Best workflow for video editing?

[jonfromno]

Hi there,

At the moment I am sitting here with 600 GB pretty awesome shots after a 1 month vacation in tropical surroundings. My goal is, within a few months, to have a nice "cinematic looking" 10-20 minutes film.

But I'm new to Adobe CC. Previously I've used Lightworks for video editing. I am far from an advanced film maker, but I am quick learner. What I don't know today, I will learn on the way. However, since I'm new to Adobe CC, I am quite confused to what is the best workflow for the material/sources I have to work with.

I'm guessing I should use After Effects, Premiere and Lightroom?

My material is from:
GoPro 3+ with gimbal          -> Timelapse videos, Picture timelapses and "Normal" videos

DJI Phantom 3 Pro               -> "Normal" videos

Canon 500D                          -> Picture timelapses (raw)

Settings used: Low saturation and low contrast etc. Basically as neutral as possible. This way I hope to develop a filter (or is it called LUT?) to apply for most/all of the shots, so that it all looks the same. 24 fps mostly, some 60/120 fps for slow motion. ND filter.

Basically I am confused on where to start, and I have several questions running in the back of my mind:

- Where do I start? Can I structure all the content in CC somewhere?

- Should I use After Effects or Premiere for color editing and transitions?

- 1 filter/LUT for all + do manual color editing where it is needed?

Am I correct that the best workflow would be:

1) Do the picture timelapses in Lightroom first.

2) Then the video timelapses in ... After Effects or Lightroom ?
3) Sort out what clips to use and structure it in a timeline in ... After Effects or Premiere?

Thank you so much for any advice!

- Jon

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

After Effects is very complex. It's the most complicated piece of software Adobe makes. I would not suggest jumping into it for what you are doing.

I don't think you would need to use Lightroom or After Effects for any of this. You should be able to import your timelapses as image sequences. Premiere will see them as if they were video files without audio!

Premiere Pro is the way to go for you. Premiere Pro is an editing tool, but in the last few releases it also got some more powerful color correction and color grading tools as well. You definitely don't want to structure your timeline in After Effects! After Effects is more for motion graphics, visual effects, and compositing. It's for making shots. You want to put all of your shots together to tell a story.

Premiere Pro is the tool for you! It's even got several workspaces set up to make things easy for you. You can use Assembly first to get your shots imported and roughly laid out, then go into the Editing workspace to get things lined up, then jump into the Color workspace to grade everything.

It may not be as complicated as After Effects, but Premiere Pro is still a professional-level tool, so make sure you get a good foundational tutorial series under your belt before you embark on your editing journey! There are some good ones here on Adobe's site - and some very helpful people in the Premiere Pro CC​ forum once you're done with that.

[jonfromno]

Thank you so much, Szalam. Very very helpful.
I will then start by looking through basic tutorials, and then assembly my shots in a tentative timeline, and take it from there.

If however I would like to do the .raw-timelapse in Lightroom first, how should I export it and import it in Premiere?
Same with AfterEffects; if I make a transition and/or motion effects there, how do I get it over to Premiere?

Thanks a lot!

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm with Szalam on this ... do the whole thing in PrPro, with one possible exception (discussed later). As to the first place to start, there are a number of excellent learning-PrPro tutorials over at lynda.com, a month of subscription to that would get you a LOT more capabilities and fewer headaches. So often, when starting out, one makes choices that lead down wrong pathways ... and then realize at some point the best thing to do is simply junk the entire project you've been working on & starting over from total scratch. Watch the tut's first ... then start building.

It's in reality a lot faster to getting that project done, and done decently.

Next, looking over this ...

My material is from:
GoPro 3+ with gimbal          -> Timelapse videos, Picture timelapses and "Normal" videos

DJI Phantom 3 Pro               -> "Normal" videos

Canon 500D                          -> Picture timelapses (raw)

Every one of those sources produce video media in "long-GOP" ... short version, it's not just compressed frames, they don't even include full frames except for every 9-30 frames, as all the intervening "frame" data is stored as a data-set of pixels that have changed since the last "I" complete frame. This requires a ton of computing from the CPU/RAM/subsystems setup. Bad enough in 1080, if you're using 4k, it can choke a seriously tricked out $5,000 pc.

So the question is ... whether to use the PrPro "Proxy" media using the Cineform preset on ingestion setup, which works pretty simply, or to create a set of transcodes of the video media for editing (and if 4k, maybe still make Cineform proxies on ingestion). One user here often makes exact-named transcodes from original long-GOP codec media, archives the original (which is vastly smaller on disc), uses the transcodes for editing, but after project completion moves all the project files into the archive folder with the original media and dumps the folder with the transcoded media ... he can re-create it at need from the originals.

Either process is a few minutes of learning, then can be done reasonably easy & quickly.

Now ... I do hope you lowered contrast & saturation some ... but didn't flat-line them to lowest setting in-camera. I shoot GH3, and deal with media from other DSLR cams also. One of the first things a lot of people do is try to emulate "log" media in look, set contrast & saturation to the flattest settings of the camera, and then try and bring back color in post.

DSLR 8-bit media is not the same thing as produced by say a 10-bit camera shooting a maker's Log settings. And if you flatlined contrast & saturation, trying to simply increase both in post may induce tons of artifacts. So ... I would suggest as one of your first test runs, taking a bit of a few clips on a sequence, and seeing what happens when you use the Lumetri Basic tab controls to "neutrallize" that back to normal media. If you post a screen-grab showing the image in your Program monitor and the Lumetri scopes ... probably RGB Parade and Vectorscope YUV ... I'd be happy to offer suggestions.

The "one exception" I have to the use of PrPro ... do you mean your time-lapse images are actually in Canon's RAW format, CR2 or whatever your camera produces? If so, you will need to create jpegs or png from Lightroom or Photoshop first, and import those. Make an export preset that is probably twice the frame-size of your video sequence. Use "Set to Frame size" rather than "scale to frame size" as it will keep all the resolution of the image and you can use Motion/scale-position to "zoom" in and around your stills at your whim.

Neil

[R Neil Haugen]

An addendum to my previous tome ... that's a LOT of media to go through, and most of it you won't use. The biggest job will be culling down to a few seconds here & there. Two ways of approaching that jump out ...

1. use say Prelude to "ingest" the media, doing rough-cuts by selecting bits of media and dropping them into a "rough cut" sequence there that gets sent into PrPro, and probably using markers or metadata comments to say something useful in a few words about the various pieces.
2. use PrPro, with a "pancake" sequence UI. You can find this by searching for "pancake" editing. You have two sequences one on top of the other in the UI. Scrub or play the top one, find a section you like, Ctrl-K both ends to get that selected, drag the section down to the lower timeline which is all your "select" sections.

I've done both, and they're about a time-wash I think. The "standard" way is to put a clip in the source monitor, scrub for in/out, and use the comma or period keys to drop that section onto the timeline. You can then clear the in/out points and make another selection from the clip. I've come to prefer pancake to that.

Dave Helmly taught in his class at MAX last year doing something I'd not seen ... nor had a couple other of us that were Teaching Assistants for his class ... using the Q and W keys. He'd take an entire bin of clips, selected ... drop the whole thing onto a blank timeline to create a sequence ... then starting with the first clip, scrub to where he wanted the in point, hit Q ... the section of that clip before the playhead (Current Time Indicator or CTI) would disappear and all jump left to close to the beginning. Scrub to the out point for the clip, hit W ... everything past the CTI for that clip disamappears, all past it closes the gap. He'd fly through a series of clips that way ... but you can only do one selection per clip. If your media is mostly short pieces and you're going for the best 3-5 seconds per clip, this works well.

Neil