Over the past year, remote workflows and a general “work from home” movement has shifted how the industry moves forward. While one could look at these steps and question the decision to not cut in Premiere in the first place, I can assure you that cutting with Final Cut was considerably faster and these roundtrip steps were minor. In Premiere Pro, I imported that XML, made sure that Premiere linked to the RAW files, corrected any size and speed issues, removed any duplicate clips, and then the project was ready for turnover. There are a few quirks in this method that you have to suss out, but once everything was correct in Resolve, I exported an XML for Premiere. So rather than go through XtoCC, I opted to import the Sony RAW clips into Resolve, then import the FCPXML, which in turn automatically relinked to the RAW files in Resolve. This complicates Premiere’s ability to easily relink files. There are various ways to do that, but automatic relinking is dicier with these RAW files, because each clip is within its own subfolder, similar to RED. The one wrinkle was that I had to turn over a Premiere Pro project linked to the RAW media files. I could go from copying proxy files to my first cut on a commercial within a single day. Thanks to skimming and keyword collections, I was able to cut these spots far more quickly than using any of the other NLE options. When you wade through that much footage, it’s easy for an NLE to get bogged down by caching footage or for the editor to get lost in the volume of clips. This gave me the freedom to edit wherever – either on my iMac at home or one of the iMac Pros at work. I copied the proxy files to a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD portable drive. If it weren’t for VFX, these would actually be the high-quality source files used for the final edit. These Sony XAVC files are high-res, camera-original files on par with 4K ProRes HQ media. Of course, if you think of proxies as low-res files, you’d be wrong. So I opted to use the proxies, which allowed me to cut the spots in FCP. I also wanted to be able to access media to cut the spots whether at home or at the work facility. I didn’t want to waste the time copying location drives to the NAS, partially for reasons of time. The Sony RAW files are large and don’t perform well playing from a shared storage system. My cutting options could be to work natively with the Sony RAW media in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, or to edit with the proxies in any NLE. The four spots totaled over 1200 clips with approximately an hour of footage per spot. The spots were shot with a Sony Venice, simultaneously recording 6K RAW and 4K XAVC (AVC-Intra) “proxy” files. I was covering for the client’s regular editor who had a scheduled vacation and would finish the project. My objective was to complete the creative cut, but none of the finishing, since these spots involved extensive visual effects. In the case of the four :60s, I originally budgeted about two days each, plus a few days for client revisions – eleven days in total. Sharing projects and elements also works better in the Adobe ecosystem. It’s simply a better fit for us, since the bulk of staff and freelancers are very fluid in Adobe products and less so with Apple’s pro software. I work in a team and the tool of choice is Premiere Pro. While I’ve cut literally thousands of commercials in my career, my work in recent years tends to be corporate/branding/image content in the five to ten minute range. I recently cut a set of involved commercials using FCP. Since I’ve been a bit quiet on this blog lately due to the workload, I thought it was a good time to reflect. Recently Final Cut Pro (formerly Final Cut Pro X) hit its tenth anniversary.
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