Premiere, Avid and FCP7 help thread. Need help? Just ask!

AyeAyeAhoy!

AyeAyeAhoy!

AyeAyeAhoy!

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20 Apr 2009
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Hello!

So I've received lots of great help on this forum, so figured it'd be nice if I could give something useful back. I'm a professional freelance editor, and have about a decade of experience cutting broadcast TV for the BBC, Nat Geo, Discovery, History Channel, etc.

If anyone needs any help with anything related to Premiere, FCP7 or Avid, as well as codecs, workflows, best practice when cutting, or even just some critical advice on how to improve an edit, then ask away.

Not sure if there is a demand for this, but I guess we shall see!
 
What's the best practice for colour grading? Do you put together your film then grade, or do you grade each individual clip before the putting together the final cut.

What about colour matching and balancing between different cameras?
 
So if you're cutting for broadcast, the grade is usually a totally separate process from the 'offline' (the edit), usually performed by a specialist Colourist.

So, with that in mind, I would always recommend cutting the film first, then grading the finished piece afterwards shot by shot. To an extent, think of the main edit as storytelling, where that's the main purpose, and deal with the shaky shots and bad colour afterwards.

Some people sometimes recommend applying a colour correction filter to footage as it sits in bins, but I would recommend against this as the edit suite needs to process the colour correction every time you lay the clip on the timeline, add a transition, nudge it along, etc, which is unnecessary.

As for colour matching between cameras, this is harder and the reason why a lot of colourists charge a pretty penny for their time. If the camera you've shot on is shooting LOG colour space, and another is shooting REC709, then you can use LUTs to help match the colours between the 2.
 
Incidentally, for anyone that is interested in grading and colour correction, Black Magic offer a free version of DaVinci Resolve.

It's not the full package, but has the basics to get you going.
Resolve was for a long time the industry standard software. It has been overtaken at the high end these days by the likes of Baselight and Nucoda, but still offers a good feature set as well as a lot of other non-linear editing features that those pro grading packages do not.
 
I've been trialling color finale for FCPX and using this video as a tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTro81QcivE

I think it works well for my needs, which is just videos of me travelling, motorcycle stuff and sailing.

I did get a promotional copy of Davinci 12, but had problems with the xml from FCPX. I think the latter mucked about with timecodes which Davinci didn't like.
 
englishpremier said:
I did get a promotional copy of Davinci 12, but had problems with the xml from FCPX. I think the latter mucked about with timecodes which Davinci didn't like.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure about FCPX, but in FCP7 you can export different types of XML (versions 1-4). It could be that DaVinci needs an older XML type. I guess EDL support in FCPX has been removed by now?
 
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