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

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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!
 
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.
 
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.

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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