Beginner: GH1 Footage Premiere and After Effects Workflow. -Stabilizing.

M

Merlin87

New member
I have much about 300 short 720p50 AVCHD clips from my GH13 which needs to be stabilzed.
I tried several DynamicLink ways of interchanging the footage between AE and PP CS5.5.
It functions well but only to some extend, and i am still cunfused.

I dont know if i am on the right way, and asking me whats the original legit way to do this.

Should i first stabilize all clips in AE and then edit in PP or do the cutting in PP and at the end the stabilizing thing?
I hoped that i could stabilize all clips at once (script etc) but i think thats impossible.
So far i wasted two full days on this, but i am still confused.

What settings should be used to render the final film? Either its much too big (8gb for 15sec) or crappy quality. What coded do you recommend for storing the final film? (So its possible to convert it to vimeo format or Blueray later?

I spent my last money and bought a NEC PA271W for the grading-stuff.
The GH1 natively shoots in sRGB (regardless if adobeRGB is chosen, read that here anywhere...)
Should i choose sRGB in the Colorsettings of the Project?
And what about the colour depth? Should i choose 16 or 32bit?


No worrys about my hardware. Recently build a Hackintosh only for this purpose. (Dualboot Win7 & SL, SandyBridge i7k, 16gb ram)
My bloodpressure reached new highs, never thought that this editing stuff could be so complicated. (Or time consuming to get all the infos). I am so sorry, this sounds noobish, but i think i am loosing my mind soon if i didnt get results. Cheers
 
I'd suggest stabilizing, and rendering the results to a codec that is good as an intermediate codec. ProRes from Apple and DNxHD from Avid, the latter is 'free' even if you are not using an Avid product, are two that I have seen around. You can save to uncompressed, or lossless compressed, but that does generate large data sets...

It sounds tedious but I think that is the way to go before editing. Well... other than perhaps pruning the clips to just the set you want to think about using for your edit.

Each clip needs to be stabilized on its own. There may be a script... but that may presuppose some sort of identifying mark in the video to target... even then, I think you have to position the targets for the stabilization process manually...

Next time don't wait until you have 300 shots to process... or allocated a week for the work...

The only thing that I could recommend would be to get your stabilizations setup, then batch render in AE over night or at times you aren't working on your computer...
 
I personally would do the edit, and then stabilize the clips just to minimize the processing time needed (you'll only have to stabilize the exact clips you used in the edit). You'll get better results from the the stabilization too because it only has to worry about the sections of the clips that you used.

So once you've got your edit, you'll want to open After Effects and instead of right clicking the clips in Premiere and doing the replace with After Effects composition, I would copy the clip in Premiere and then paste it into a composition in After Effects. This way you retain the original edit in Premiere, and you avoid using an After Effects composition in Premiere through dynamic link. I find that compositions in Premiere are unnecessarily clunky and slow, and I prefer instead to render uncompressed videos out of After Effects and import those into Premiere. Then you just stick above the original cuts so you have both in case you have to make edits to the video.

Edit: If all your shots need to be stabilized, you could also do the following instead to make it quicker: In After Effects, import your Premiere project so that you've got a composition with all of your shots. Now you can just go through and drop the Warp Stabilizer on each shot pretty quickly, and then render the whole thing out as one big uncompressed video which you can bring back into Premiere. However, this may not work so well if you've used any transitions. I don't think transitions come across from Premiere to After Effects.

For exporting a final video, you should probably do an H.264 encoded video...I'd use Adobe's encoder rather than trying to go through Quicktime. You should easily be able to get the quality you need in less than 100mb. Make sure to do VBR 2 pass.

Color depth in After Effects probably doesn't matter unless you're doing color grading. I usually grade in Premiere and it operates in 32bpc color be default. Your source is 8bpc and your final is 8bpc so simply passing video through at 8bpc (like you would when stabilizing) won't be a bottleneck. For what it's worth, I'd also avoid transcoding as Premiere can edit AVCHD fast natively, and any transcode will likely just decrease quality unless you go to uncompressed.
 
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Do the edit first. If you use one track the clips will cascade down and right in AE.

Import the PP project into After Effects.

Stabilize each clip.

Save and Render.
 
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