ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

Like FCP7 animation and keyframing can be performed on clips right in the timeline. Any filters applied can also be animated without going up to the Effects Controls tab. You don’t have to “open up” the dedicated key framing area like you do in FCP7.

With this setting turned on you can keyframe and animate in the timeline, including filters. If you turn on the Show Opacity Handles then the yellow rubber band on the clips behaves like the opacity rubber band in FCP.

To keyframe and animate in the PPro timeline you can use the Pen Tool to add keyframes to the yellow rubber band. Many editors would then move up to the Source monitor (that’s called the Viewer in FCP7) and do direct manipulation on the image for things like scaling, position and rotation. But you can achieve the same animation results by dragging the rubber band keyframes up and down.

You can see in the above image that you can choose different parameters for Effects that are applied to a clip in the timeline. In this example I animated a blur.

Change the parameter in the pop-up menu to animate something different. It’s worth noting that you can often drag a keyframe up to an extreme number. For example, in the Gaussian Blur:Blurriness parameter I could drag the value up to 30000 which blurred the image into nothing. A more usable 50 barely registered a move in the timeline. Hold down the option modifier key when dragging a keyframe in the timeline to gear down the movement to make it more manageable. These extreme numbers will hopefully be turned down in the future.

Working with something like Scaling, which has two separate options for scaling height and width is interesting. You can turn on the rubber band for Uniform Scale and then drag the rubber band to turn in ON or OFF. When ON you only get one Scale option in the timeline to animate as opposed to when Uniform Scale is OFF. Then you can get rubber bands for separate Scale Height and Scale Width.

This same timeline keyframing is true for audio as you can keyframe levels and audio filters as well.

Keyframe audio levels and filters in the timeline just as you do video filters.

One other thing worth mentioning is that you can also right + click (or control + click with a single button mouse but does anyone use a single button mouse anymore?) on a keyframe in the timeline to bring up standard animation easing controls.

All of your basic keyframe easing controls are available in the Premiere Pro timeline as well.

Choosing something like Bezier handles will allow you to adjust those handles right in the timeline. Any change you make to keyframes and animations in the timeline are also reflected in the Effect Controls tab for each clip. While it’s nice to be able to do this in the timeline it’s often easier to really fine tune the animations in the Effects Controls tab.

The big timeline submenu.

PPro also makes use of submenus throughout the application and the timeline is no different. Right + click on a clip to reveal many options under the submenu.

You’ll become very familiar with this clip submenu as there’s a lot of useful options that live here.

This submenu could be the subject of its own article (and a lot of the menu items are self-explanatory) but here’s some highlights of the clip submenu.

Cut, copy, paste commands are the same as FCP7 with the exception of Paste Attributes. Pasting PPro attributes pastes all the attributes of a clip, including filters. This is one area where FCP7 has a leg up as PPro needs the option to selectively paste only certain attributes. Maybe next release. Strangely you can selectively remove certain effects but not paste them selectively.

The Remove Effects dialog box give an option to selectively remove certain things.

Replace edit operations happen with the Replace With Clip option and can replace from the Source Monitor or directly from a bin. Replace edit works like a replace edit should and keeps motion and effects intact. I especially like the Replace With Clip > From Source Monitor, Match Frame. That keeps a sync point between the playhead in the Source monitor and timeline. This works very much like Sync Point Editing in Avid Media Composer if you’re familiar with that function and is one of my favorite advanced editing techniques.

Like FCP you can both turn clips visibility on an off in the timeline via the Enable command. You can also Nest clips just like FCP. A double click of a nest opens that next in a new sequence. One extra feature of the PPro timeline is the ability to Group and Ungroup clips. This works exactly as you think it would and allows you to select groups of clips with one click. It’s a nice feature only there’s no visual indication of which clips are grouped together unless you choose to label the group with a color. I wish there were more colors available.

Grouping of clips is one of my favorite PPro timeline features as it makes an easy way to group clips together without having to nest them. Label them for easy identification.

Synchronize Clips isn’t a PluralEyes like auto-syncing feature (though PluralEyes is available for PPro) but rather a way to quickly sync in the timeline. Choose this option and you’re give choices on how to sync the clips.

Any of the above options can be used to sync clips in the Premiere Pro timeline.

It’s just one more tool to use in the PPro timeline to make life and work a bit easier.

I make use of the Reveal In Project option as that is a basic Find Bin command that shows the master clip in its bin. Strangely this isn’t available from the Source window. Also note the Replace With After Effects Composition. If you’re using Premiere Pro then you’re probably an After Effects user as well and Adobe’s Dynamic Linking between the two is a very big selling point. See a previous PVC article about using Dynamic Link to bring AE’s Warp Stabilizer into PPro.

Missing from the timeline clips submenu is a way to add Clip Markers to a clip. PPro uses several different kinds of Markers so hopefully that will be added as it seems like a natural way to add them.

And then there’s three buttons in the upper left corner

Finally there’s three buttons in the PPro timeline under the timecode display.

While PPro doesn’t have a customizable button bar like FCP there are three buttons there.

The left magnet icon is to toggle snapping. The middle one that looks like a disc icon is to Set Encore Chapter Marker. Finally on the right is a basic Set Marker button. Double clicking on a marker that is set in the timeline will bring up a dialog box for editing the marker.

Since Adobe is still into things like DVDs and Flash, there’s quite a lot of things you can do with a Premiere Pro marker. It’d be nice if you could assign them different colors.

Wrap Up

I hope this primer on the Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 timeline has been useful to those moving over (or just trying out) from Final Cut Pro. I’m still learning things about Premiere Pro every time I use it and I learned a lot by writing this article. This article hasn’t covered every aspect of the PPro timeline so if you’ve got some of your own timeline tips please post them below. It’s great to discover new things that I’ve never had access to while editing in other NLEs (like PPro’s Group clips function which is entirely different from what Avid calls a group clip). FCP7 users won’t have much trouble adjusting from one timeline to the other if you just remember they are different programs and all features aren’t exactly the same. They are very similar in operation so if you study their similarities and come to understand the differences between the two it’ll be an easy transition.

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Thanks Tom. I learn something new about PPro every time I use it!

Posted by Scott Simmons on 11/07 at 12:41 PM

Hi Scott, thanks for a great article.
I’m still undecided about PPro 5.5 as opposed to Avid MC 6 as a replacement for FCP 7. As a feature editor, my only real concern is which system is better as a ‘heavy lifter.’ I’ve read a lot of good things about PPro 5.5 but never seen any comments or feedback about it’s ability to handle 2 +hrs of long form feature work. I know MC 6 has the street creds for that type of work but what about PRro?, I’d be interested to see a comparison or hear your evaluation
Thanks, Geoff

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/07 at 05:24 PM

EXCELLENT!
Thanks to you clear explanation on track targeting I was finally able to get my head around it. Cannot understand value of targeting both setting the V and A patch panel AND highlighting/un-highlighting the track name is required. Maybe Adobe will remove the extra steps in future.

Posted by lightprismtv on 11/08 at 05:40 AM

Thanks all for the comments.

@Geoffrey - I still trust and choose Avid with really long for things as its media management is still tops. One weakness of PPro (that was always a weakness of FCP) is its media management in that it just tracks media pretty much by file name. If stuff goes offline for whatever reason then it’s the “reconnection dance” to get it back online. FCP had a search button that could try and search out the files but PPro doesn’t and that can be problematic if you’re looking for weird video files buried in a BPAV folder. I think Adobe is aware of this so I hope, hope, hope it gets addressed in CS6.

So for features I’d steer toward Avid since it has just a prove track record with longform and the large amounts of footage that you have to load into it.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 11/08 at 08:27 AM

@lightprismtv - that’s a good point that it is a couple extra clicks. Avid that an auto-patching settings that takes a click out of this task. I would shout out to Adobe with feedback:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

I would think this is the type of small usability things they’d want to hear as this can make a big difference in day-to-day operation as an editor.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 11/08 at 08:31 AM

Scott,

Thanks for the right up. Really appreciate your blog, always seems to be relevant to what I’m doing at the time.

We are looking to transition away from FCP7. We had a perfect job to test Premiere on. 20 1.5 minute videos relying heavily on AE graphics and templates we created. I’m loving the Dynamic Link and a the interface in premiere…

I have one huge issue though, export time from Premiere is incredibly long! Have you experienced this? I’m a bit nervous to have a client in the edit session and tell them there 10 minute video is going to take an hour to export! Also the lack of real playback from my BM multibridge is alarming.

I’m not sure premiere is ready for a client edit session? What is your take?

I grabbed the crossgrade for AVID, wondering if I should start start testing it for our shop.

Thanks,

-Dane

Posted by DaneH on 11/08 at 10:13 AM

Dane and Scott. Here is a post that addresses some thoughts and solutions I have on the same Export issue.

As much as I love working with PrP 5.5, Ive discovered one issue that slows done the workflow for long form and high graphic intensive projects. It is the EXPORT function. Ive seen some projects require many hours to export to a file. I want to make this work in my client driven environment so Im posting an idea thats the result of collaboration between me and some folks I hold in high regard.This workflow at this point is theoretical, but feasible.

Choosing Prores as the Preview codec is the first step in my alternative approach to insure high quality preview files.. Like I said, if you edit either long form shows or graphic intensive projects, the exporting process can involve hours of time. All my professional life Ive worked in client oriented sessions. At the end of a 2 day edit, if I told a client it was going to take 8 hours to export their video, they probably would run screaming from the edit bay

So the solution is this. Instead of spending all that exporting time, I just play out the timeline through a Kona 3 SDI output that is hooked up to a Ki Pro Mini recorder.This assumes that those things that need rendering before dumping will get it. If the show is 20 minutes, the dump to the KPM is 20 min. and you get a Prores master when you are done. 90 min. movie? Instead of a 20 hour render, you spend 90 minutes dumping the timeline to the KPM. Its analogous to dumping to tape, a process I did for the last 30 years in about every edit bay I ever worked in. There are some unknowns at this point that need testing. And if involves purchasing the AJA product. But I think its a great alternative to the time intensive export process that is the standard operating procedure for PrP .

Posted by Tom Daigon on 11/08 at 10:22 AM

Thanks Scott, pretty much what I had thought, but it’s nice to get expert confirmation.

It’s a long way from my Media100 days in the ‘90’s (I still have a soft spot for the old, and expensive, turnkey system).

I look forward to any MC 6 articles in the future as I’m just about to make the FCP to MC6 jump (good on avid for making that a financial possibility)

Keep up the good work
Cheers,
Geoff
PS I did try and get to grips with FCP X, it has some nice features, but for drama cutting it’s an impossibility frustrating D-O-G. (try lip syncing 3 hrs of clips!!)

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/08 at 02:19 PM

I haven’t seen those crazy export times but I’ve only done exporting with shorter edits that were H.264 Canon files or ProRes.

Are these long GOP formats where it’s having to reconform? Is this a direct export out of PPro or going through Adobe Media Encoder?

Posted by Scott Simmons on 11/08 at 02:45 PM

Hi Scott. When exporting, the entire sequence is “rebuilt” frame by frame for any format.Unlike FCP where the preview files are stitched together to create the master file.Heres what an Adobe tech said about it…

“What you’re looking for is what we commonly refer to as smart rendering, and it doesn’t exist in PPro. That’s a Final Cut ‘ism, where it splices rendered data from the preview QT files into the final render. Keep in mind that’s a QuickTime centric feature, & doesn’t translate automatically to all file formats.

From what Ive gathered from the Adobe folks. All exporting uses the AME. If you go direct out of PrP it ties up PrP for the process. If you choose AME then PrP is freed up, I think they call that approach “headless”.

So my approach treats the process similarly to exporting to tape. Just play the timeline and record the master on the Ki Pro.

More interesting info about trying to avoid slow exporting here…

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3945436#3945436

Posted by Tom Daigon on 11/08 at 03:18 PM

Thanks for the Reply Scott,

This is using ProRes & Dynamic Link to AE. The sequence has already been rendered (render bar In green). 1 1/2 minute video is taking 10+ minutes to render. Just seems a bit odd to me. We don’t have many videos that don’t get some effect or graphic treatment, so mercury only does so much.

Oh well, it seems like these are things we gotta deal with going forward. It’s just hard to get used to.

Toms workaround is interesting. Hopeing to here back about any results!

Thanks,

-Dane

Posted by DaneH on 11/08 at 05:36 PM

I certainly prefer being able to work along real-time while editing without getting stopped every few minutes in the creative process to render as we did in FCP… and then when finished, do a final render that I can walk away from to do other things.

In FCP, when adding effects and CC, most of the time just reverted to scrubbing to see results instead of rendering ... but you cannot get the feel of timing with just scrubbing.

Definitely like working mostly real-time in PPro previews without stopping for rendering to a final render at the end.

It is just so much faster ... and allows more creativity - you are more tempted to try off the wall things. When we used to use Edius mated with a GV card, things were very much real time as well. PPro brings back the same real time fun and more so with all the integration with the other apps.

Posted by lightprismtv on 11/09 at 06:39 AM

Scott - very helpful and timely article. I believe you have a Matrox Mini. have you been able to get it to work properly with Premiere Pro CS5.5. Mine works fine with FCP, but having some issues (dropped frames, crashes) with 5.5.

Thanks

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/14 at 10:59 AM

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The Adobe Premiere Pro timeline for Final Cut Pro users

Keyframing and animation in the Premiere Pro timeline.