Replacing footage in Premiere Pro CS5.5

[custerc]

OK, so I have this DSLR footage that I've already synced to externally recorded audio, chopped up, and dropped throughout several scenes in my film. But it's a bit noisy (was shot in very low light), and I've done some tests in AE and found settings that seem to show I can clean it up quite nicely without losing too much sharpness (and I can probably get some sharpness back anyway.

My question is, what is the best way to go about replacing the footage, as I've already cut it up, synced it with audio, and integrated it into my film. Is it best to just go clip by clip, replacing with an After Effects composition? Or is there a way to somehow tell Premiere Pro that all the clips from File A should now pull from File B instead (where File A is the original footage and File B is an exact copy of that footage except the noise has been removed).

Thoughts? Sorry if this is a noob question. (Also, while I'm here, any tips on the best way to re-sharpen footage a bit after removing noise?)

 

[Bruce Watson]

...what is the best way to go about replacing the footage, as I've already cut it up, synced it with audio, and integrated it into my film. Is it best to just go clip by clip, replacing with an After Effects composition? Or is there a way to somehow tell Premiere Pro that all the clips from File A should now pull from File B instead (where File A is the original footage and File B is an exact copy of that footage except the noise has been removed).

This is one of my pet peeves about the Adobe products -- the lack of training available for the workflow between their various products. It's not obvious how to do this, and Adobe (and the third party service providers) aren't very forth coming with manuals, tutorials, or other instruction, as you well know by now.

I'm by no means an expert -- I'm in the same boat as you. I've been researching this very problem for the last couple of weeks. This is what I've learned (rightly or wrongly) from my research and my questions on various forums:

The "normal" way to do this if you have dynamic linking available is to do the "File...Adobe dynamic link...replace with After Effects composition" dance. You can do this one clip at a time, or you can use the selection tool to select two or more clips and replace them all at the same time -- useful if you are going to do the same correction to all the clips.

A second way to do it is to avoid dynamic linking. You can use AE to import a PPro project, make your changes, and render new files. Or export to another PPro project. You might want to use this older (pre dynamic linking) workflow because of what happens when you render an output file (from PPro, "File...Export...Media") from a dynamically linked PPro project. It turns out that when you do this from PPro, when AE gets pulled in to process your noise reduction stuff, AE runs as a service, which means that it will only run on one CPU. If you have AE corrections to every frame, which you do if you are using AE's "reduce grain" filter, the resulting rendering times can be very long no matter how many CPUs or how much memory you have available. To get around this, people render intermediate files from AE -- when you do this AE can go multi-threaded and greatly improve performance. Then you import these files into PPro, and either create a new sequence using these new files, or replace your original files with these newly corrected files. I don't know the exact steps because I have yet to try doing it this way. If CS6 doesn't solve the PPro dynamic link to AE poor rendering performance problems, I guess I won't have any choice though.

A third method might be to use something like Neat Video as a PPro plug-in. This should give you considerably better rendering performance, but IDK for sure.

I'm going to wait until I get the CS6 updates installed on my machine and try it out. If Adobe fixed the dynamic linking problems such that AE can make use of all system resources when rendering as part of a PPro-AE dynamically linked project then I'll just use the first method above and get on with it. Else, I'll probably have to learn the second workflow, and therefore have to start transcoding my capture files to an editing CODEC that makes it easier and faster for PPro, AE, and Media Encoder. Which I should probably be doing anyway despite my desire to keep things as simple as possible. Sigh...