None destructive raw workflow for Premiere using After Effects and Dynamic Link.

Started by noisyboy, June 01, 2013, 05:47:00 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

noisyboy

I've seen a few questions here and there regarding raw workflows inside of Premiere Pro but as most of us know, you can't import DNG sequences directly into Premiere. However, if you have Master Collection, Creative Cloud or Production Premium, you can use the Dynamic Link Feature greatly to your advantage so you can edit and make changes seamlessly without having to finalize or render anything 'til the end of your cut.

First off you will need to create proxies of all of your raw sequences. The way I do this is by using Rawanizer (BIG shout out to marten for this and a1ex for raw2dng). The beauty of Rawanizer is you dump all of your raw files in a folder, select that folder in Rawanizer and it will automatically batch convert all of your raw files to DNG sequences, each inside of there own folder and as an added bonus it also creates easily editable proxy files in a variety of flavours so you can cut your footage with ease. It's a very straight forward piece of software but if you need further help just go here.

Basically all you need to do is create your premiere project and import al of your raw proxies ready for your edit. What I then do is create a cut or even a rough cut using those proxy files.

Once you are happy with the edit, highlight everything on the timeline and duplicate it (hold Alt while dragging) above the sequence you already have (so you see two copies of each clip, one above another. Then rename the original video tracks "proxies" and the tracks with the new copies as "raw" just to keep track of what's what.

The idea here is that we are gonna replace each proxy with a raw dng sequence while at the same time not losing the proxies just incase we have to go back in a edit some more as it'll be less processor intensive us editing the proxy files.

So, you can then right click your first copied clip in the timeline and select "Replace with After Effects Composition".

This will then automatically open After Effects and create a new Comp for that clip after asking you where you would like to save the project (Pro tip: I like to keep everything for a project in one folder for archiving - this means you wont have problems with it not knowing where assets are if you offload the project at a later date).

Inside of After Effects you can then double click the project browser and browse to the folder that contains the dng sequence that relates to that particular clip. Select the first dng file, check the "raw sequence" checkbox a the bottom and import the sequence.

You will then be presented with Adobe Camera Raw and you can do your whatever corrections you wish to do and then then click done. One thing to bare in mind here to those who aren't too familiar with AE, it has a habit of importing sequences at 30fps so what you need to do is right click the sequence in the project browser, select Interpret Footage and then type your desired frame rate into "Assume this frame rate".

Then drag the DNG sequence into the Comp which contains the proxy for the clip you chose to replace inside of AE. This needs to go on the top layer but to be honest, it's not the end of the world even if you delete the proxy from this comp as we still have a backup inside of Premiere.

Then all you have to do is switch back to Premiere and you will see the clip has been updated with your raw sequence and has replaced the proxy file. Hooray!

Now! What I like to do here is select both the raw clip and the original proxy clip we still have sitting beneath it at the same time and right click -> group. That means that now if we want to rearrange anything we can easily click on one clip and it automatically selects both so you can drag them around or shorten/lengthen them together.

Now all is left to do is do the same for the rest of your timeline and then "mute" the track (with the little eye icon) which has your proxy on inside of premiere and hit the enter key which will render previews of all of your raw clips so you can easily play them back and edit them. If you have raw footage mixed with h.264 footage and you don't want to disable the whole track then you can disable individual clips by simply right clicking them and selecting disable.

The beauty of this workflow is that you can quickly make further adjustments to your raw sequences with ACR, simply by switching back to AE, selecting the relevant comp for that clip and then doing this inside of After Effects which will also allow you to correct any frame in the dng sequence, not just the first (shouts to my fellow Modizzles Audionut and Squig for helping me figure this part out).

Then if you need to go back into premiere and do any real intensive edits, you can always disable the raw clips and enable the proxies and as long as you move the clips together, you can then switch back to raw when you are happy.

So there you go. As is said - there are many ways to skin a cat but this is my way and I'm happy with it. If I refine this further then I shall update accordingly and if anyone has any questions or suggestions then post them up in here.

My final thought on this is yes it isn't the quickest most instantaneous way to edit but the work you put in is only in the setup, after that you have a clean, quick workflow with maximum flexibility and to top it off you are already linked to AE so you can start your mastering as soon as you lock your cut. That and raw workflows of any format are not quick and easy. If you want quick and easy workflows I'm afraid raw isn't the way to go but in my opinion it's worth the extra work.

Oh and a final-final thought (promise), keep everything organized inside of Prem and AE. Rename files and create relevantly named folders for proxies, comps and dng's to all live in for each shot. This will make your life a lot easier.

Hope this helps a few of you out!

Kraig  8)

noisyboy

Note to my fellow Mods: I didn't see another thread that has this as a suggestion but if you know of one then let me know and I'll move/merge/remove accordingly.
Peace ;)

Africashot

Thanks for laying this out, there are some really nice tips there and although I was generally familiar with most of it I actually learned quite a bit from your explanation.
I am just finishing a (my first) RAW project and decided to turn my usual h.264 workflow upside down by grading first in ACR, then up scaling and adding grain in AE and render it into cineform clips.
I shot the stuff for a day on Tuesday and today is Saturday and I am just finishing rendering the cineform clips... so not the ideal way of doing things if you are in a hurry, I look forward to editing the cineform clips though, they edit really fast and nicely in Premiere and since essentially all the grading is done I won't have to apply tons of effects making this part a bit easier at least.
Thanks again for all the work you guys are doing! 
ML 5D2 & T3i

noisyboy

Quote from: Africashot on June 01, 2013, 06:02:09 PM
Thanks for laying this out, there are some really nice tips there and although I was generally familiar with most of it I actually learned quite a bit from your explanation.

You are very welcome my friend :)

Yeah - the way you have done it sounds good too! Cineform was a large part of my workflow for a very long time before the days of Mercury Playback engine and I still find a great deal of use for it too.

There certainly is no wrong way of doing this, it all depends on how you work I guess. The logic behind my workflow is simply to be able to easily make changes at any point throughout post without having to do a huge round trip :) Also you have all the added benefits and power of working inside of AE while editing inside of an NLE. Plus you can always render any of them our as Cineform, right click your proxy and "Replace Footage" to easily use the Cineform files inside of the sequence too so that they run along side of the DNG sequences.

Anyway - sorry if this is patronizing, I'm sure you get most of this already... just worth discussing for the sake of others 8)

Oedipax

Just one small suggestion/addition, in After Effects if you go to Preferences/Import you can set the default framerate for image sequences to 23.976 (or 25 etc) so you don't have to interpret clips each time.

noisyboy

Quote from: Oedipax on June 02, 2013, 07:34:18 AM
Just one small suggestion/addition, in After Effects if you go to Preferences/Import you can set the default framerate for image sequences to 23.976 (or 25 etc) so you don't have to interpret clips each time.

Ahh pro tip there sir ;) Thanks for that! Will add to the guide.

iunknown

noisyboy,
How are you getting the dng's to line up with the cut proxy files?  For example, I have a video file and I cut it in half, delete the first half, and then open the second half in after effects.  When I import the dng's, it imports the first frame, which doesn't match the second half of the video. 

So should editing be the last step?  Or is there some way to get the correct dng's to load on a clipped video? (which would be nice because you wouldn't load footage you don't need.)

dandeliondandy

iunknown,
What I do with this method, which has worked very well (thanks noisyboy!), is once I have the doubled edits in premiere I select the top track, send those to after effects and then once after effects opens all the proxies I simply select each clip and replace it with the DNG sequence. That way all the edits are still there, but now in Premiere I have identical tracks, one is RAW and one is proxy.

Just be careful if you're using something that creates proxies that are half the size of the final video. you'll need to make sure your premiere sequence is the correct larger resolution.

noisyboy

Quote from: iunknown on June 13, 2013, 12:24:40 AM
noisyboy,
How are you getting the dng's to line up with the cut proxy files?  For example, I have a video file and I cut it in half, delete the first half, and then open the second half in after effects.  When I import the dng's, it imports the first frame, which doesn't match the second half of the video. 

So should editing be the last step?  Or is there some way to get the correct dng's to load on a clipped video? (which would be nice because you wouldn't load footage you don't need.)

It's probably because AE is importing your DNG sequence at the wrong frame rate (default is 30fps bu this can be changed in preferences). What you can do is right click the dng sequence in AE project browser, select interpret footage, then type the correct frame rate into "assume this frame rate".

8)

pinger007

This is a phenomenal workflow!  Thanks for bringing it up. 

Instead of creating after effects compositions for each shot, you could expedite the process by creating a nested sequence in Premiere (Premiere recognizes it as a single clip) and then replacing it with an after effects composition.  When you open it up in After Effects, there you will see all or your edits and you can replace them with the RAW dngs!  I really like this workflow!  Feels old school.  :)
all you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you

chmee

Sorry to say that, this workflow is consuming too much time - roundtrippin' with Resolve is workin' so i see no better/faster way to cut your video with proxies (in premiere, fcp or avid) and grading and finishing after that in resolve with original files.

regards chmee
[size=2]phreekz * blog * twitter[/size]

dlrpgmsvc

Everyone grades in acr. I prefer using speed grade: it is part of the master suite but nobody seems to take advantage of it. All speak about acr or davinci resolve like there is nothing else. But speed grade is nothing less than davinci, it eats less resources (gpu ram is always not enough) and is windows style at least (try to understand how to import a clip in davinci the first time and how to close a dialog... ahah!). Just my hints contribution...
If you think it's impossible, you have lost beforehand

chmee

[size=2]phreekz * blog * twitter[/size]

dlrpgmsvc

if i have to spend 2k euro to buy a new laptop because my 1k euro current one is not enough to run a free software (davinci lite)... it is like to take advantage of a free refuelling for lamborghini's cars... for pc's the problem is easy and cheaply solvable, but for laptops is often cheap to buy an alternative software or using one yet bought and stick with it. this is just to point out the unhappy choices that some software houses makes from time to time and to point cheapers alternatives in some situations like having a laptop.
If you think it's impossible, you have lost beforehand

noisyboy

Quote from: chmee on June 24, 2013, 11:06:01 PM
Sorry to say that, this workflow is consuming too much time - roundtrippin' with Resolve is workin' so i see no better/faster way to cut your video with proxies (in premiere, fcp or avid) and grading and finishing after that in resolve with original files.

regards chmee

Hey I never said it works for everyone so fair enough ;) The point of this is no round tripping at all once you have your project set up. It's all completely connected and editable/gradeable at any time and completely none-destructive. I personally think that this is not anywhere near as time consuming as round-tripping but then maybe I need to learn more about Resolve. I LOVE Resolve but the only thing that stops me using it every time is the lack of de-noiser in the free version and as I end up handling a lot of DSLR footage - de-noising is essential so de-noising and exporting all of my footage first before I can grade is a pain in the testis ;) Also it means I don't have to convert everything to Cinema DNG and at this stage (unless I'm mistaken) ACR seems to handle the debayering side of things a little smoother. Do you use premiere with your workflow chmee? Would love to learn more about your workflow if you PM me dude  8)

Peace!

chmee

you named two things, these are real arguments
(A) ACR is hooot (but its sloooow for batchworkin sequences) (i use LR for photoworks)
(B) denoising, sharpening, optical correction - all things that makes ACR/Lightroom an alltime winner

yeah, i'm workin with premiere cs5.5 - and since roundtrippin is working - its no deal to make the first import into resolve, makin automatically xml and proxies, workin with it in premiere and finalizing back in resolve. (cinema dngs are useable for you as well - you could look, if you see any differences between 16bit(14bit) and 12bit)

So, finally, i'm sure, we'll get a handy tutorial for the beginners about roundtrippin'.

regards chmee
[size=2]phreekz * blog * twitter[/size]

Danne

Too bad my version of adobe doesn,t allow dynamic link.Crap! Really like the idea to be able to use acr in final stages. Thanks for the workflow.
Tried to export to a premiere pro project from after efects but when importing changes from acr is not there anymore. Need that dynamic link

noisyboy

Quote from: chmee on June 25, 2013, 11:50:59 PM
since roundtrippin is working - its no deal to make the first import into resolve, makin automatically xml and proxies, workin with it in premiere and finalizing back in resolve. (cinema dngs are useable for you as well - you could look, if you see any differences between 16bit(14bit) and 12bit)

Sweet man - just saw that it's fixed so that's a big plus :) Still need to learn more about it coz the way I use resolve is probably a real long way of doing shit. Need to get deep in some decent tutorials on roundtripping. Anyone got any suggestions let me know - otherwise I'm gonna get started with Denver Riddle. Hope he removes his 6  month minimum signup soon now that he's working with Instagram. Dude must be able to afford it now eh!  ;)

araucaria

Thanks for your workflow! But I have one question, is there any way to speed up or use the gpu to render the previews? In resolve I almost get full speed but in AE with Acr i get 1fps, setting AE up to use 6 cores (i7 2600k HT) doesn't really help and CPU levels stay at 30%. I might have the thing set up wrong, it's basically as slow as rendering *.nef timelpase secuences of my nikons, only that these have huge res and my 50d footage is small.

dirtcastle

Quote from: noisyboy on June 01, 2013, 05:47:00 PM
Inside of After Effects you can then double click the project browser and browse to the folder that contains the dng sequence that relates to that particular clip. Select the first dng file, check the "raw sequence" checkbox a the bottom and import the sequence.
Great workflow!

I'm having trouble importing the dng files into After Effects. When I attempt to import the dng sequence into After Effects, I get the following:

After Effects error: file '0000000.dng' cannot be imported — This A@@@ file is damaged or unsupported.

I don't see a "raw sequence" checkbox option anywhere in the import file window. The closest I see is "Camera Raw" in the file types dropdown.

UPDATE: I figured it out. I fiddled with the import settings.
1. Enable: "All Files" (don't use this pulldown to select "Camera Raw")
2. Format: "Camera RAW"
3. Check "Camera RAW Sequence"
4. Import

dirtcastle

Is it possible to use Lightroom instead of ACR, but still maintain a non-destructive flow?

Danne

When I apply anything in acr in photoshop information gets stored and are saved when opening my files in after effects. Should get the same information in lightroom. Still, I don,t think premiere have a raw engine so probably you have to get in in the dynamic link circle to get the settings via after effects to premiere when working with non destructive procedures? Anybody have any thoughts?

classicjoe

I use raw2dng on my mac and I've never had problems... but is it possibile to create proxies even with this software?

r-man

Could anyone clarify to me couple of things

For example I have 1880x800 source files, shot on mk2, so I have 14 bit of depth in thats RAWs, am I right?
So, according to this workflow ( btw thx for this ) we're importing
converted DNG sequences into AE.

Question is in the following - If I set the comp's depth for 16 bpc, but sources are 14 bit, how these parameters gonna affect sources while roundtrippin' Ae/Pr with Dynamic Link and all that online updates between sequences of Ae/Pr ?

Africashot

I have adopted this workflow on my latest project and as far as editing is concerned it works well, the problem I have is with grading; I am a good graphics card away from being able to use resolve, thus colorista II will have to do the job for now... but grading RAW proofs to be difficult, once you adjust the settings on import in ACR the look is pretty much baked in (although it can be tweaked) and going back to ACR to change stuff is cumbersome at best. I tried the flatz preset (after having graded everything in ACR first I changed my mind and turned everything flat, mainly because I had some cinestyle h264 on the timeline I had to match) but realized that after grading in PP with colorista through dynamic link you won't get a true representation of the colors, also some of the problematic tones like orange get oversturated quickly, although I am probably a nerd my knowledge on digital color science is insufficient to be able to tell why and where the problem lays... also, at least on my rather weak system, every step along the way gets extremely slow when working with the linked footage. I have high hopes for the october CC update and would like to get into speedgrade at least for as I can't use resolve, however for now I have not found an ideal way to comfortably grade the footage and will probably go back to converting to cineform when I edit my next project since this just proofs too complicated for now
ML 5D2 & T3i

Africashot

To be more specific... it would be great if anyone using this workflow would share their approach to grading (as long as it doesn't involve resolve)
ML 5D2 & T3i

r-man

I've been thinking about this workflow and the Raw workflow overall - in my opinion, using progs as ACR and Lightroom etc in the very start of editing and grading may push you into some limits

Why so ? I think that sometimes it's hard to grade shots fine and adequate, when you can't see the whole image of your sequence ( i mean all your shots going one after one, when you see complete result ), as they might look comlpletely different. Especially this way of grading is awkward when you got the shots with different latitude of highlights and shadows

For example we have a pan shot - in first part we push highs down and black to up, but when pan is over and we have brighter darks, than in prev.part we might get a crap.  Something like this.

So I think that more flexible way for grading, especially secondary grading is to import from Pr to Sg with native dpx conversion.

But I may be wrong, as I'm still exploring different way to work with raw, so if anyone could fix me- you'r welcome!)

The only thing I surely know is that Dynamic Link must be essential in this process, until we get a native dng import to Pr CC

Africashot

Quote from: r-man on September 14, 2013, 04:32:34 PM
I've been thinking about this workflow and the Raw workflow overall - in my opinion, using progs as ACR and Lightroom etc in the very start of editing and grading may push you into some limits

Exactly my conclusion! Currently I have not found a good alternative and I am having trouble getting into speedgrade... it still feels very akward even after the changes made when ported to CC, Adobe should do a better job in getting all their software workflows to be at least similar, I am not even thinking of speegrade here but even simple things, like if ctrl+D duplicates a layer in after effects why it would have to be ctrl+J in photoshop (and yes I know you can customize that but why would I have to?) when it comes to speedgrade it still feels like a completely different product to me, I hope they'll improve on that!
ML 5D2 & T3i

DFM

Some general responses to this thread  ;):

We get a lot of comments about the UI for SpeedGrade being strange, and I agree that it's very different to anything else in the Creative Suite family. It's a legacy of two things - firstly Adobe have had their hands on the code for only a short time, and so the initial development was all about compatibility - Sg as it looks today is basically the same UI as shipped by IRIDAS. Going forward things are evolving but the DI/CT professionals who use it every day have had many years to learn a bunch of quirky UIs from the vendor of their choice, so a wholesale change to something that behaves like Premiere Pro or Resolve would annoy far more people than it'd please.

Without wishing to be rude to anyone, Sg was designed for a very specific user - a color timer in a motion picture studio - and so the UI is secondary. Colorists use hardware desks so they don't care if the wheels are fiddly to use with a mouse, and neither did IRIDAS. The concept of 'look' layers is also difficult to grasp without some heavy reading of the manuals, but given the target audience do nothing else all day every day, the industry does somewhat prefer things to be obscure (a colorist keeps his or her job until the DP finds out a way to do it themselves!). This is also the reason that Sg as of today will only import digital cinema footage rather than stuff like H.264 and AVCHD. That will change in October but the UI is largely static for the time being.

The solution, as you'll know by now, is to steal the Lumetri Color Engine from inside Sg and plug it into the other Adobe applications. You can already do that now in Premiere Pro CC (applying a "look" file as an effect) and come October you'll be able to apply looks directly from Adobe Media Encoder CC, but there's no escaping the need to jump into Sg at some point if you want to create your own looks. Again in October the link between Pr and Sg will finally connect properly.

Will we reach a point when Sg is as intuitive to use as the consumer products? No; but the biggest quirks will be ironed out. Creative Cloud has changed how Adobe see the application landscape, with truckloads of people getting access to programs that in all fairness are beyond their abilities. Dumbing down these top-end applications isn't an option the professional user community would accept so there will always be a cliff-face learning curve between something like Photoshop Elements and SpeedGrade. The hope is to create workflows that the majority of 'prosumer' users can follow which grab snippets of pre-made functionality without necessarily understanding what's happening.

At the basic level, someone with the classic "make my iPhone video look good" question can pick one of the predefined Look files and apply it without needing to know anything about what's being adjusted. Step one level up from that and you can jump across into Sg and fiddle with those defaults, maybe to widen a split tone or burn down the highlights. You will need to read the help file, but not much of it. A colorist who has to shot-match against Macbeth cards and calibrate Alexa log footage for broadcast will lock herself in a basement for 6 months and learn SpeedGrade, then get paid handsomely for her efforts.

In terms of color depth, the sequences in Premiere Pro are always 32-bit floating point. The default MPE previews aren't (because nobody has a 32-bit monitor) but you can bring in your DNG footage, apply any combination of "/32-ready" effects, and export back out to a lossless format of your choice. A pixel in the input stream will be a pixel in the output stream. In contrast you have to explicitly set the bit depth in AE (because it's far more CPU-intensive to do the comps in /32). The rule in AE for maximum quality is simple - pick a comp depth equal to or higher than the deepest source file you intend to feed it. If the source is a 14-bit ML DNG, there is no significant benefit in going above a /16 comp - it would have a very small effect if you apply some ultra-extreme grades as the interpolation would be narrower, but without the source data in the first place you're not gaining any 'real' pixels. If you're exporting that comp to H.264 for the Web you may as well stick in /8 and tone-map on the way in.


For ML raw video shooters the workflow is absolutely going to improve in October; we're not at the point of supporting MLV as a native file format  ;) but the time it takes to get from a folder of DNGs to a Vimeo-ready file will drop hugely. If you're just transcoding a rush to show someone, you'll be able to do it in AME with full hardware-accelerated rendering. The Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro means that in theory you'll be able to scrub about your CinemaDNG timeline as smoothly as you want; but with all raw footage the bottleneck very firmly arrives at your disk. With a decent GPU and more than 12GB RAM, unless you're serving the footage from an SSD or multi-striped RAID array it will often struggle to read the frames fast enough.

That doesn't mean you need a behemoth of a machine to work effectively, just that you can't expect miracles from a Walmart desktop. I have Premiere Pro CC running on a Microsoft Surface Pro and it limps along OK - nothing I'd want to rely on but as a proof of concept it's as not bad to be transcoding on a 'tablet'. Some of the video pros that post their benchmark figures to Adobe have built things that make my eyes water (I've seen a 20-way RAID cabinet feeding a quad-Xeon board with 4 Tesla cards) but they'll be working on time-critical HD material, such as for broadcast news where a minute of extra rendering means they'd miss air time. The 'average' Premiere Pro CC user hovers just a little above the minimum specs; they tend to have a decent graphics card but their disks are...  :o

Africashot

Nice to see Adobe is listening! And thanks for the comprehensive reply. I get your point and largely agree, there is no reason to 'dumbing' down the product to fit the average consumers needs, there is plenty of that already and we could see how going that direction can backfire within the community (thinking of FCPX here...)

However looking at how the industry develops and with web video becoming an essential marketing tool, the 'one man band' type user will become a large majority of your subscribers and, at least to me, this is exactly the target audience the creative suite seems to be aimed at (a professional colorist will hardly ever be using tools like dreamweaver or even encore, but I do!).

I am not saying that there should be less features or that niche professional should not be kept in mind, also I understand Adobe has purchased an existing product and needs to continue to cater for the existing customer base of this product, but by now Adobe should have enough weight in the industry to have its very own style and a 'company identity' that goes beyond having similar Logos for all their products... making things more complicated for the 'average user' in order to alianize a niche group of professionals in order to support their struggle to justify their existence is counterproductive imo.

In any case thanks you for working on providing great tools for many types of artists, your efforts are highly appreciated!

ML 5D2 & T3i

arrinkiiii


maverick891

The part where this workflow is failing me is when I drop the cinema dng sequence on the composition in after effects above the proxy video layer. Since the original file is longer and I have cut it to my requirement in edit the DNG sequence fails to sync with it rendering my cut completely useless and forcing me to match the start manually. I like this workflow and would like to really use it. Please help. What am I doing wrong?

dude

wouldn t it be one way to do shadows/highlights via ae, and then export to tiff sequence, 16 bit?
So you can import to premiere and cut like you want, even do colour correction due to 16 bit


spnsir

Quote from: maverick891 on October 09, 2013, 09:54:53 AM
The part where this workflow is failing me is when I drop the cinema dng sequence on the composition in after effects above the proxy video layer. Since the original file is longer and I have cut it to my requirement in edit the DNG sequence fails to sync with it rendering my cut completely useless and forcing me to match the start manually. I like this workflow and would like to really use it. Please help. What am I doing wrong?

Also having this issue---any way to automate the start of the DNG sequence so it uses the same start time as the proxy clip edit?

mrnv45



here is a simple test from a video i am shooting.

rawmagic>after effects+acr>export frame size to quicktime prores444>premiere>edit and export to proress444 at 1920x1080>film convert>h.264 1080p

HugoFilipe

Is there any chance of, after creating a project with this method, create a trimmed project (for disk space saving) that would include the original DNG's from After Effects?

I've used this method and currently have 3 huge projects that I'd like to delete the unused RAW clips (and proxies), but when I create a trimmed project (Premiere>Project Manager) I only get the proxies, not RAW's or DNG folders.

I would really appreciate if anyone know how to do it.

Thank you!

pc_bel

I know this topic have a long time inactive, but I've found my own workflow and I want to share it:
The main problem I have found with the method of Noisyboy is that it doesn't work for me if I do the editing of the proxy clips before creating the composition in AE .
But if I import the whole clip to the timeline from the Premiere project browser and then I do " replace with AE composition" (then "replace footage" choosing the DNG sequence inside AE), and then edit the clip in Premiere , I have all his original length within AE so I can cut or lengthen everything I want within Premiere without any problem with the start or the end of each clip. If I first edit the clip in Premiere and then I do " replace with AE composition" , AE does not have the total length of the clip then after, in Premiere, I will not be able to lengthen the clip over the length available to me within AE .
The method does not seem the fastest to me, but is very effective and completely non-linear , so at any time the clips can be edited in Premiere , with the advantage not displaying the track containing the AE compositions I get a very smooth playing even with slow computers .
Just do not forget to group every proxy clip with their respective AE composition before edit.
Thank you very much for the workflow ! .

felixaudette

Hey anyone  found anything better that look a like this one??
I'm planning of using this workflow in my next project :)
thanks a lot

setagana

Um, I think I'm doing something wrong here. Either that or this workflow is simply not fit for purpose.

As others have pointed out, after your rough cut if you send a clip to AE and import the DNGs it doesn't take edits like your ins & outs into account, so your proxy and your raw in AE will not have the same start point.

Also, once you're back in Premiere pro if you group the AE comp and your proxy clip together, you can't edit them in length anymore.

Please tell me I'm doing something wrong, cause I was just starting to get the hang of this workflow.

JADURCA

I use Sony Vegas Pro 13 to work on my projects. First, I color grade using ACR, then save in a folder as PSDs (yes, Vegas recognizes it). Then use Import Media option, it import all PSDs using Vegas, then add in timeline by doble-click it. Finallly you can cut, apply effects everything to the originals. If you are not happy later with a color grade you made, no problem, just open again the RAW in a ACR, make corrections and then overwrite PSDs in the same folder. When you open Vegas, everything, the new media and clips are already in place! Found this way very easy and fast, not only that but I can see that at the end once I finish editing I render in h.264 and quality is superb! Check this short video I made using this workflow.

https://youtu.be/fZBErHr3rtw