C100: c100 with ninja 2 Post Workflow using Adobe CC

kiel

New member
Hey everyone,

I'm in over my head and looking for some advice on CC and ninja workflow. I'm shooting with a c100 with ninja 2 to pro-res. My post workflow is in need of some serious tidy and help. I'm responsible for backing up and organizing footage for an editor using FCP. However I also need to be able to cut together small trailer style clips of the footage using Premier and the CC. I'm very much a beginner to Adobe and need some serious workflow advice while still keeping footage properly organized and logged for an editor using FCP. My trailer videos and her edit do not need to be compatible.

Would you use Adobe Prelude to back up off of the SSD to separate drive for my editor? Then log and sort through the footage that Ill be using for my trailer and send it to Premier using Prelude also? Then edit in Premier and send to speed grade for quick grading? Then export for web (the trailers are going on vimeo and you tube) using speed grade?

A step by step and any help with file handling would be super helpful! Thank you
 
FCP 6/7 or X?

I've managed large workflows as a supervising film editor on numerous BBC/Discovery/Nat Geo etc series and I'd suggest the most important part of your workflow is post shoot, when you determine clip metadata. If your editor is using FCP 7 or below, it's crucial that you establish a naming convention and stick to it rigidly, as clips must get named once and then never changed after they go to the editor. For example, at the BBC we used something like this:

TG-012-002-DVCPHD-020

That's then human-readable as Top Gear, series 12, programme 2, shot on DVC Pro HD, clip 20. That ensures each clip name is unique, but not in some kind of hexidecimal gobbledygook that is otherwise meaningless if you want to manually find stuff and you're not a computer. You can obviously change that formula to include multiple camera, different frame rates etc - anything you might want to be able to quickly determine by looking at the file name. Don't forget, you might also want revisit stuff months or years down the line, so having clips that will instantly relink to an offline project is useful/crucial.

Once you've renamed the clips, using freeware like Name Changer, drag and drop them into FCP7. You can then edit them in any NLE - just don't change the names.

If you're using FCP X, I'd ingest them into that first. It will re-wrap everything and name it with it's own UID, based on shooting date and time etc. Then it's ready for you to copy for use in another NLE.

I would question why you don't use the same NLE as the main editor. After all, your work could then feed into what she's doing and perhaps give you opportunities to contribute to the main programme edit. Collaboration is easier if you're on the same system.

Hope that helps.

Ben.
 
Thanks Ben!

That was very helpful. Would you do your naming in a program like prelude then?
 
Thanks Ben!

That was very helpful. Would you do your naming in a program like prelude then?

If you're working on a Mac, you could try using Automator to batch-rename your clips in sequential order. I've done that before and it works a treat.
 
As Stephen just pointed out, a freeware re-naming app is all you need to batch name the Pro Res clips, which are otherwise good to go straight into FCP. You can then just import copies of the re-named clips into your NLE (or pull the same clips from a SAN.)

By working with the same clip names, you can quickly find a clip when the grown-ups say, "where do clips x and y in your promo come from?"

Ben.
 
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