Lessons

Lesson Info

Ingesting Media:

Let's talk about ingesting and importing. I'm gonna use those terms interchangeably, and I tend to use them interchangeably. Some people may refine them as more technical. We're gonna globally call this ingesting, and this is just bringing your media in, and we waited 'til later on in the course to talk about this, because I want folks to have an understanding of how they're gonna use your media, how you're gonna use your media, so you know what you need to bring in and what you don't have to bring in and some of the different formats. Ultimately, this is probably one of the first things you're going to do, and there's lots of different workflows that you probably have come across if you've attempted to work in Premiere, or that you will come across. So, you know, we're gonna go really from the start with just setting up a project. We've done this a couple of times, but we never did it really in relationship to all the different ways you can ingest your media and some of the choices yo...

u need to make. We're then gonna look at importing files that are already on your computer. We've actually explored this throughout many of the lessons, so this should be very familiar, and then importing what we define as tapeless media. Those are the SD cards and CF cards that you're probably recording your video as well as your still photos on, as well as audio, perhaps, that you want to go ahead and bring into Premiere and work with. We then will touch on importing projects and sequences. That will be very quick, 'cause this is one of the situations where maybe you've already created something in Premiere and you wanna actually reuse some of that, you know? It's like, "Oh, I don't wanna reinvent the wheel. "I did a show last week, I wanna be able to use elements "from the show, how do I do that?" When media goes offline, what happens? That will happen because maybe you've moved media. You know, you've cleaned up your drives and you moved it from one drive to another, or just renamed a folder. Premiere may lose that, especially if it is not open when you have done that, and we talked a little bit about organizing the media within Premiere, but we also wanna talk a little bit about organizing the media as you bring it in. Where are you going to put it? And I know some of you have questions because you have challenges about, "I have a finite amount of space, "and I have a lot of large media." So, let's just jump in. First thing we're gonna do is we're gonna just create a brand new project. We're gonna simply launch Premiere. Actually, let me make a little more room in my space. I'm gonna empty the trash on my computer. You can never have enough space. So, I'm launching Premiere, we've seen this before, but I wanna do this from scratch, because it's gonna give me some dialogue boxes that I may want to change, and I can change some of these when I start my program, and also, we'll show you how you can change things after the fact. So, we're gonna go ahead, we're gonna create a brand new project, which you've seen before, and we're gonna give it a nice storage location. I'm gonna be a little more legitimate on my storage. Before, I've been lazy and stored things on the desktop. Since we're talking, you know, practical situations, I'm not gonna necessarily do that. I'm gonna actually browse it and look for a defined location. I tend to put things in my Movies folder, because I'm not using to store movies that I've bought or downloaded, I'm using it to create movies. So, it's just, you know, something that I can remember. You can store things anywhere. So, I'm gonna go ahead, new folder, just to keep things organized, and I'll call this Lesson 14, I believe we are on. Ingesting, so I can find it. If I don't remember, remind me what I called it. And we're gonna say, "Choose." So, that's where I'm saving my project file. I'll call this Ingest, and let's just take a quick look at a couple of boxes that we didn't look at earlier. We always looked at this, and we talked about this here, but there's scratch discs and ingest settings. I briefly opened up scratch discs at an earlier lesson, probably it might've been all the way back in lesson three, and I said that the defaults are a great place to leave things, so by default, it wants to save all this information in the same place as your project file so it's easy to do housecleaning. I mean, you think about housecleaning at the beginning of the project, and then it's actually easy to clean house and find your files and make space. So, this is nice, it's all together, but if I wanted to, I could have things saved in different locations, and I implied that... I didn't imply I commented that in broadcast facilities, they may have all that media on a big central server so all the editors can access it. So, just to go quickly down here, I'll just give you an idea of what these elements are. Captured video and captured audio. Most likely, you won't have captured video. That's a situation where, if you have maybe an old DV or HDV camera, a tape camera, and you're actually going into the computer and it's converting it. Sometimes, to bring any kind of taped media in, you actually have to go through some kind of a black box or a breakout box to convert it from analaog to ones and zeroes, digital. It's already ones and zeroes when you're taking it off these compact flash cards. So, this is really legacy, so we're really not gonna go into it, but that's what it's all about, captured video. Captured audio, for the most part, is the same thing, except for you are creating audio when you are recording a voiceover. We did a voiceover in the audio section, so that's where that's going, 'cause you are generating new media, okay? And that's, again, I keep this always with the project. It's easy to find, it's easy to clean. Video previews and audio previews. Those are those things that I called "render files," when it creates artificial files, not artificial, it creates temporary files that allow you to play back at full speed. Once you're done with the show, these become obsolete, you can throw them away, but again, if you know where they are, it's nice to clean house, and I'll tell you it's important to know where your preview files are, because they can get rather large, and if you put them in some place that you never look, you could fill up your hard drive and say, "I don't know why it's so full," because you have these files that may be obsolete, because you've already finished the show and thrown things away. So, again, I like to keep things together, and you'll notice when I opened this up during the media management lesson, you can see these items and where they are. Project autosave, we haven't talked a lot about autosave, but this is a good time to discuss it, because we're creating a new project from scratch. When you create a project, you save it for the first time, and then it will automatically save instances of it, kind of like the back of those, in an earlier question, snapshot of it at defined intervals that you define. Out of the box, it's every 15 minutes. It'll save one in the background, and I think it saves, by default, 20 of them, and that way, if your system crashes, or in my case, actually, I was teaching some lessons, and I wanted to go back to the way the lesson was before I modified the sequence, I actually will go back to my autosave vault and find the first one. You can modify the frequency of how it saves and the number of saves in your preferences, and we can take a peek at that once we actually get into the application, but this will actually say where you're saving, and again, the default works fine for me. Libraries is something that has to do with the cloud, where you can actually see things from multiple computers, because once you log into your Creative Cloud account, you might have things that you wanna access from different locations, whether it's some graphic files, or video files, if they're not too large to upload, as well as some things you might've saved, such as the titles that we talked about. You create and export a title, or maybe you're creating some sort of a graphic with QuickTime and an alpha channel, and you wanna be able to get to it from maybe your work location and your home location. So, that's where the default is. You can change these to wherever you want. If you change it to an external hard drive, if that external hard drive is not plugged in, it will default back to this setting, which is with the disc, okay? With the project. So, that's just an FYI. Probably, I recommend not changing that, but this is something that we're going to touch on throughout this lesson. I'm going to point out that you can set this up here when you create a project. We're gonna actually set it up once we've started the project, because if you forget to do it here, it's not too late. You can do it once you're inside and working on a project, and this allows you to modify what happens when you go to the media browser or import and bring a file in, which allows you a little more flexibility and a little less risk than just the way we've been doing it, and this is a new feature in the latest release of Creative Cloud, as of, I think it's 11.3 or 10.3. So, I'm gonna go ahead, I'm not gonna change anything. You can see there's a location. It's saving it with the application, but I'm gonna say just, "Okay." So, we're at the way we're used to seeing it. Okay, is that too small? Just testing. (laughing) Magic, I don't know why I did that. So, we talked about ingesting and importing. Before I get deep in, I'm gonna throw it open to you to hear some of your issues, concerns, or questions, so I can address them while we bring in the diversity of media that we're gonna deal with. Yeah, so, I either bravely or foolishly tried to import some media last night, and ran into all sorts of issues. Excellent, excellent! I'm proud of you for trying and running into issues. So, one of the sources was my iPhone, which I think a lot of us use. Of course, typically, when you plug in an iPhone to a Mac, it wants to just bring all of your media into Photos, which is what I did, that's what I always do. But then, when I tried to locate those videos, I couldn't find them anywhere. I couldn't find the original files to actually ingest them into Premiere, and I think I right-clicked on every single thing, like, anywhere-- Except for the one you might have needed, right? Except for the one that was actually useful! And that is very common, because a lot of, Apple's really good at trying to do things for us, and sometimes it does so many things for us, we can't figure out how to do them other ways when we need to. So yeah, we'll take a look. I'll put some stuff into Photos, and we'll see how we would get it out of Photos. And then another issue, because once I got frustrated with my iPhone, I decided, "Great, I'm gonna go to the SD card. "This should be really straightforward, right?" So, I went into Finder, I found the folder that had all of my jpegs in it, gosh, that's not where the movies were, so I found that in a different folder, it had a QuickTime icon on it, I clicked on it, and great, I found all of the files that were the videos that I had shot, but I couldn't just drag and drop them into a different folder to import them-- And you were attempting to drag and drop them off the SD card? Off of the SD card, onto my computer. Okay. And it just wanted to play them, and that seemed like it was my only option, and there was no way to sort of pull them in or just import them, except, once again, to go back into Photos. Okay, and that was an SD card you used from your DSLR? That's right. Okay, excellent. I won't ask any more questions now. I'll try to answer that one, but we'll see what happens, excellent. Was there somebody else who had a question, or is this where we're gonna start? Questions, good, questions, please. This is one of the things that's challenging only because there's such a variety of formats that we're dealing with, and such a variety of sources that every camera manufacturer sometimes stores things differently on these cards, compact flash cards, SD cards. I have some to hold up as examples. This is a compact flash, an SD card. I'll actually put it in the camera so that we know where they come from. Oh, there is one in here, okay. And, as a matter of fact, there's also the micro SDs that you might be using in like, a GoPro. You know, it's scary that these micro SDs can hold, you know, 250, they can hold as much as this computer, and that's just a little bit crazy. So, we wanna ingest, and there's a variety of things we wanna do, and I wanna address your second challenge first, which was the SD card issue. Whether you shoot on an SD card or compact flash card, a good rule of thumb, if you're just kinda running and gunning, is to actually drag and drop and copy that SD card onto your hard drive, because that way you know that the media is local, and then maybe you wanna copy it onto a back-up drive, because as soon as you erase that card, you wanna make sure that you have your media, and I'm always afraid of losing my raw media, and redundancy is, uh, is the keyword. I always make two copies, sometimes people make three, and then you put them in different locations, because you don't wanna back it up to a hard drive next to your computer, and then suddenly, a hurricane blows through from both the east and the west coast, and now they're both lost. Usually, you send them to different locations. And then, we'll also talk about traveling and in the field, because you eat up a lot of hard drive space, a lot of card space, that you need to transfer off when you're in the field, and bringing hard drives with you on travel, I know some of you are doing travel videos, I fill up terabytes, because your camera cards are now easily 64 if not 256 gigabytes of media, and video fills it up pretty quickly, and if you're shooting time-lapse, and I know a few of you are excited about the time-lapse stuff, time-lapse, especially if you shoot camera raw, and you shoot 2,000 images, we know that eats up a lot of space, so being able to back things up is important, and we'll talk throughout a little bit about drive speed, but let's go ahead and look at some compact flash cards. I'm gonna go ahead and hide Premiere. What I've done is, the cards that we used to record the interview that we worked with earlier with Mike Hagen, we actually recorded them on three different types of cameras, one Sony, two Canons, but two different Canons that record video with slightly different flavors, and I actually backed these up a couple ways. The first thing we did is just plugged it in, plugged the cards in and copied them onto the hard drive, which is a good way of doing it, not a perfect way of doing it, because sometimes, if you're copying a card and there's a glitch in the computer or the computer, it may not copy everything off the card, and then you go, think you have it, you look and you go, "Oh my God, the file's not there." So copying is okay, but there are also ways that some people, what they'll do is they'll open up a card, and I'm gonna actually show you a card as an example. What I did is I made virtual cards here. I'm gonna go head and launch this. It'll look like I plugged a card into my computer. Oh, it wants to do Lightroom, so here we have it, that's actually good. So, in this folder, you have all these sub-folders, and a lot of times, you go down and you find something that says "Movie". Additionally, there might be this miscellaneous, all this information. Some of these cards have like these deep hierarchies, and people go down and they dig in and they find this thing that says "Clip" or "Movie". Sometimes that works, but some cameras will save your media as distinct files, where you might have the video and the audio and the thumbnail and the metadata, and if you only grab one element and it's been recorded using one of these flavors, you might play it back and find out you have the video, but you forgot to bring in the audio. So, it's good form to copy the whole card by simply option or alt-dragging it, or we're gonna see in Premiere, it now will allow you to make a copy automatically in the background, and there's another application I'm gonna only mention but we won't open up called Prelude. It is part of the Creative Cloud, and one of its main purposes is to copy and transcode media off of cards. The nice thing is that, up until the latest release or the current release of Premiere, that was the only way within the cloud that you could do that. Premiere can do that natively, and that's where that ingest drop-down panel that we looked at comes into play. So, the first thing is copy it. Some purists, and I wanna just bring this up for those people who have been editing for a while and they're old school, I'm gonna go ahead and close some of these windows, show you my desktop, zoomed in, is I, when I use these cards, I created what's called a virtual image or a digital file, it says DMG. If you're on Windows, you might see it as a .iso, and what this is is it basically looks at the card and makes an exact copy that, when I double-click, it looks like I put the card into a card reader. A lot of times, when you download software, you'll see one of these files that says "double-click" and then you get the installer. So, you do this within the operating system level, it's not done in Premiere, so on a Mac, you would just go to Disc Utility and you can do that. I'm not saying you have to, but I'm saying you can, and so, when I put this in, I get a perfect image of my card, and I can have it so I can't write to it, so I can't mess it up, and when I click on it, it's just like I put the card into my hard drive. So, there's the EOS digital, and I have two digitals, so let me just... One of these should be an EOS digital, and one of these should be Sony card. I get into the Sony, we'll see. We'll see what kind of redundancy we have. Okay, watch me have three of the same card. Okay, so, when I double-click on this, it actually looks like I plugged these cards in. I have at least the two Canons, maybe I didn't do the Sony. So, in this other one, this Canon XF, this other camera, if I look at it, I say, "Oh, that's not a movie file." And then I double-click and it says "Clips". I'm getting closer. Then I double-click, I'm getting closer. And then I double-click, I'm getting close, wait a second, I don't see anything that says "Movie". So, depending on your camera, you might see this, but the beautiful thing is, within Premiere, when you look at these files, it just shows you a movie. It doesn't make you think, it doesn't make you merge it all together, it does the work for you, which is why it's important to copy the whole card or make an image of the card, so you have all of the bits and pieces here, okay? And I can't emphasize that enough, that I've had situations where people have come up, and they're like, "I copied off the clip file "out of the folder," and they're like, "I'm missing all this stuff." It's like, "Can you get it back?" It's like, "Did you erase the card?" They're like, "Yeah." It's like, "It doesn't exist anymore, okay?" So, when you put the card in, if you're gonna copy stuff, and this goes back to drive speed, you wanna be able to copy it as fast as possible. Most of the current computers, if you got a computer within the last four or five years, it probably has a USB 3 connection. You know it because it's blue. So, there's a big difference between USB 2 and USB 3. Not price wise, this is maybe $5 more, so instead of paying 15, I paid 20. This will copy 20 times faster, and this is huge, because if you have a 64 gigabyte card, and you try to copy it with USB 2, it could take maybe an hour, and you're like, "Why? "Especially because they're small files." Instead, on USB 3, you could copy it a lot faster. Now, that's only part of the equation. I see some eyes going, "This is good information." When I travel, I work with solid state drives. They're a little more expensive than spinning drives, okay? You can get a spinning drive, four terabytes, 80 bucks. An SSD, it might be a half a terabyte for 200. You can get a deal sometimes, maybe 250 for a terabyte. It is gonna copy so much faster, because these drives can write sometimes 20 times faster than a spinning drive, and the reason it's good for me, that I'm willing to spend the money, is that if I'm shooting, and I need to clear a card, and I wanna back things up because I do silly things in the field. You go, "Oh, my camera's full. "I think I copied this." And then you delete all of those pictures, you format the card, and then you go, "Oh, nuts." Or, the other thing that happens is, I don't know if I've copied it, so now, I'm like deleting individual files to get space. Always carry lots of SD cards. So, being able to transfer things quickly, just a 64 gigabyte card, if I'm going from a solid state drive through this, I can copy in about six minutes, and to me, that peace of mind is amazing. I'll do it. If it's gonna be an hour, I'm not gonna do it in the field. I have to do it at night in the hotel, even at home, you just don't do it quickly, so a lot of times, I like to do that. Solid state drives are really nice for another reason. Usually, when a spinning drive fails, you lose everything. As a solid state fails, usually you can still read it, you just can't write to it. So, again, I'm very protective of my data. Ultimately, because of the expense of SSDs, when I make a redundant backup, I make that onto a spinning drive or to a backup system, like multiple drives that are rated together, you know, redundant drives. So, that's an important thing to consider, because, you know, we can't spend all of our money on SSDs, but it is important for speed when transferring, and sometimes editing, if you have really big files, being able to get it back and forth off an external drive, having that SSD is nice from an editing point of view, versus a spinning drive. So, drive speed, both internal and external, is important, and also your card readers. A lot of times, the cheap card readers or a card reader that might come with a card from the micro SDs, they're USB 2. USB 3, huge difference. There are other flavors you hear, like Firewire's obsolete, but you know, Thunderbolt, Lightning, and e-SATA, but the USB 3 is pretty much the flavor, and USB-C is a variation of USB 3. It's fast, it's 20 times faster. The other thing I wanted to point out, because we're talking about media and we're dealing with media, again, not necessarily, well, it is important for video. Your compact flash and your SD cards are also rated for speed. You'll see some of them have 400x, 600x, 1,000x. Obviously, we've gotten this much faster. When recording some video flavors, sometimes your camera can actually write pretty big files that require a lot of bandwidth, and if your card's not fast enough, it can't write some of those flavors, and if you're just shooting stills, sometimes it doesn't buffer and come off the internal memory of the camera fast enough, and now you're finding that, instead of shooting 17, 18 frames per second, you're shooting four or five, 'cause it's trying to dump it off, so fast cards are important. They get cheaper. That old card that you had that was great two years ago, probably not worth it, you probably can get eight times the space and four times as fast for the same price you paid. You know, I still see some photographers using these old four gigabyte slow cards, and it's like, "You just spent $3,000 on a camera. "Spend $30 on a new card." Compact flashes are a little more expensive, but yeah, SD cards, and I do go with bigger cards. Some people are afraid to go with big cards. I like 64 minimum. A lot of the new cameras cannot write the high speed, high bandwidth video files to cards that are smaller than 64, because you can't format them to the flavor that allows it. So, that's something to keep in mind. Thumb drives, USB 3. You can get USB 2 really cheap, $8. It will take forever to write and read from that card, and the other thing I wanna point out is that just 'cause it's a thumb drive and it's USB doesn't mean it's super fast. When you look at the package, it'll say, "Up to 90 megabytes a second," or whatever. That's the read speed, there's also a write speed, but read the specs, and I actually go to Amazon and read the reviews with a grain of salt, and some, what they put inside, the chips they put inside have different speeds, and I have some thumb drives that are USB that are slow, they take 30 minutes to copy something, 'cause it's only going at 40 or 50, and then I have some that are faster than my internal drive. You know, you pay a little more, so read about that, especially if you're moving stuff around, and I find with video, I'm moving stuff around. I can get a thumb drive that's fast enough for me to edit 4K video off of, and you know, it's not this obscene, crazy $1,800, it's like 80? They're pretty cheap. So, think about the drives when you buy them, because you're moving media around, and sometimes, you're just even copying files to edit a movie from here to there. So, with that, let's go further into the ingesting. So, we saw that these cards actually store the information differently. Some of them store them as movies, the other ones store them as complex files. I also have just a folder of media that I want to bring in, and I want to talk about the different types of media. I've stored these by, I haven't stored these, I've sorted these by kind, and a couple things that you'll face is, you know, we have camera raw files, those are ARWs for Sony, NAS for Nikon, for... It's funny, 'cause I shoot Canon, I just draw a blank of what their code is. Probably should have a Canon file right here, uh, CR2. So, these are camera raw still images, and I indicated at the very beginning of this course, that camera raw is not easy to, you don't import that directly into Premiere. You need to process that through Lightroom or through Photoshop, and save it as either a TIFF, a digital negative, a DNG, a jpeg, a pict file, any of those can be brought in, but you're developing it before. You're actually, you know, opening up. You should do your color correction on still images in a photo editing program. Not that you can't do some of it in Premiere, which we saw, but these programs are designed for you to get your image as good as possible before you bring them into Premiere, and don't waste your energy in Premiere trying to fix it some more, especially if you're well-versed in either Lightroom or Photoshop. If you're not, not a bad idea to get versed in it. There's multitudes of courses on CreativeLive that you can watch to spin you up, but I do recommend that. Sometimes, you'll shoot things directly out, they'll be just regular image files. These are some stuff taken from an iPhone that was shot while we were prepping, okay, which we pulled off, and we'll talk about what happens when you pull them off. So, the first thing I would've done is I would've copied the folders over, and then just, once the folder's over, as a folder, don't even go inside and find your movies. Just grab everything, or if you wanna just do the movies, you said they were in a folder, so grab the whole folder and copy it over. I don't know why they were popping open, they shouldn't. Maybe for some reason, it was set up to double-click, or maybe the space bar, so it automatically opened. They shouldn't do that when you see them, but weird stuff happens all the time, and half the time that happens to me, so a workaround, copy the folder, or we'll see, you can ingest directly from the card and copy it.