HD editing in Premiere Pro

In the days of Premiere Pro CS3 Adobe was behind most companies in supporting new formats.  With CS5 they generally support more formats than everyone else.  They also support them "natively" - i.e. you can put the clips straight on the timeline without converting them.

Here you can see the sequence settings for Premiere Pro.  You can have different types of sequences in the same project, so NTSC PAL, standard definition, high definition all in the same project.  We also have some special Matrox presets in the list as the screen shot was taken from a computer with a Matrox MX02 installed.  The MX02 is a way of both capturing footage and watching the edit on a proper video monitor, rather than just on the computer screen, so you can properly judge colour correction and focus of your shots.

Click here for more information on the Matrox MX02.

Mix and Match on the timeline

Premiere has always been able to mix different formats on the timeline and CS5.5 is no exception.  You can take any of the formats Premiere Pro will load and drop them onto any timeline.  If they are bigger than the timeline (for example you are editing HD footage on an SD timeline) Premiere will let you pan and scan the footage and maintain the quality as you do so - great for adding a fake pan to an HD shot, or reframing and image.  It does this in realtime using the Mercury Playback Engine.   With CS5.5 mixed frame rates and field order changes are also handled in realtime - so just throw it on the timeline and play!

The Media Browser

With CS4 Adobe introduced a new panel called the Media Browser. This allows you to look through footage either on your hard drive or on the card on which your camera films and select the actual video clips for import into the program. If you ever look at the folders of information on an XDCam or DVCPro card you will see several folder with files in different places - the audio maybe divorced from the video and there will be other folders with XML information files in and other data. With all these folder which bit is the actual clip? The Media Browser will look at all of this and just show you the clips.  Here we can see the results of looking at a folder from a P2 card.  With P2 you get a thumbnail of the media concerned.  With other formats you do not.

How does Premiere handle the different HD footage?

AVCHD

AVCHD is a highly compressed form of video - great for filming but can be a pain to edit. Premiere Pro will load the footage natively - ie as it came off the camera.  As long as you have a nice up to date computer, like, for example an one with an i7 processor, Premiere can also happily edit the footage at full quality.  With the right graphic card powering the Mercury Playback Engine we can even fly 4-5 layers of native AVCHD around the screen in realtime.  

Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the best programs at handling native AVCHD footage - the other being Grass Valley EDIUS, which works as well as Premiere, possibly with a slight edge over how slick it works with this footage. Sony Vegas can also take native footage but cannot play it back as well or do as many layers as Premiere Pro. Avid Media Composer 5.5 and Apple Final Cut Pro have to convert the footage when loading and cannot cope with some formats like 1080 50P.

If you do not have the latest computer then you could convert the footage into a different, easier-to-use format instead.  Premiere Pro does not come with what is commonly called an "intermediate codec" although if you can add one.   Converting will take time and the footage will take up to 10 times the amount of space on the computer but will make AVCHD usable on an older computer.  However a much better idea is simply to buy a new computer because it will save a huge amount of time converting footage, as well as save a lot of space.  The overall performance of Premiere Pro will also benefit from having a nice shinny new computer with decent processor.

In to which formats could I could I convert my footage?

CineForm

If you just have Premiere software then CineForm is the most obvious. CineForm footage will look as good as the original, wont take up too much space and is very easy to edit.  There are a variety of different CineForm bundles which start at about £100. Neoscene can handle sizes up to 1920 x 1080 but all conversion has to be done via the Adobe Media Encoder which is slow - 1 minute takes about 2 minutes on a good system.  Neo handles the same sizes and comes with CineForm's conversion program which can remake footage faster than realtime.

For more information on CineFormclick here

Black Magic MJPEG

If you buy a Black Magic card you also get Black Magic's MJPEG codec  which is a possible "intermediate" format.  This codec is Ok and is a variation of the same kind of codec we used to edit video on the very first capture cards.  Sometimes we have noticed artefacts (video noise caused by the compression not being so good) which means that when changed the footage is not quite the same as the original.  You may want to consider using CineForm with a Black Magic card as a better intermediate.

Click here to read more about Black Magic cards.

Matrox

Matrox have their own format, called Matrox I-Frame MPEG.  It is similar to the kind of compression that is used on DVDs and in HDV cameras, but instead of saving the changes between frames like normal MPEG it saves each frame as a complete frame.  This makes it very easy to edit.   This is a great format to use as an intermediate.  You will get this format added to your system by buying one of Matrox MX02 range of devices.

Click here to read more about Matrox cards.

HDV

There are two main formats of HDV - 720P as used by JVC and 1080i as used mainly by Sony and Cannon. Premiere can edit both natively.  When capturing HDV Premiere Pro does not show the picture on the computer screen as it captures - it will show the picture before you press the capture button but then the screen changes to a graphic which basically says "watch the incoming picture on the camera"  With CS5 Premiere Pro can also do scene detection on HDV footage - this is where it will notice every time you paused the camera when filming and break the incoming footage up into different clips for each pause.  This was not in previous versions of Adobe Premiere Pro.

You can also load HDV which has been saved onto compact flash or other external devices.  Simply copy the footage off the card onto the computer, and then load into Premiere Pro via the Media Browser.

Matrox & HDV

Matrox have been supplying cards for enhancing Premiere Pro for many years and with old cards like the RT.X2 and Axio they would capture HDV into their own format, rather than the way Adobe would capture.  With these older versions of Premiere this meant better performance with a Matrox card, but could be a pain if you ever sent the footage to someone else to view as they could not view the special Matrox format.  With CS5, because both Premiere Pro and computers have got better, Matrox no longer do this and capture footage the "Adobe way". This is not important for anyone who has never used Premiere Pro and a Matrox card, but if you have and are upgrading you may wonder why it is different.  In CS5 with a Matrox card HDV will still performa as well as it always did, but it is saved in the more standard MPEG files rather than Matrox ones.  The good news is that if you have old fashioned Matrox HDV file you want to load into Premiere Pro CS5.5 then you can still do so as long as you have a Matrox card installed (such as an MX02)

DVCPro HD

DVCPRO HD is Panasonic's HD format and is stored on P2 cards. Premiere now handles native DVCProHD very well, loading through the media browser with all the extra metadata you can store on the cards and with the ability to write back to P2 cards. Add a Black Magic or MX02 card so you can see the footage on an HD screen while editing.

Premiere Pro can also write back to the P2 cards for export.

XDCam and XDCam-EX

Premiere handles XDCam and XDCam-EX natively, again all loaded via Media Browser. You cannot write back to XDCam media as you can with some other programs, however, but editing is fine. When loading large projects with lots of MPEG based clips like XDCam  older version of Premiere Pro (CS3 for example) can take quite a long time to load the project with some customers reporting that a project would take 20 minutes to load! 

This is not the case with CS5.5.  First of all the 64bitness of the program means it has a lot more memory to play with so can handle a lot of MPEG based media.  Secondly a lot of work has been done by Adobe Engineers to load projects quickly - now Premiere will open a project, load the media with which you are editing currently and then load the remaining clips in the background as you work.  Net result: faster opening of projects and much better handling of big, complex projects with lots of compressed HD footage.

AVC-Intra

This new Panasonic format has been supported by Premiere Pro since CS4, and works really well. Again load the footage via the Media Browser.

RED camera support

Premiere now has some of the best RED footage support as it will load clips natively in all the various resolutions.  Since RED footage can be greater than HD quality it can be very hard work.  We tested some 3072x1728 footage on our standard i7 test system and the computer would only play the footage at half resolution.  When we tested on a dual processor Xeon system performance was better and if editing RED footage we would recommend getting the extra power of a Xeon based system, preferably with two 6 core Xeons installed, to do so.

Premiere has some nice settings built-in designed to help RED footage play back on your computer - you can drop the playback resolution of the program window for example to get decent performance.

Nearly all the devices that give a video output from Premiere Pro only work in HD resolutions a device such as the Matrox MX02 may not be the best thing to add if editing RED footage.  However you can always feed a decent LCD monitor from the second head of your graphic card to see the RED footage at full quality.  If you get the right Quadro graphic card, equipped with a DISPLAY PORT connection you can output a proper 10bit colour display on to the right kind of output screen - such as an HP Dreamcolour display.

Canon XF footage

This new Canon format has garnered a lot of interest and people like the BBC have even accepted it as a format suitable for filming HD for broadcast (they would not accept AVCHD or HDV for example).  It films in 4:2:2 colour space into MPEG files saved onto Compact Flash cards.

This new format is not handled by the MEDIA BROWSER as yet but Premiere Pro will happily load the footage - just drag it into the project like any other footage and it will work perfectly.

DSLR & MP4 footage

A lot of still cameras will take video these days - some will film full HD quality some film at different rates.  These are generally saved in a MOV file or MP4 file and internally stored in H264 video.

Premiere will take pretty much all of these types of footage and even has presets for DSLR video.