Work directly with native camera formats

[male narrator] Premiere Pro has really spectacular multi-format media support, and I'd just like to take a moment explaining how big a deal this is and why it matters and how easy it is to use.

Essentially, what I'm going to show you is almost a non-workflow.

You can pretty much forget about media formats, codex, compressions— just forget all of that and really just focus on your creative work.

So, I've got a project here, which is already set up with quite a lot of different formats.

I'm just going to show you the import process with one because it's the same for all of them, but you can see here I've got a real mix of media types.

I've got some Sony F55 media, this is— let's have a look— 4k straight off the camera.

I've also got some P2 footage.

I'm going to import the RED in a moment.

This is P2 Panasonic camera footage.

Fantastic.

I've got some GoPro, MP4 files straight from a GoPro camera.

I've got some Canon C300 media.

See, I'm just double-clicking to open these up in the source monitor.

I've also got— interestingly—full support for the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera; here's a clip from that camera.

It's actually just a clapper board, but you can see there it is playing back fine.

And the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, the full size camera, and you can see— again—this plays back fine.

What's interesting about these 2 formats— just to highlight— is if I right-click on one of these and choose reveal in Explorer— this would be revealed in Finder in Mac OS— you'll see—I just turn this into a list view— this is actually a DNG image sequence, just lots and lots and lots of still frames.

And Premiere Pro knows when you import these using the media browser, which I am going to show you in a moment, not to give you a whole load of still images, but instead to give you one clip.

Down here as well, I've got some ARRI AMIRA footage, and the support for these formats is really advanced.

The AMIRA footage is a beautiful example.

This is the BMW footage, shot with the AMIRA camera that I got from IZ-ON Media.

So many thanks to IZ-ON Media for this beautiful content.

What's interesting about the AMIRA camera is that it can embed a look-up table file— a LUT—in with the media at the time that you're filming.

So with this clip open in the source monitor, if I go to the effects control panel, here is a Lumetri effect with an AMIRA LUT already applied.

In fact, if I pull this effect control panel over a little, so you can see the original clip and the effect controls, I can turn this effect off and on, and you can see the effect this has.

That's a LUT that was actually set up by the camera operators on location and Premiere Pro is applying it as a Master Clip effect that you'll see reflected in the timeline.

So I can say this again and again and again, but it's pretty much the same statement, doesn't really matter what your media is, it's just going to play back in Premiere Pro.

But let's take a look at the import process.

I've got a bin set up here ready to import some RED media.

I've just named it, and I'm going to double-click to open this up.

So here it is, and if I just go to my window menu and choose media browser— well, it's behind this panel— so let's pull this to one side, I can now browse inside my hard drive directory.

And if I go into my media directories, I've got lots and lots of different kinds of media, and here if I just pull over a little bit— there we go—R3D 6K.

Now this is actually 6K media from the new Epic Dragon Sensor from RED.

Very, very high resolution files, and you'll notice there's a project set up for these clips— they've been ingested already.

Interestingly, if i double-click on this project file, I can browse inside it— let me resize it little bit.

You can see, I can import a sequence if I want, I can even browse inside bins and take clips that have been pre-organized for me.

But, I'm going to go directly into this folder that has the RED files, and there they are.

It takes a moment to update; they're really big files, but if I just hover the mouse over the thumbnail here, you see I get this preview updating just like clips in the bin.

And now, if I want to import this media— and the workflow I'm going to show you now is the same for pretty much everything— if I want to import this, I can select a clip, press control-A, or command-A on Mac OS, and just drag and drop into the bin.

And we're done; and you can see how fast that process is, and the reason it's so fast is that there is no transcoding, there's no conversion, there's no adaptation of the media.

This is just creating shortcuts to those original files on the hard drive.

Now, I'm just going to close this bin, and if I go back to my project panel, I can expand it here.

There's a few different ways of accessing the bins.

And you can see, if I double-click on this, this is huge, this is 18 megapixels per frame— absolutely enormous—but you can see how responsive this is, and I'm just playing back on a laptop with a solid state drive attached by USB 3.0.

And even on this laptop, if I switch down to maybe quarter resolution, let's see if this will play back.

I'm pressing the space bar, pretty much fine.

And the reason that I get this wonderful playback support, is that Premiere Pro can now debayer footage from RED cameras, and actually from the Blackmagic Cinema Cameras, using the GPU.

So we're getting acceleration from the GPU not just for thing like special effects, but also actually for the debayering for the playback of the original media.

I mentioned a moment ago, that if you go to the media browser— so here's my media browser— and you look at content like that Blackmagic Cinema media, which we saw a moment ago is just a lot of frames, but if I go in here and take a look at one of the shots you'll notice that I don't get lots of frames, I get a clip.

This is a 2 second, 21 frame shot.

I can double-click, and open it up, and I see this as video, because that's exactly how it was intended.

Now as an editor, this means I can just forget about what the original media is.

As long as I use the media browser to access it, Premiere Pro's just going to take care of it for me.

Coincidentally as well, if I go back to my project— in fact here is my RED footage— if I right-click on this media and choose source settings, I get this wonderful, detailed, debayer control panel where I can modify the interpretation of that raw media in a way that—actually— has no impact on playback performance.

You can begin to make adjustments here and take the settings from camera, you can make adjustments— retrospectively if you like— and see them update in your sequences in Premiere Pro.

It's very powerful access to the interpretation of the media.

Of course, another important aspect of the way Premiere Pro handles multiple media types, multiple formats, multiple resolutions, is that again, it just takes care of it.

Here, I've got my F55 sequence and if I take my RED 6K footage, and put it into this sequence, let's just take a few of these clips.

I'm going to drag and drop them in, you'll notice that—again— Premiere Pro just pretty much takes care of it.

Now, my RED footage is higher resolution than the F55 footage; the F55 is a 4k camera, this is 6K RED.

I'm just going to zoom in a little bit with the plus key on my keyboard, so you can see these RED clips.

I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to choose scale to frame size.

Now, scale to frame size will— in a sense—it kind of rasterizes the media.

If I were to zoom back in again, you see I'm getting the whole image fitting inside my sequence frame.

But if I were to zoom in, I'd get some softening because I've—kind of—reset the image resolution to match the sequence.

So I'm going to undo that, I'm going to press control-Z or command-Z to undo.

And this time instead, I'm going to right-click and choose set to frame size.

Now, it looks like the same result, but have a look at this.

If I go to my effects control panel and expand motion, you'll notice that the scale setting has been changed has been changed to 66.7 percent.

What Premiere Pro has done is kept the original media at the original resolution, but scaled it down using the motion controls in the effect controls panel.

I can now scale back up if I want, and I can pan the scan around inside the image, and I'm not going to lose any of those original pixels of my content.

So it's very easy for you to mix and match media, and why don't we do that here just to demonstrate.

Here's some P2 footage; I'm just going to shift-select a bunch of this—that's fine.

Let's zoom out a little bit.

Let's take some of that C300—fantastic.

Let's pull that in as well.

And you can see I'm really not paying any attention to the media type.

You do have to be careful to make sure that you choose the correct settings for your sequence to begin with because—of course— Premiere Pro will conform anything you put into a sequence to the sequence settings.

So want you don't want to do is create a standard definition sequence in the beginning, and then have all of your media down-rezzed to standard def when you have a lot of very high resolution media available to begin with.

So here we go again; I've got all this media mixed and matched.

I'll just zoom out a little bit on the timeline, and you can see how responsive this is; I can scrub through this really fast, I can play it back, and I can pretty much put out of mind what my original media is.

I can just focus on telling the story.

And I suppose the last thing to say about this is— of course—output so we can ingest multiple formats, we can play back multiple formats on the timeline, and if I go to file and choose export and media.

I can output to low video format too.

We now have support for AS-11, so if you're working in broadcast television, you can produce AS-11 content packages and DCP content packages.

So if you are an Indie filmmaker, and you're producing content for film festivals, and increasingly festivals are asking for a DCP delivery, you can do that really easily from Premiere Pro.

Choose the wrap to DCP option in the format menu— it's going to be 2k— and then choose the video dimensions and you're pretty much ready to go.

You can export an output; the options are really simple.

You can get an extended plug-in from the company that produced this technology, QuVIS, and you get all of the advanced detail controls too.

But I would say for most Indies—especially— you probably just want it to work, and that's exactly what this will do for you.

So that's an overview of multi-format editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.