Now that CS5 has officially been announced, launched, and available for download and purchase, I figured it was time to blog about one of my favorite features in Premiere Pro…Native DSLR editing.
A few months back, while on Press Tour in Singapore I purchased a Canon 7D. Having only worked with some 5DMKII footage (during our demo-asset creation phase) I was really psyched to ‘get my hands dirty’ and see what these cameras could do on the video side. And more importantly, really test the power and push the boundaries of the Mercury Playback Engine.
In this brief tutorial, I’ll show you (very quickly) how to take your DSLR footage, regardless of frame-size, frame rate or aspect ratio, and start cutting your vision together…in seconds. As with RED R3D, AVC-Intra and XDCAM-EX (among many others), we handle DSLR footage NATIVELY; those H.264 files straight from your Canon or Nikon cameras can be dropped into Premiere Pro, and you just, well, EDIT. No transcoding, no wasting time. And remember: Bridge CS5’s ‘Photo Downloader’ can be used to simply grab the video files from your camera’s media card. That’s how I do it (but you’ll see reading from cards directly too). Adding transitions, Color Correction, Keying, other effects…it all works the same. And the with amazing new 64-bit Mercury Playback Engine, you can work with these effects and playback without rendering.** Check it out…
DSLR Editing in Premiere Pro CS5 from Jason Levine on Vimeo.
(I’d recommend making it full-screen, as it was originally captured in 1920×1200; the video here, in VimeoHD, is presented in 720p)
I hope to do a little follow-up in the coming weeks on some additional DSLR workflows. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the power of the Mercury Playback Engine (and the 64-bit capabilities of Premiere Pro) be sure to check out Karl’s latest Short & Suite episode.
And if you want to download the trial of CS5 Production Premium, click HERE.
Blog on…preferably, in 64-bit 😉
**Mercury by itself is a software engine. As such, even on my MBP laptop (the newest model, 17″ COREi7 w/8GB RAM) I’m able to typically add Fast Color Corrector (a 32-bit floating-point color effect), Sharpening and Levels and *still* get real-time playback, without any kind of rendering or GPU acceleration. For more info on leveraging Mercury with GPU-accelerated cards, watch the Short&Suite video above.