I play in a band. We record most of our gigs with a GoPro. This is mostly for our own use, but I'll occationally chop out clips to post on social media. I just to do a little bit of color correction as needed and sync the GoPro files to the audio (recorded from another source) and export. Nothing crazy.
A typical gig is 3 hours broken into 2 sets so the resulting files will be two separate videos approximately 1.5 hours each. We play 50+ gigs a year so I work through this process constantly, hence my interest in speeding it up.
Current workflow using info from most recent gig:
- Record the show resulting in 14 separate .MP4 videos totalling 156.14 GB.
- Edit and mix the multitrack audio from the show resulting in two separate ~1.5hr 48k stereo files.
- Import the 14 GoPro files and 2 audio files into a new Premiere project and add them to a new sequence.
- Synchronize the gopro files to the audio files one at a time (select audio file and one gopro clip > synchronize > repeat).
- Convert the sequence to 4K to give me some wiggle room to crop and frame the footage better (shot at 5k).
- Add an adjustment layer to the sequence and apply any color correction needed.
- Export using the Match Source - High Bitrate preset. Each video is typically around 6GB. Two videos per show, so about 12GB per project.
Things I've tried:
- Auto-stitching the GoPro files into two 1.5 hour videos would theoretically speed up synching the video to the audio (step 4 above), but I've never had good luck with this. Because each set is so long, the stitched file and audio file are only in sync for about 10mins before they are noticably out. Similarly, synching just one gopro clip to the audio track and then bumping the rest up next to it gives the same issue so the only option I have found is to synchronize each clip to the audio file individually.
- Encoding the GoPro footage BEFORE importing into Premiere and editing. I've tried this with the hopes of speeding up the final export but preloading the encoding time doesn't seem to actually save me any time. Especially since these are typically one and done projects. I'm not returning to the project or exporting draft versions or anything. Just import, edit, export once and I'm done.
- Rendering files within the sequence before exporting. I'm never doing anything that "requires" rending (red bar), but everything is yellow. Again, I'm not returning to this project for multiple drafts or versions though so rending before exporting doesn't seem to actually save me time, it just shifts the time to a different part of the process. Another issue with this is preview file sizes. Last time I tried this was with a two-camera show so double the numbers mentioned above. With rendering, the project ended up over 500GB.
- I've played with the export settings quite a bit using settings people suggest on various forums or YouTube videos. I've found settings that might lessen the output file size by just a little bit without noticable quality differences, but haven't found anything that also speeds the process up.
One other note is that I import the files and edit the project directly on my laptop hard drive. I save the resulting videos to my NAS and upload them to YouTube and then delete the entire project and source files from my laptop.
Obviously upgrading my machine will help with speeding up the export, and that's coming, but I'm interested in finding ways to make this process both more effecient and result in a smaller file size for the two 1.5hr 4k videos in the meantime.
Thoughts?
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