Local Tv Hero

Like my exhaustive over-long DAW shootout a few months ago, I’m now doing the same with my editing software. I’ve been a Final Cut Pro editor for years, but I gave Premiere Pro a shot back in 2009. Despite cutting a music video with it, and even liking some of the features, I found the CS4  experience to be clunky and buggy. It wasn’t hard to stay with FCP.

Flash forward to to the release of FCP X (and all that went with it), and a lot of folks are taking a serious look at Premiere again. I’ve begun playing with the new version and I’m amazed that I can pull T2i footage off the card, right into Premiere – no transcoding needed. To be fair, you could do this in CS4, but it didn’t always work (at least for me).

With CS5, the Canon footage played with little effort on my MBP. Again, I’m taking footage right off the card – I haven’t added color correction, fades or attempted to composite anything yet.

For now, I’m getting reacquainted with Premiere, and thanks to lynda.com, and it’s training series for FCP editors making the transition, I’m digging it so far. If editing Canon’s version of AVCHD doesn’t bring my laptop to a crawl, I can see the benefit of switching to it. I can’t count the hours that I’ve spent waiting for transcodes. I often shoot several commercials in bulk over a few days, then edit over several weeks. I batch-transcode with Red Giant’s “Grinder”, and that experience can be like watching paint dry, not to mention the crazy big file sizes associated with converting to ProRes.

With the added benefit of Photoshop and After Effects integration, this could be a no-brainer. It will take working through a project to see if I’m my cutting in FCP will be final. (yeah, I went there…).

It’s days like these that I’m in awe of the current state of technology. The toys we have at our disposal are nothing short of amazing. I’ve been shooting a great deal of pictures and video with the T2i, and have stumbled onto a workflow (I know… I know…) that makes my jaw drop.

I’ll detail my workflow later – as that deserves an entry of it’s own. Today, I’m chuckling to myself because I’ve tapped the ‘Score to Picture’ features of Logic Pro. I’m editing a video of test shots from the camera, and wanted to add music to it. The obvious approach would be to scour my iTunes library for a song and drag it to my timeline. But wait… I play a musician on TV… Shouldn’t I make my own?

I exported a reference movie from FCP, and imported it into Logic Pro. I say this a lot, but Holy Crap!!! I was aware of, but truly had no idea of the scoring features in Logic. It took no time to import and lock the audio from the video clip, and after using ‘Detect Cuts’, Logic placed markers on all of the edits. Ten minutes later, I had a nice automated mix of the footage audio, and was scoring away to the images (with a smile on my face)

Yeah…

When I’m done with the music, I’ll export the complete mix from Logic and lock to picture – or – push out the stems, and mix those elements in FCP. I could also do the whole thing in 5.1, but I need to read up on mixing for that.

As I said, I knew Logic was capable, but never knew how easy it was to actually do. If you have the ability to score your videos, do so…

Ok, I’m going to join the chorus of DSLR blogs out there digging the latest, greatest file converter. The world doesn’t really need another, but if you own a Canon 5D, 7D, or T2i, Red Giant’s “Magic Bullet Grinder 1.0″ is worth checking out.

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for good marketing, and after viewing the tutorial video, I instantly ponied up the $49. The program is similar to MPEG Streamclip, Cineform and Canon’s EOS Plugin for Final Cut Pro, in that it converts H.264 files into ProRes for easier editing, but what sets Grinder apart is its ability to batch convert to low res proxy files (with TC window burn) for editing on a laptop. After editing is complete, the high quality ProRes files can be relinked for final output. I’ve been interested in editing with proxy files for a while, but it always seemed like a pain before Grinder.

The program makes use of hyper-threading, and I was able to confirm during a test, that Grinder uses all 4 cores of my i5 MBP. It’s much faster than the EOS Plugin, which converts a clip at a time. It also allows the user to pick the location of the transcoded files – a huge plus for me, as my workplace has a required file/folder structure for video. No more fishing files out of the Capture Scratch folder.

Ok – sales mode off…

The downside – It doesn’t convert to ProRes LT (which I’ve taken a shine to recently), and I’d like to keep the metadata generated by my T2i – the EOS Plugin does that.

These are minor gripes to be sure, as Grinder is a 1.0 release. Red Giant’s support seems good, and they’re receptive to user suggestions via their blog. Maybe we’ll see ProRes LT in the next update. I’d also like to see support for AVCHD added, making it a “one stop shop” for all my files.

All in all, it’s well worth the $49…