0 Replies Latest reply: Mar 19, 2014 3:55 PM by ArtifaktAstrix RSS

    CASE STUDY (Music Video): "Cheatahs - Get Tight"

    ArtifaktAstrix Community Member

      Dear Premiere Pro CC Users and Adobe,

       

      I’d like to share with you a case study on a music video I have just recently worked on as the Offline & Online Editor.

       

      Here is the youtube vevo link:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQiQvXUgN5s

       

      Here is my website:

      www.psychedelicoffspring.com

       

      I have also coloured this using SpeedGrade CC and on occasion had to use After Effects CC.

       

      I have done other works of course but for me this stands out due to the challenges I was faced, many of which seem quite simple to perform. However it struck me, as brilliant as Premiere Pro CC conception is, of how many features old and new I discovered along the way in this powerful NLE program that helped me along the way, but equally so how many features I deemed to be missing and I hope through this post, that you yourselves can discuss and Adobe can address in the near future. (All of which I plan to submit in their request features section after this).

       

      Obviously if you dislike the music video that’s an altogether different discussion. But the case in point is to share your thoughts and technical expertise on the workflow I performed on this project.

       

      The music video was shot on a Canon Mark III, 1080p, 25 fps. Nothing special. I edited the project natively working off my Tempo SSD Pro with RAID 0 on two Crucial M500 960GB SSDs, 700mb/s read. Which helped massively since the amount of video tracks I had to stream.

       

      Here are my system specs:

       

      -Mac Pro Early 2008 – 2x Quad-Core 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon

      -Mountain Lion 10.8.5

      -32GB RAM 800Mhz

      -GTX 770 4GB VRAM Approx. 1500 CUDA Windforce (attached to this: 1x Dell Ultrasharp U2410 via HDMI, 3x Dell Ultrasharp U2713H via one of them DisplayPort and two of them Dual-Link DVI).

      -Crucial M500 240GB SSD Boot Drive

       

      The Director had to do a re-shoot half way through the edit and we were on a tight deadline with lots to do. The final result however he was very happy with, as was I.

       

      I began with general familiarisation of the footage and logging it, prepping an assembly timeline to lip-sync any video vocals to the track. Trying to create a narrative with the footage I had. It turned out pretty uneventful, this part being the fact we lacked varied footage, especially since the song was 3:30min long, which is quite long.

       

      The Director went for a re-shoot. The band very kindly offered to be filmed playing, which looked cool and filled up the timeline nicely. Also some more Tramp footage was shot and some more TV Face and tongue action was filmed.

       

      With all that we had one week left to edit and colour it. More precisely, 5 days in fact and the Director could only be available during the mornings as he worked in the afternoons. Many of the VHS TV footage he shot back at home at night to create more diverse footage when he got back home late every night to bring along the morning after. Suffice it to say, we managed to complete it in 4 days.

       

      Here is a general view of the timeline – which is a mess:

       

      Whole-Timeline.jpg

       

      JUMP CUTS

       

      I’ll begin with the extremely fast cuts in the music video. Jump cutting between footage in time with the song’s manic builds up, whilst trying to maintain a narrative within them. We were aiming for hysteria and paranoia.

       

      As you can see in the image below, I laced the section where this was to be performed with selected footage, and then began laboriously using the razor tool to create 3 to 6 frames long clips.

       

      Jump-Cuts.jpg

       

      It was not helped with fact every time I tried to horizontally scroll along the timeline it would jitter and lag uncontrollably, couldn’t stay smooth at all, my machine is powerful but quite old – this could be partly because of a recent update on PrP-CC which I’m experiencing on other projects. (I look forward to my new Mac Pro once it arrives).

       

      Now this is one of the features I’d like to be added, it was so painstakingly slow to razor this many clips I thought why not add a new special razor tool, which cuts horizontally? Obviously how many seconds/frames does it cut along a video track and how many seconds/frames in between the cuts would have to be inputted into some form of quick access settings. It would be nice to add perhaps a nice window like the effects window of specialised tools where they can be customised for their use.

       

      I had an advantage during the whole process of editing this. - I have recently purchased a Euphonix MC Control Surface (EuCon), a friend had a brand new unopened spare one which I bought off him, obviously these are now called Avid Artist Control but the old ones still work exactly the same and are still supported.

       

      http://www.avid.com/US/products/Artist-Control

       

      Now this I would like to complement Adobe for adding support for recently and hope they continue to do so. It works superbly. Technical note - you have to power up the control surface connected before you turn on your Mac, otherwise the firmware doesn’t load up properly into Premiere Pro CC fully.

       

      I have customised it to my personal taste (you gradually customise over time). Using the soft keys I can now perform shortcuts I normally do on my keyboard which require 2 or more buttons. Of which I can now perform in just one.

       

      photo 1.JPG

      photo 2.JPG

       

      VIDEO TRACKS

       

      As you’ve noticed I had several running video tracks, much of it being lip-sync footage, unfortunately half of it wasn’t one whole take due to technical conflicts on-set and were split up. Plus I wanted the space to work freely to put selects to the side.

       

      Another feature I’d like to see added to the video tracks is beside the option of toggling the eye button to activate or de-activate an entire track output, as useful as that is, would be great if we can have the added option of a Solo button; just like the audio has. As sometimes I want to turn off all tracks but one. I’d rather press one button to do so rather than 5 or more. Additionally for these eye and solo buttons to have them accessed via shortcut creation, if they aren’t already for both audio and visual.

       

      Another feature I used which Premiere Pro CC has added were the improvements to audio controls. The Audio Track and Clip Mixer. Adjusting the audio levels live by writing in keyframes is very refreshing, and it also works with the Euphonix/Avid control surface, which I had to perform at the beginning of the music video of the static sound effect, I made that audio edit in just one go.

       

      NESTING, PASTING ATTRIBUTES & CLIP MANOUVERABILITY

       

      This next part is quite extensive. The Director and I came up with the idea to create multiple floating TV screens, doubling in quantity as the song progressed. 1 > 2 > 4 > 8 > 16 > 32; so ended up with 32 video tracks total. I thought of going up to 64 but that would have been overkill. I nested these tracks, as I knew I would have to create one video track when I prepped it for the grade. Below is the nested clip externally and the sequence of the nested clip internally:

       

           External

      NEST-ext.jpg

       

           Internal

      NEST-int.jpg

       

      The raw footage I had to use in this nest was a static shot of a TV Screen playing through a VHS, of pre-recorded footage the Director had shot earlier. He really wanted this raw VHS look and tone that I admired. I had to put it through After Effects CC to mask the TV Screen and correct its position to detach it from its backdrop and table to make it appear floating on a black canvas, which I then placed in an alpha channel.

       

      AE-TV-off.jpg

      AE-TV-on.jpg

       

      It was my second time using After Effects CC, I have no idea how to use it professionally, but thanks to Adobe TV tutorials I got there in the end.

       

      So after making sure I was in sync with the music within the nested sequence, I began the assembly. Once I got to 16 and especially 32, it started to become quite arduous as you can imagine. However, thanks to PrP-CC advanced motion effect controls I got there, lots of copying and pasting position numbers to make sure the matrix of TV screens were aligned evenly.

       

      One of the great right-click options is the Replace Footage from Source Monitor. I could easily replace the assembled footage on this multi layered nested timeline with different in and out points of similar footage of the TV screens instead of having to re-create it every time we wanted to experiment. Simple enough function, but like the Interpret Footage to conform fps, it’s an indispensible feature of PrP-CC.

       

      Again, the Euphonix/Avid control surface here cut my workflow time considerably. As well one of the new features Adobe added was being able to reset each effects parameter individually as opposed to earlier releases only resetting the entire book effect section in one, especially in the Motion book. However:

       

      Regarding the effect controls is the copy and pasting of attributes from one clip to another. Currently when pasting attributes, you can only paste a book of effects as opposed to individual parameters. This became frustratingly apparent in the Motion book of parameters. When I wanted to at one point to retain the scale and positions of all these TV screens, I had to horizontally flip a section which I did externally on the nested clip, the screens were then slightly rotated out of place as the TV was naturally awkwardly shaped. I changed the rotation parameter in motion by one degree, which fixed it, and then had to do so manually to the other 31 clips… urgh. Please can we have a broken down option of pasting attributes within each effect book. For instance, within Motion we can individually select which attribute to paste, so can change rotation only but retain everything else inside Motion, etc.

       

      Pasting-Attributes.jpg

       

      To follow on from that, is manoeuvrability. The shortcut for selecting previous clip and next clip is very useful. Would be great to add a shortcut to selecting above clip and below clip too.


       

      Lastly, when looking at the Program monitor. A nice useful tool is to physically control the wireframe image from the Motion tab next to the fx button, using the mouse to adjust the image in the program monitor. As of right now you can only select one video track at a time, would be nice to select several clips on the timeline and adjust all in one go. As well as being able to turn off the images and just have the wireframe/s active of those selected on the timeline. Like it was in Final Cut Pro 7.

       

      Wireframe.jpg

       

      CONCLUSION

       

      I’ve only been using this program since last year, having migrated from FCP7 after 6 years and have not looked back since. I apologise in advance if anything I have mentioned actually already exists regarding missing features.

       

      One final feature idea I have is:

       

       

      Regarding Keyboard Shortcuts Settings search function. Would be nice to “reverse-engineer” search a keyboard shortcut/bind to discover what it performs and the name of its intended task. Basically a more advanced internal search engine.


       

      I hope this garners some attention from you all, especially the developers at Adobe. If you would have taken different editing routes/workflows please do share.

       

      If you have any questions or advice I will be happy to discuss here.

       

      Thank you.

      Arthur Graham-Maw