Continuing Tales of an FCP Switcher – CS6 workflow, for now

By Walter Biscardi

Our third entry in the continuing tales of our switch from Final Cut Pro to anything else. (Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them) Today we’re talking Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and the workflow we’ve developed for a current broadcast series. Before you read this, yep, it’s a bit convoluted but we fully expect this to smooth out and get better as Adobe moves their product forward.

Native as much as possible

Gone is the “log and transfer” requirement of FCP and it does take some time to get used to the fact that you can literally jump right in without the need to do anything to your media. As much as we can, we just leave everything raw and native as it came in. Saves a lot of time initially and with some very fast “big iron” systems, we have cut our back end render times down to essentially “real time.” Our 27 minute shows render in about 28 minutes.

Our biggest struggle is getting field cameramen to STOP converting the native files to quicktime files. QT files actually slow down Premiere Pro as they’re 32 bit files. They’re slowly catching on but it’s kind of maddening when we get the QTs.

The other beauty is that Premiere Pro can read native cards even when information is missing, like those LASTCLIP.txt files that come along with P2 material. I can’t tell you how many times that file was missing and FCP would not do anything with the camera data. Premiere Pro can read the data just fine so that’s been a huge help. read more...