Free AVCHD to Mov FTW

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adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe media encoder, adobe premiere pro cc, Apple, audio, AVCHD, creative cloud, geekery

Where’s Poochie?

I recently experienced a shock when I discovered one of the clips in my Premiere Pro project was missing ~90% of its audio. This was a clip I had shot myself, so I knew the audio had been recorded properly. But for some reason, a few minutes into the clip, it just disappeared. This is a camera, SDHC card, and transcoding workflow I have used 100’s of times; I have never had a problem like this.

Panicked googling led nowhere, largely because the search results were dominated by an old bug in Premiere CS6 that refused to import audio from any AVCHD footage ever. (I used to use Apple Compressor to import my AVCHD footage before moving it over to Premiere Pro for exactly this reason.)

I tried opening the card in MPEG Streamclip, but for all its Swiss Army-like beauty, MPEG Streamclip won’t read AVCHD files. Then on a whim I tried VLC, and sure enough, VLC could read it. And the audio was all there. But VLC is just a player, not a transcoder…

Still, I was much relieved knowing the audio was there; now it was just a matter of getting to it. I long ago ditched Final Cut Studio, so Compressor is no longer on my machine. And with MPEG Streamclip dead in the water, I had to begin looking for alternatives.

Free AVCHD to Mov

And that’s when I came across Free AVCHD to Mov on the App Store. I hate installing junk I don’t trust – especially ad-supported junk – but I needed a solution. So I gave it a shot, and it performed beautifully. With a simple interface that I probably could have figured out if I didn’t happen to be a professional editor, it grabbed the clip and transcoded it to ProRes 422LT with perfect audio.

I still don’t know what caused Adobe Media Encoder to choke on that file – all the other files from the same card shot on the same day were fine. (I have a theory about it being a bug triggered by the fact that the SD card was previously nearly 100% full, before being erased for this project – but I haven’t found anyone else to corroborate it.)

In any case, consider this my love letter to Free AVCHD to Mov. Thanks, bro!

Use NeoFinder to Reclaim Hard Drive Space

Tags

backup, editing, freelance, osx

Duplicates Found

I’ve written about NeoFinder before. It’s a great tool to keep tabs on files across multiple external hard drives. (Basically, it creates a searchable database of every file on each of your drives, which you can then quickly search even when those drives are not plugged in.)

Ok, so that’s great. Easily worth the cost of a license. But what’s even better is the built-in “Find Dupes” feature. Once you’ve cataloged all your drives, just hit the Find Dupes button and it will let you know what projects or files are living on multiple drives.

I cleared over 100 GB in just a couple minutes when it reminded me that I had started a recent project on one drive and then moved it to a portable drive to finish it. (And it found quite a bit more than that, which I’ll deal with when I have a bit more time.)

Check out NeoFinder if you haven’t already. Really – I’m totally vouching over here. Great stuff.

OS X Yosemite and Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

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adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe premiere pro cc, Apple, creative cloud, Creative Cloud applications, osx, yosemite

When Adobe released its 2014 Creative Cloud applications earlier this year, I put off upgrading due to the usual concerns of “I am not your guinea pig.” But with Apple’s release of Yosemite this week, I decided it was time.

OS X Yosemite

I installed Yosemite this morning, and promptly spent an hour on Apple Maps doing 3D flyovers of various cities. (I gather this feature has been available on Mavericks for a while, but since I never use Apple Maps, I only found it when it got added back to my dock.)

After that I had to download and install an update to TotalFinder (my older version was broken on Yosemite, and I simply cannot be without it for a moment). Although the update is listed as beta, it seems fine so far.

I’ll spare you the laundry list of changes (if laundry lists are your thing, check out Apple’s product page and Lifehacker’s Top Ten Hidden Features), but I do like the changes to Spotlight, and why on Earth it took them this long to make the Full Screen button actually make an app go full screen, I’ll never understand.

Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

Next I installed Premiere Pro 2014, and opened up a recent project to putz around. I immediately had to download new versions of and reinstall my plugins (and in one case buy an upgrade) to get everything to work properly. But once that was done, smooth sailing.

Of course the previous version of Premiere sits alongside 2014, so I was able to go back into my old project when I needed to gather some details to recreate one of those upgraded plugin effects.

All told, it has so far been relatively painless. I did have one crash the first time I opened Premiere, but I’ve closed and reopened it many times since then and it hasn’t repeated. (I suspect it was related to one of the outdated plugins sitting in the timeline.) Editing the project to recreate the various plugin effects exposed no problems, and an export through Media Encoder 2014 worked perfectly.

In sum, this Late 2013 iMac seems to be running both Yosemite and Premiere 2014 without a hitch. I’ll install the rest of CC 2014 in the coming days and update this post; I’ll do the same upgrades on my Mid 2009 MBP soon and post those results separately.

Adobe Premiere Pro / Audition Roundtrip Tutorial

Tags

adobe, adobe premiere pro cc, audio, audition, creative cloud, editing

I created this tutorial for anyone who needs an overview of working with audio in Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition. It includes a basic roundtrip, splitting a stereo track into mono tracks, normalizing speech with the Speech Volume Leveler, and EQ’ing for voice.

A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film

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editing, film, movies

A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film

Didn’t mean to post two of these in a row, but this guy’s videos are pretty great. This one is about the evolving visual representation of the internet/technology in film.

I first noticed the on-screen texting thing earlier this year in Chef (2014). I guess I need to get out more.

What David Fincher Doesn’t Do

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editing, film, movies

What David Fincher Doesn’t Do

This video beautifully articulates all the reasons I love David Fincher. Mind you, I didn’t realize these were the reasons before I watched it – but as I watched I just keep thinking, “yep, yep, that’s right, yep, love that, yep, ooohhhhh THAT’s why….” Etcetera.

A Year with Adobe Creative Cloud

I recently celebrated my one-year anniversary with Adobe Creative Cloud. This might seem odd, as my last Adobe-related blog post was about not wanting to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud. But while I had my concerns, I was already fully converted from FCP7 to Premiere Pro CS6, and I wasn’t about to go back. So instead, I went forward.

In a word, my first year with Adobe Creative Cloud has been uneventful. Which is good. I’ve had a few crashes, but fewer than with any other NLE I have used. It’s never refused to start because of network issues (as some feared). Basically, it’s worked, and worked well.

I have, for the most part, kept current on incremental updates (although I never update in the middle of a project). I’ve never had anything break or witnessed other untoward behavior after an update.  And while I have enjoyed knowing that I am always on the latest and greatest, I honestly can’t think of a single new feature in the last year that I’ve used. I was looking forward to audio scrubbing without pitch-shifting in the in the new 2014 update, but…

…due to reports of crashing, lost work and general nastiness, I have not yet updated to CC 2014 (released just a few weeks ago). Once they release the first major patch, I’ll give it another look-see. But until then, my audio scrubs are all chipmunks, yo.

Although I find the integration of Premiere Pro with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite to be nice, I find that I actually need to use the other programs less. Indeed, I just recently used UltraKey (in PPro) to pull a temporary green screen key while I worked on a project, with the intent of using KeyLight in After Effects to pull the final key when ready. But UltraKey did such a great job, I was happy with those results and didn’t even need to bother with AE. Likewise, with FCP7, I was firmly in the habit of creating all titles in Photoshop and importing into FCP7; but the titler in PPro is powerful enough that I find myself using Photoshop less and less. And of course, it’s much more convenient.

The exception here is Adobe Soundtrack, which I now use on every project. It started out just as a way to tackle major audio problems; but exporting an entire sequence to Soundtrack is so quick and clean, and the experience of using it is so simple and powerful, I gradually used it more and more until it became a standard part of my workflow.

Honestly, my biggest problem with Premiere Pro CC is more of an annoyance than a problem: most of the time – the longer I have it open the more likely this becomes – when I shut down PPro, it crashes. It doesn’t lose any work, and it (usually) doesn’t crash while I’m actually using it. But when I finish up for the night, save the project and hit Command-Q, the Premiere process starts pegging my CPU, and I have to force quit. Almost every time. Unless it’s only been open for half an hour. Again, nothing bad has ever come of this – it’s just really annoying. And it is particularly galling given that a) I keep Adobe up-to-date, b) I keep OS X up-to-date, and c) this machine is a beast. It’s got 8 freaking cores and 32 GB of RAM – what more does Premiere want from me?

Anyway, all in all, I’m happy with CC. For now. I still don’t know exactly what happens if I ever want to move away from it, but I don’t think it would be too painful. I could keep the subscription live for a few months while I transition, and even after canceling it, I figure I could always reactivate it for a month here and there if I ever needed to get back into an old project.

Right? I hope? Yes? Please tell me I’m right. I really don’t want all my work hijacked when the next big thing comes around….

Adobe’s Creative Cloud has 1 Huge Flaw

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adobe premiere pro cc

NOTE: This article was originally posted 6/27/2013.

If Adobe’s new Creative Cloud offering has done nothing else, it has generated LOTS of discussion. There are strong opinions both for and against, and many compelling arguments made by each camp.

But at the end of the day, there is one major concern I can’t seem to shake. Yes, I am fine with the idea of paying in monthly installments instead of all at once; yes, I like the idea of being always up-to-date with the latest versions; and no, I’m not worried that Adobe will suddenly stop innovating because they have everyone locked into 12 month contracts.

What does concern me, though, is what happens if (when) I one day stop paying. Let’s say I move all of my clients over to Adobe Premiere Pro. I spend the next three years doing all my client work in Premiere Pro, and everyone is happy. But then one day, for some reason or another, I decide there’s a better option out there. Maybe Apple fixes Final Cut and releases an upgrade that trumps everything Adobe is doing; maybe Adobe pulls an Apple and wrecks their own software; maybe another company that doesn’t even exist yet releases a game-changing product that works better than everything out there. Whatever the reason, I now want to leave Premiere Pro, so I cancel my subscription, stop paying my monthly fee and invest in something else.

Poof.

Just like that, in an instant, I lose access to three years of work. All my clients’ projects, everything I’ve worked on in three years is gone because Premiere Pro stops working. It’s not like I can simply choose not to upgrade, move to another platform, but keep the old version around in case I need it (hello, Apple!). In the Creative Cloud world, my old version stops working, and I lose access to all my projects. A client wants a quick update to a video from last year? Nope. I want to build a new title sequence based on one I already made? Gone. I want to update my reel with my most recent work? Fail.

I love Adobe Premiere Pro. I am so happy I made the switch from Final Cut Pro 7 to Premiere Pro CS6. But this single concern keeps me from moving to Creative Cloud. I don’t know how this will eventually resolve itself, but I hear Lightworks is doing good things….

Simple, Efficient Backup for Creatives

Tags

backup, editing, freelance, mac, organization, tech

NOTE: This article was originally posted 8/11/2013.

Backing up our data is important. We all know that. But particularly for creative professionals, our data is our livelihood. Lose one project due to hard drive failure, and your reputation is ruined with that client forever. And yet, so frequently I find that freelancers and even small companies don’t maintain adequate (if any) backups. Why?

Expense is always an issue, but with today’s hard drive prices, it’s no excuse for risking your client’s work and your reputation. If the confusion inherent in the backup landscape is your excuse, then I’m here to help. You don’t need a RAID array or a NAS or a SAN or a data locker to take basic precautions for data redundancy. Below is a simple, effective backup strategy I developed for a small production company I used to work for, and which I implement now in my own freelance practice.

Step 1 – The Archive
This is where your projects go to die. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Let’s say they “retire.” Because you never know when a client will want an update to something you produced for them two years ago, or if you’ll want to go back and grab an old After Effects animation to use as a template in a new project. The Archive is where projects live after you think you’re done with them.

The Archive is simple. For every hard drive you need to keep archived material, you buy two. So if you have 1 TB worth of old projects, you buy two 2 TB drives. You put all your projects on one of them (leaving room to grow), and then you mirror it to the second. Whether you need one, two, or twenty drives, you keep them all mirrored, all the time. There’s no mismatching – each hard drive has an exact mirror. There’s no throwing projects just anywhere and then trying to remember to back them up somewhere else later, when you get a chance, and THEN trying to remember where on Earth either of those copies went. Projects enter The Archive chronologically, so when you need something you just need to remember approximately when you finished it, and then find that drive.

Step 2 – The Working Drive
Next, for active projects, you get a portable drive and a place to back it up, and do the same thing. If you’re a freelancer, that’s pretty much it. If you’re a company with multiple editors, you give each editor a personal portable Working Drive and a place to back it up. They keep all their active projects on that drive, and they keep it with them for those inevitable times when a client needs something unexpected over the weekend.

If you’re a freelancer, it works in the other direction – your Working Drive is always available to bring to a client’s location when necessary, and always has your current work on it. You can just buy two identical portable drives, but a cheaper solution is to back it up to another desktop drive. I use Time Machine to back up my portable to my Time Machine backup drive along with all my system files.

Step 3 – The System
Now we have a simple, elegant backup solution. Keep all current work on your portable Working Drive, and keep that drive either mirrored or backed up to a desktop drive. When you close the books on a given project, move that project to The Archive, make sure that it’s mirrored, then remove it from your Working Drive to reclaim the space for your next project.

You can perform the mirror backups manually, or you can use software to automate the process. If you’re on a Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner is a free program that will keep two drives matched, always updating one to match the other whenever changes are made. (If you’re using a PC, then you probably have 20 different options, none of which actually work any better than CCC.)

Bonus Level – Off-site Backup
If you’re serious about backup, you need to also think about off-site backup. Keeping all your drives mirrored protects you in case of hard drive failure, but in case of fire/flood/theft/volcano, you’re still hosed. So if you want to take that extra step, it’s built into the system: just take those mirrors and keep them somewhere else. If you’re a freelancer, keep them at a friend’s or family member’s house, or store them in a bank safe deposit box. If you’re a small company, send the mirrors home with some trusted employees. You’ll need to retrieve them when it’s time to update the mirror, but c’est la vie, amirite?

Agitator Level – But what about the cloud?
If you’ve got Verizon FiOS or an OC-3 connection, by all means, just dump it all to the cloud and forget everything I said. Crashplan has some reasonably priced plans and comes highly recommended by the interwebs. But for the rest of us, HD video is far too massive to realistically back up to the cloud. It would take days of a constant streaming upload to backup just a few hours of footage. So please stop showing off; if we had FiOS in our area, we wouldn’t rub your nose in it.