelude does more than just transfer and back up footage from cameras. It can add metadata (such as location), markers to help speed the editorial process, and even create a rough cut, which is fantastic for an on-set quick assembly of footage.

Adobe Prelude will also transcode your assets to a variety of different codecs if you choose to do so. Some codecs are meant to be used for “proxy” or low-quality editorial and be relinked later to high-quality footage. Some codecs (such as DNxHD) are ideal as a postproduction codec, also known as a mezzanine codec, and are meant to permit flexibility and are no longer dependent on highly compressed camera masters. For more on transcoding, see the “Transcode or Not to Transcode” sidebar in Chapter 1 and the section “Using Mezzanine Formats” later in this chapter.

In a new Prelude project, press Command+I (Ctrl+I) or click Ingest at the top of the interface to enter Ingest mode. The Ingest dialog opens (Figure 8.1). If you want to restrict the file types the dialog displays, specify the file types using the Files of Type menu at the top of the dialog (Figure 8.2).

You can also designate an In and Out point on a clip using the I and O keys to do a partial ingest of a clip, although you have to choose to transcode the asset to make a new file of the selected portion (Figure 8.3).

Although it will take a bit more time, using the Verification feature (Figure 8.4) for straight camera media (non-transcoding) transfers is highly recommended to ensure that the data is being transferred completely. The bit-by-bit comparison option does a CRC check, verifying the file checksum, and is the most thorough method. If time is extremely pressing, running the File size comparison method is still better than not running verification at all

You can specify your transfer destinations and details, and add additional destinations by clicking Add Destination and providing the necessary detail of where your second copy belongs (usually a different drive). For workflows in which you will be converting camera files to a mezzanine and/or a proxy format for editing and post, Adobe Prelude can transcode assets as well.

Transcoding is likely something you would do at some point after the shoot as opposed to during your initial camera data transfers on location. Transcoding does involve more time than doing simple data transfers, depending on the source and destination formats chosen. When you need to transcode (Figure 8.5), you can choose the format and a preset target file specification for each destination.

You have options to add metadata fields to your footage for all destinations or for just a particular destination. You could, for instance, add some sort of tag to some proxy footage that will go to the editor and leave the full-quality original footage targeted for other destinations unaltered. These presets easily can add a given set of metadata to every clip during ingest.

If you plan on using this for scene designations or something that changes frequently, you’ll need to ingest only the appropriate clips for that metadata preset. Alternatively, you can add more specific shot-by-shot information after the footage is ingested.

Renaming files during ingest can also be applied to a specific destination or all destinations. Note that using renamed files will add complications when relinking media to camera originals if there is a loss of data or when moving from proxy editing to finishing. So make sure you think through your full workflow before throwing this switch.

The advantage of this logging workspace (both here in Adobe Prelude and also in Adobe Premiere Pro) is the focus on seeing all the metadata (and adding to it) that belongs to a clip.

The basic operating principle in Adobe software is to be nondestructive wherever possible; thus, Adobe Prelude does selections and notations with markers instead of making any physical changes to the source media.

By positioning the playhead on the Timeline where you want a marker to start and clicking on the marker type or typing the appropriate number (1=Subclip, 2=Comment, etc.), you set the In point for that marker. Moving the playhead where you want the marker to end and typing O will set an Out point for the marker. You can move any marker by dragging it right and left with the mouse or by positioning the playhead and typing I or O to move the selected marker’s In or Out point to that position.

You can use several layers of various and overlapping markers as necessary. The two marker types most commonly employed for video postproduction are the Subclip and Comment types (Figure 8.9). You can also use custom markers.

Here’s a little more detail about some smart marker uses:

Subclips. A Subclip marker creates a new subclip in the Project panel when you save the project. Updates and changes to the subclip’s settings update at the next save.

When you send the Prelude project (or the individual subclip) to Adobe Premiere Pro, it will appear in the Adobe Premiere Pro Project panel as a subclip, and it is editable in Adobe Premiere Pro the same way a subclip created in Adobe Premiere Pro would be.

If you send the entire Prelude project to Adobe Premiere Pro, the Comment markers will be visible on any full clips and subclips, but note that subclip markers will not be visible on the original source clip.

Comments. A Comment marker is used for any notes that you may want to make on a shot that don’t fit into the other marker type categories. With the marker selected, use the Marker Inspector panel to make any appropriate notes.

Custom markers. You may find that you use one type of marker repeatedly, say a Subclip marker for “Good Take” or something similar.

Save some time by saving the specific marker as a template. Select the marker you want to create the template from, and from the Marker pull-down menu, choose Save Marker as Template (Figure 8.10).

You can make different libraries of custom markers for different types of projects and save the custom marker set using the text header at the top of the Marker Type panel (Figure 8.11).

Setting up a truly efficient and flexible post workflow involves anticipating not only the final needs of the finished project, but also the needs of the process along the way, and there are a few big issues that seem to keep surfacing for many editors and postproduction supervisors.

Because Adobe Premiere Pro is designed to load native format camera media as its primary working method, you can load most camera data file formats without excessive processing or file duplication, which of course can save time and an immense amount of storage space.

In other cases, projects where Adobe Premiere Pro interacts with other software, either collaborating on an edit with another manufacturer’s nonlinear editor (NLE) or even just using various postproduction applications for effects work, knowing the optimal file formats that each application handles will help you determine if you need to use a mezzanine (or intermediate) format to make your assets more portable across multiple applications and computer platforms and operating systems.

There really isn’t one best approach for every situation, and in many cases the most widely compatible formats are also the largest stored files sizes, so this decision is a significant one. Of particular concern are situations in which you’re working with some type of camera raw footage. Often, these files are huge and require very fast media access. There is no single camera raw format; frequently, each camera manufacturer maintains its own raw format. Many visual effects and editing applications don’t handle native camera raw formats as well as Adobe Premiere Pro (if at all).

Therefore, one solution would be to convert camera raw to some type of high-color precision format for postproduction, which would make the files more accessible to a wider variety of applications and make handling the footage a bit more “conventional.” However, the trade-off in flexibility means a compromise in maintaining the original format of the clip. There will be a compromise compared to keeping the clips in their original pristine form.

If your project footage is camera raw, the consideration may not be so much “if” but “when” to transcode. The benefits to editing the camera raw footage and converting only selected segments is discussed later in this section.

When you’re shooting material for final framing and composition, you can simply edit the material in Adobe Premiere Pro in its native frame size. At the end you can then export the footage to the desired format and frame size, delaying the down conversion (and the inherent quality reduction) until the very end of the process. The edited project can then be archived with the original media and retrieved and remastered by exporting it at a different frame size in the future. So, if something was shot in 4k, it could be edited in 4k and delivered in HD with the flexibility that if 4k delivery became easy, you’d have the option to deliver the content again in 4k. Many production facilities did this with HD. They’d shoot HD and edit in SD, knowing one day they could deliver the materials again in HD.

Alternatively, using a sequence designed around the current delivery specification allows you to choose between using the original framing or “pushing in” to a larger frame to recompose the shot, which adds a significant degree of visual flexibility to the edit (Figure 8.15).

One drawback to working in the final delivery form is that the entire project is now edited at the delivery frame spec, which is often HD. As a result, future opportunities to deploy the program at larger frame sizes (UltraHD is well on its way to a living room near you) will involve significant rework, including reframing.

Even if you don’t see the need for a higher-resolution version of the project in the future, there is another issue to consider. Any compositing or effects work benefits from the highest possible resolution source images. If that effects work is designed to be downstream from the edit in your workflow, any 4k selects you send from your HD frame edit sequence will have already been reduced to a quarter of their original resolution.

The choice is to consider this question prior to entering post and try to plan for the optimal results from each link in the postproduction chain. Even if you’re delivering an HD program, using 4k will provide higher-quality effects. Elements like keying will likely be easier with the extra resolution.

Some camera raw formats have their own primary color grading capability built in to the metadata of the file. RED R3D files can be altered in Adobe Premiere Pro by accessing each clip’s Source Settings by right-clicking on the clip in the Project panel or the sequence. Changes made to RED clips in this way will stay with the clip if you choose Save to RMD (RED Metadata) in the upper right of the RED Source Settings panel (Figure 8.16 on the next page). ARRIRAW frame sequences can also be altered using Source Settings, although the tools are basic by comparison.

Other camera raw formats may have alternate methods for making adjustments to clip metadata. GoPro’s CineForm formats can be altered via an external application/utility that can run simultaneously outside of Adobe Premiere Pro. Any changes made to a clip in metadata would then be carried with the clip, which would eliminate the need to render frames out of Adobe Premiere Pro’s edit Timeline to retain the changes. The most important consideration when you’re editing camera raw files is that they can’t be altered and rewritten in their native form by an Adobe application in the vast majority of cases.

As discussed in the “Using Mezzanine Formats” section, the point where you convert camera raw footage to even a high-quality mezzanine format in your post process should be planned for so you can take full advantage of the flexibility of the raw format before the footage is flattened.

Features such as shot-to-shot matching, Secondaries (correcting portions of an image like sky or flesh tones), and a huge library of professional “looks” are just a few advantages of working with Adobe SpeedGrade. Because it is built on the Lumetri color engine, a sequence sent to Adobe SpeedGrade via Direct Link will place a single Lumetri effect on each clip when the sequence returns to Adobe Premiere Pro.

Adobe SpeedGrade can be used directly as Lumetri effects on clips in an Adobe Premiere Pro sequence. By first generating color LUTs (saved as .look files) saved out of Adobe SpeedGrade, the LUT can act as a basic starting point, which is particularly useful with cinema cameras.

Most cinema cameras shoot “flat”—the image looks fairly terrible until a LUT is applied. This is to maximize the amount of light captured in-camera. The LUT helps make the image look “normal” while retaining all the extra data. This technique of adding a LUT can be even applied to the raw clips and burned into transcoded clips permanently for use as mezzanine clips or for proxy files.

To save a .look file of your correction in SpeedGrade, make sure the correction layer with the settings you want to save is selected (you may want to hide any correction layers that aren’t selected to ensure that the change you’re seeing is the one you want to save as a .look file). In the Look Management panel at the bottom below the HSL wheels, the correction layers are shown on the left. Keep in mind that you can only select one correction layer on the Timeline; however, all the layers of correction in the Layers list that apply to that correction layer will be part of the .look file. Below the Layers list is the Save .Look icon (Figure 8.17). When you click it, a new preset appears in the Look Management panel (Figure 8.18) to the right.

You can click on the name of the preset in the Looks Management view and type in an appropriate name. To access the .look file later, you may want to store it outside of SpeedGrade’s preset library. To do this, simply right-click on the preset and choose Export Look (Figure 8.19).

Once you’ve chosen Export Look, a dialog appears (Figure 8.20) displaying the compatible versions that will be saved in a ZIP file. These alternative versions of the LUT can be extremely helpful to maintain maximum compatibility across a variety of software and hardware.

If you really want to push the LUT workflow to the limit, these can be attached in Adobe Media Encoder to a preset (on the Filter tab). Presets built in Adobe Media Encoder appear in both Adobe Premiere Pro Export Media and in the Ingest dialog in Adobe Prelude. Once you’ve picked or adjusted a LUT, you could transfer your proxy files with the LUT “burned in” wherever you want to do the conversion: in Adobe Prelude (probably your best choice), in Adobe Media Encoder (you could even use a watch folder!), or in Adobe Premiere Pro.

If you’re editing 4k on an HD sequence, the After Effects comp created to replace the clip in that sequence will have the frame rate and size of the HD sequence instead of the source clip (Figure 8.22).

If you need to create an After Effects composition based on a different size than the edit sequence you’ve set up, you can use Dynamic Link to create a new composition and set the specifications in the dialog. Of course, you can create a composition in After Effects the “old-fashioned” way, and then import the composition in Adobe Premiere Pro through Dynamic Link. You can choose any of these options from the Dynamic Link option in the pull-down menu in Adobe Premiere Pro. You can also replace a clip on the Timeline with an After Effects composition containing that clip by right-clicking on it and choosing from the menu.

When you require many Dynamic Linked After Effects compositions, you can improve your editing response in Adobe Premiere Pro by keeping the Dynamic Linked After Effects comps on their own video track. You can then switch off that track’s output when you don’t need to work with all the comps, or you can enable/disable individual comps on a clip-by-clip basis.

Even when edit performance is not an issue, you may want to consider rendering the After Effects comps and importing the finished clips. You can place the rendered clips on a video track above the Dynamic Linked comps. By doing so, not only will you gain some performance, but you’ll also have actual media to archive with the project versus needing to restore all the After Effects projects, plug-ins, and so on to be able to complete simple changes to the project in the future (Figure 8.23).

These extracted audio files will be written to the directory you’ve identified in Project Settings (File > Project Settings) for captured audio (Figure 8.26). Keep this in mind for archiving purposes because these clips are now critical components of your project and will be necessary to alter your edit in the future.

If you send an entire sequence to Audition, the audio in the existing edit sequence will not be changed because a copy of all the audio is made for Audition to work on. After sending a sequence to Audition, you can make your edits and then bring back a finished audio track to insert into your sequence. Often, creating new audio tracks at the top of the sequence to accommodate the finished audio tracks and muting all the raw audio tracks underneath allows you to have the sequence ready for master output but keep the original components on the Timeline in case future changes are necessary.

Alternatively, you can send the export job to the Queue. Clicking Queue opens Adobe Media Encoder and puts the export job in Adobe Media Encoder’s Queue list, allowing you to continue editing or even set up additional export jobs and send them to the Queue. When planning your workflows, it’s best to consider how you’ll handle exporting (should you tie up your system?) and what the final archive format for the future should be.

Because Adobe Premiere Pro utilizes the GPU for so many functions, an Adobe Premiere Pro sequence in the Queue needs to do the same to render frames into the encoding process. Even when you continue to edit while the Adobe Media Encoder Queue is set to run, there is another version of Adobe Premiere Pro running in the background to handle the Adobe Premiere Pro sequence being encoded. When Adobe Premiere Pro is technically running in two places, it keeps resources prioritized for the editor who is continuing to work; therefore, the background version of Adobe Premiere Pro pauses every time the editor who is currently working in the foreground moves the mouse or plays back video, pausing the encoding process as well.

When Adobe Media Encoder is running processing clips from the Queue directly, it will run constantly even while Adobe Premiere Pro is editing in the foreground; however, the performance of both applications will depend on the hardware resources available.

Creating the most efficient workflow means something different to everyone. For some, completing the export as quickly as possible is worth the pause in editing necessary to do a direct export from Adobe Premiere Pro. For others, the time it takes to do the encoding in the Queue as it starts and stops is perfectly acceptable if editing progress continues. And if your project needs to be delivered in multiple distribution formats, you might consider making a master quality file. This should be a post codec such as DNxHD or Apple ProRes.

If you export a master file, you’ll no longer depend on Adobe Premiere Pro, meaning less resources wasted and improved performance. And in Adobe Media Encoder you can just set up this file and have all the output profiles you require, utilizing the master file as the source for each one.

In workflows where extensive effects work is necessary, there may be a wide variety of applications playing roles in completing complex effects. Many specialized visual effects programs do not accept the wide variety of video formats of Adobe digital video applications.

Adobe Premiere Pro (and Adobe Media Encoder) has the ability to export DPX frame sequences in a wide variety of specifications and frame sizes up to 10-bit log color precision, allowing a wide variety of post effects applications to access very information-dense versions of your footage (Figure 8.28).

Because DPX files can have a black point set above 0 and white point below 1023, color values beyond this range can also be stored in the file, which can prove useful for effects work where maximizing the available grayscale information can aid in masking and keying operations during compositing (Figure 8.29). If you’re working in other effects pipelines, using DPX might be the easiest and smartest method for interoperability.

Chapter 2, “Setup and Organizing,” talked about organizing a project at the outset. Storing your assets where you can find them is as important at the end of the project as when you started. Multiple copies of the data are also important to have at the archiving stage, just as in the beginning of the project.

Because data storage is currently so inexpensive and disposable, not having two (or three) copies of your data is akin to not having it saved at all when that inexpensive hard drive fails (and they all do at some point). An updated version of a popular saying might be: There are only three things constant in this world: death, taxes, and hard drive failure.

If you were organized based on suggestions in Chapter 2, great. If not, the Project Manager can collect everything for you for easy backup and transfer. Or if you just want to copy part of a project, again, the Project Manager is the tool for these uses.

Using the Project Manager is an easy way to gather your assets in a given project and move them all to a specific destination for archive storage. When you launch the Project Manager from the File menu, a dedicated panel opens (Figure 8.30). At the top of the panel you’ll see the sequences in your project listed. You can choose which sequences you want to archive by selecting or deselecting the corresponding check box.

The Resulting Project options allow you to simply copy all the project assets to a specific location, or you can trim the project (Figure 8.31). When you trim the project, Adobe Premiere Pro trims the copies of only the parts of any video assets that you used, plus some extra frames based on the Include Handles option. You can select the Exclude Unused Clips option, and any assets inside the project that are unused will not be copied.

The options to keep Preview and Audio Conform files are available as well. Keep in mind that Adobe Premiere Pro can rebuild the previews and conform files easily when the project is retrieved. Keeping them is rarely necessary, and they can take up considerable hard drive space in larger projects. A good reason to keep them would be for a “quick” restoration of a project. That way you could save the time in re-rendering. Everything is a trade-off.

You should carefully consider whether or not to select the Rename Media Files to Match Clip Names option. In Adobe Premiere Pro, many editors will name camera data files more intuitively in the sequence, because many camera formats have clip names that are anything but intuitive to human beings. However, keep in mind that changing the names of the clips in your archived project may make the footage difficult to track down should you need to retrieve the project in a year to find a particular shot in the raw camera archive. In that situation, maintaining the original name of the media in your archive project would come in awfully handy.

After choosing a destination for the project, you can click the Calculate button to have the Project Manager show you how much disk space the resulting project will consume relative to the original.

The Dynamic Linked After Effects comp in Adobe Premiere Pro will be included in a Project Manager consolidation. But the Adobe After Effects project that contains the data for the composition exists outside the Adobe Premiere Pro project. If any media or assets were added in Adobe After Effects, they will need to be manually copied, because they weren’t in the Adobe Premiere Pro project. (After Effects has its own methods for gathering project assets from inside the project.)

In After Effects you can access the project consolidation features by choosing File > Dependencies. After Effects offers several options, which range from simply collecting files to removing unused footage or finding missing footage (Figure 8.32).

Adobe Audition projects and any audio assets you may have used in Audition but did not import into Adobe Premiere Pro directly also need to be manually collected and moved. This does not include the “Audio Extracted” (replaced) audio files because those are assets included in the Adobe Premiere Pro project and they will be included as assets in the trimmed project.

Keeping all the additional audio production work and assets in one directory (the Common Media folder specified in Chapter 2 is an excellent location for this) makes moving them a simple process when the time comes.

Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator assets, such as other files you reference that are not imported to Adobe Premiere Pro, will not be managed. Therefore, you’ll need to keep track of them and move them as warranted.

Adobe SpeedGrade corrections you applied through Direct Link will be saved within your Adobe Premiere Pro project as settings in the Lumetri effect. However, it’s still a good practice to save your .look files separately in cases where you have color corrections that may be useful in the future.

One method of keeping all your files and assets organized is explained in the section “Media Setup Outside of Adobe Premiere Pro” in Chapter 2.