Premiere Pro for DSLR in a few easy steps

PVC Production Values by Mark Christiansen

Let’s face it, a lot more editors, artists and animators have Premiere Pro loaded on the systems they use every day than are actually using it. And yet over the last few years—and in particular over the past year, since Adobe started demoing real-time playback of all kinds of files, including 4K RED .r3d source, in Premiere Pro on systems with CUDA-enabled nVidia cards—there’s been this notion that the application is really pretty good, and worth learning more about. Sure, clients tend to ask for other non-linear editors, so even if your day-to-day job demands that you edit in some other application, the question remains, what are you missing out on in Premiere Pro, both with its integration with other Adobe apps and by itself, if you’re not using it? I’ll be focusing on this in more than one article.

To begin with, I thought I would take a look at what the app can do with DLSR footage, since I basically have my choice of what app to use with footage from 7D or 5D, as well as related cameras with similar formats like the GoPro I have sitting here. I’ve heard that Premiere Pro kicks ass with these formats, but is it true, and even if true, is it useful?

My DSLR workflow, I have to admit, has been sloppy at times. In the early days there was no application that handed the ingest process nicely, so I got into the habit of just dragging files with their original names and timings right off the card onto a local drive, then importing them wherever needed - in After Effects or Final Cut Pro, say. Lately Lightroom 3 tempts me with its ability to handle both the videos and stills on that card. But if you asked me to show you my organized volumes of video from my own cameras, you might see a sad, wistful expression cross my face. And improving that situation sounds cumbersome, for a few reasons: read more and watch the videos...