HDSLR Post-Workflow Questions (Neat Video, Colorista, Grain, Premiere, Render Codec)

stokstad

Well-known member
Hey,

Im currently working on a short documentary shot with the D800 on the internal codec. I have limited experience and are trying to learn a proper workflow to get the best results possible while still being effective in a one-man environment. To do this I have decided to go with trying to keep as much as possible being done in premiere. I have purchased Neat Video, Colorista II and some Gorilla Grain. My aim is to make a render for the web and a higher quality for for offline screening.

My questions are as follows:

1) Is it advisable to edit, noise reduce, grade and add grain too the original footage inside premiere on the same render?

If:

1a) Is there any way of insuring which order effects get applied in premiere CC? (So that Neat Video can be applied before Colorista)

If not:

1b) Which is the easiest way to transcode an HDSLR (D800 internal) edit into another format? (10bit ProRes 4:2:2?) And when, in which stage should you do this?


2) Adding grain too my footage seems to add alot of compression artifacts to my rendered footage, if not rendered with a high bitrate (like 60Mbps). Is this because of my workflow in premiere or anything I should be aware of in the render-settings?

This is a screengrab of a shot im experimenting with from inside premiere, and this is about how I want it too look after my render:

Screen Shot 2013-08-23 at 1.39.54 PM (2).jpg
http://snag.gy/I1cQp.jpg

I realise these questions may not be straight forwardly answered, and that you might need more information about my setup/workflow. Please feel free to ask me anything and thanks in advance for any sharing!
 
* The order in which effects are applied in Premiere and After Effects is exactly as they appear in the list of applied effects. You can add a couple of strong curves to confirm this and see which is first and which is last (if you clip something to white, the next effect won't be able to unclip it).

* Since CS5, you don't need to transcode the footage: for best results, load it as-is into Premiere or AE.
 
Does anyone have any tip on how to get grain looking good on web-compression?
High enough bitrate. Good compression when encoding the videos.

Youtube will always make your videos looks like if it's been shot on a crappy 320*240 resolution with 75kbps bitrate. Vimeo is much better to handle quality videos.

1) Is it advisable to edit, noise reduce, grade and add grain too the original footage inside premiere on the same render?
Yes. I usually do something similar, when using low-light shots: I denoise, color correct, add grain and render separate clips, then I edit with the "final look".

2) Adding grain too my footage seems to add alot of compression artifacts to my rendered footage, if not rendered with a high bitrate (like 60Mbps). Is this because of my workflow in premiere or anything I should be aware of in the render-settings?
That usually depends on the encoder. If you're using AME from Premiere, this can be the cause. It's not the best available. I would recommend you to render in QuickTime at 100% and deselect any "restrict bitrate" option. Then, use another software to encode your videos. VidCoder is a free and very nice software which produce great results. I'm using it to render my videos and it's just great. You can render by quality based, or size based. It's fairly simple to use as well. That's what I'd do.
 
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