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Lesson Info

Ingesting Media: Transferring And Importing

So what I want to point out is we're going to go ahead and we're going to start that Ingest and we're going to go back into Premiere and what we didn't do when we started it is we did not say how we want it copied. Remember I said ignore that panel, because we're going to do it inside? Because I want to show you if you forget that you don't have to create a new project. So underneath the file menu, there is something called project settings. I believe it's also under the file menu in Windows. So this is one where there is parity. And you see that there is those same three panels general, scratch disks and ingest settings available once your project is open. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm clicking on ingest settings and I want to step through what we can do. We've seen earlier, that when we've pointed to something in the media browser, it pointed to it, and it never copied it, and that was a big rule that I really tried to emphasize. And you know something? I still try to emphasize it...

because you may forget to flick this switch, and you think you're copying, and it's on the card and you forget. You know, better safe than sorry. But, this is great. This is new. If I want to modify this, this is all grayed out, you have to hit this check box to activate it, otherwise you will drive yourself crazy, and once I do that, tah dah, it is no longer grayed out. So let's take a look at some of the options we have when we Ingest. The default is copy, so this is great. This is going to allow you if you come off a card to copy the media to the active fault location. It's also good if you want to organize everything and you don't mind duplicating the media. Maybe you're coming off an external hard drive and you want to bring it internally or vice versa. By copying it, it does move it all, not move it, it makes a copy all in one location. So think about your work flow. Think about how much space you have. You may want to have this on all the time, whether you're bringing things in from another drive or bringing things in from an SD card, which it basically is seen as another drive. So if you choose that and just leave that, it's going to make a copy. It will go into that default location, but you can change your mind. You can say use a different location, including your cloud. Now remember, these are potentially big files, and if you put it in your Cloud account, I believe you only have a finite amount of space. Maybe it's a terabyte, no it's probably a gigabyte. But you know, it could be another Dropbox or something. So you can choose the location still, but what I want to point out is this one here which is copy with MDS file verification and copy without. This is basically as it's copying, it's verifying that everything has successfully copied and it's giving you. And so this is just a higher level of double checking. It'll slow it down because as it writes it it then re-reads it and confirms and comperes, but it is more bulletproof. So that's just what that's all about. Destination's obvious. There's something called proxy which we can't get to and I'll explain why, because we haven't chosen that option. So that's copy. You also have the option if you want, is to transcode. And this is a buzz word that I may have dropped throughout the course, but I want to explain it again. Transcoding is basically saying, I'm taking whatever flavor media this is, and converting it to something else. So maybe you recorded it at H.264 and you want to edit everything in Apple ProRes. Or maybe they were really big files, and you want to convert it to a different flavor, a different codec actually. And this can be beneficial. And the reason some people want to do this is that some codec, some ways that cameras record things, it's harder for the computer to work with those files because it has to decompress and decode them on the fly. They may use an algorithm that makes them really small, but then they're harder for playing back and it varies from computer to computer depending on your number of processors, the speed of the computer, and the video card. So that's one reason that some people like to transcode them. For instance an older computer, may not be able to play back as highly compressed H.264 video as well because it just doesn't have the CPU power. But it can play back Apple ProRes which is an uncompressed format. So you may say well, why don't I just convert to Apple ProRes all the time? Which is fine, except for Apple ProRes being uncompressed may be 20 times larger than your original file. So that really cool 4 gigabyte card that held an hour worth of footage, is now a 60-75 gigabyte file on your hard drive. It's a give and take, and it's a decision you're going to have to make based upon how you're working, and how responsive your computer is. There is no set answer for that. So that's one thing you can do is you can transcode it as you bring it in. By the way, all of this can be done once files are inside your computer. And it's also using Adobe Media Encoder, which we learned about under Export, to do all of these calculations. It actually will launch Media Encoder to do all this transcode. And by the way, when you switch to transcode, these are some of the flavors you might have seen in Export. Why do we have so many? Well different people have different needs. Some of these work with broadcast environments where everything has to be the same flavor. I've worked in a lot of sports and broadcast networks and everything that they work with on their servers all have to be XDCAM-EX or XDCAM HD and thus when they're being Ingested, why not convert them? You know you will see what you will use. Sometimes you might have giant files that you want to make smaller, H.264. You can also create your own presets. Of course it gets to the geeky stuff. The other two are new and also very interesting. Create proxies, now we haven't talked about proxies. What a proxy file is, think of it as an approximate of the original file. It's a smaller version of your file that creates less overhead in the way of space, as well as usually demands on the computer processor. So let's just say you shot something at 1920 x 1080 and that's a little bit strenuous for your computer. You might make a proxy that is 1/2 the height and 1/2 the width of the original file. Okay so it's 540 x 960 and that file is going to be 25% of the size of the original file and is going to put a lot less demands on your system because there's fewer pixels, it may be compressed differently. Maybe you haven't even compressed with, as a more lossy file, because you're using it just as a reference. And what happens is it allows you to use these proxies while you edit, giving you a lot more of a robust experience and then you can switch back or it does it automatically when you export to the original media, so everything is beautiful and clean. It's nice. It's also something that if you wanted to use the Cloud, you can create these small files that you can access anywhere. To be able to create proxies is great, because it does buy you space and speed and that's a new feature. And in addition to that I'll just jump straight to the next one and then I'll take a question. You can also copy the original media, as well as create the proxies so you have both to work with and it backs up both. When you do that, you can see you can choose the destination for both, and also you can choose of course, the preset that you're going to do. It'll tell you what the proxies are and you can modify things. So this is the basic settings, and we'll input stuff but I'm going to throw for a question, and then we'll move forward because this is a lot that we do have to cover within the nine hours that I've dedicated for this lesson. So creating proxies sounds great. Is there any down side to that? Is there any reason that you wouldn't want to do that? You mean doing a downstream afterwards? Or at this point in time? At this point in time. The question was, is there a reason you wouldn't want to do it? Time. Or necessity. Sometimes you don't need them because your files are small and your computer is fast enough. So you don't, it's superfluous. Or on the flip side you know, some of these cameras shoot 4K which are huge, and maybe when you're editing you don't want to use the full 4K media, so you may create a proxy that's going to be dramatically smaller and a lot easier for you to work with. As a matter of fact, sometimes people will use all their proxy files because they want to edit on the road on their laptop, off a thumb drive and then when they get back to their house they can point back to the original media and it's efficient, or maybe you want to send the proxies over to the other coast whether you're on the left coast or the right coast to have somebody else work with you in tandem, and you both have the media but you don't want to upload a terabyte of data. So there's a lot of reasons that you can benefit from them, but again, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it if you don't need it. So that's why I wanted to discuss the options, versus saying this is what you should do. So if I have this set, I'm going to say okay, I'm going to go ahead and bring in a piece of media. Did I show you the AVCHD file? I don't think I did. I can tell because I just said AVCHD and everyone went, like puppies. So the AVCHD file stands for advanced video codec High Definition. You don't really need to know that, but sometimes you will open up your camera card or a file, let me go ahead and hide this, and switch over to my finder. New, desktop. I have to remind myself what I'm doing. Ingest media, and if we zoom in here, one of these files should be that. There we go, AVCHD. And if I look at this as an icon, it doesn't look like a video clip. And depending on what software is in your computer, sometimes you can double click and play this fine, but if you go to the import dialogue you wouldn't be able to scrub through it. I think this machine has the codec for QuickTime opens it. On a pc you may not be able to open it. On an old Mac you may not be able to open it. What it is, is it's a container. It's a container just like your iPhoto library. So when you click on that iPhoto library that's already ingested your video, it opens up iPhoto. All of these are really folders pretending to be applications. So if on a Mac, there's also ways to do this on a pc, actually Mac hides it really well, or hides it so much that you don't know what you're doing, because they hide it. You can say show package contents and what this does is it looks inside the folder. If you do this in iPhoto you'll actually see folders with your photos in it, and you may see like the low resolution ones that you quickly populate your iPhoto catalog and then you might see the originals and different stuff. That's a good way to find the elements. But you'll look inside sometimes these folders and you actually will see sometimes your clips and whatnot. So I just wanted to point out this is different stuff. The beautiful thing is it looks really weird, when I show it to you at the finder level. Let's go over to media browser, we've used it before. Going to go ahead, look on my desktop, or even actually, before I even do that, let's look at those, remember I opened up that Canon XF file and it had all these folders and everything? Well if I click that, Premiere knows not to show me those folders. It shows me, a movie. Because I want to see the movie. So that's where the magic is. That's why you also want to use the media browser. And then I can go in and I can say import, and if I'm a lucky guy it should be doing some of the stuff in the background if I actually said confirm. It's importing this, and even if you're transcoding stuff you can start working with the media immediately, because it just points to the original one and does all that transcoding copying in the background. So, processor wise yes you're juggling things, but you can still work with stuff and then it just originally points to the other information, so it brings it in, and as we know, it looks like a movie. Let's go back over to this media browser. So we saw that one folder. Let's take a look at that AVCHD file. I'm going to go ahead I'm going to look at my home folder in my desktop. There's home folder. Go to desktop where I've successfully hidden things, and by the way, this is a nice little plus, if you're constantly going to the same folder like your desktop, like I do all the time, if you right click on that, you can add that to your favorites, and you'll see on the left side of my media browser, I can jump right to it, so I don't have to keep digging and digging. So maybe copy all of your stuff into your movies folder and you're always digging through the movies folder. Right click. Once you find it once, right click on it, say add to favorites and that way you can get to it with one click. So, going to go look in my desktop. I have my Ingest media, I have that folder that was in AVCHD, as a matter of fact I'm going to go ahead and zoom out, and use the (mumbles) key, bring everything full screen., This is a slue of media. This is everything from JPEGs to TIFs to a variety of movies that were captured on a bunch of different cameras. I love the fact that it might still be thinking on this. It should still be picking on this. Sometimes things take a while because it actually has to process and create these little icons. So I can see everything, I specifically said I need to bring in a kitten, because now we'll be all over YouTube with this kitten. This is Taz, a kitten that my son saved Christmas eve. Raining, pouring, we hear a meowing from in the sewer. And literally we opened up the sewer, they climbed in, honestly about 30 40 feet and found this poor little cat that weighed like a pound and a half. This cat is now like, it's still crazy, but it's nice healthy in like 12 , 13 pounds, brought this cat out, took it to the vet and he's really cute but yeah it was like rain through the sewer. This will break hearts. But a very happy cat now and I'm proud of my kids. I'm scared, but you know, they're big kids. They were 16 at the time. Saved this cat on Christmas eve and it's a happy cat and the kittens are really cute so. The shoes are gone, but the cat's around. So there we go. But it points out that this was shot on an iPhone. So you have all these different flavors. So the media browser allows you to see really a wide variety of all your formats and it does have to re-draw these sometimes, in the slot memory, so I can bring in my images. I do want to point out that I'm looking at this as a list view, I mean an icon view. You can look at it as a list view if you need to do and dig down. But I can bring all of this in. One thing that I cannot bring in is in this folder there were several raw files. I don't even see those. I would Ingest those into, I currently probably use Lightroom, because I can batch modify them and even do it in Photoshop too, but in Lightroom I like it because I have the whole thing I can modify it and some of the tricks of Lightroom is you know you can apply settings throughout automatic. Again, another creative live course that you probably should watch, and then I would bring it in. And this is a specialty case, and we will see this in a later lesson when we start working with the time lapse stuff because that's a lot of pictures, and we'll talk about the advantages of shooting JPEG versus raw, and the challenges of that. So I want to point out this is how you would bring this all in. You would ingest it. I can simply select it all but what it will do is it should copy. I want to jump back into Premiere into our main folder, look at the one clip we brought in. Let's take a look if I right click on this. I want to point out a couple of things. So, if I hadn't made a proxy, I can still create a proxy afterwards. So maybe I brought it in and I go often you know something, I need to make smaller versions. I go create proxy brings up the variation of that dialogue box. Ask me where I want to store it. I usually put it near the original media. And then I can go with any preset, we talked about. Proxies don't have to be a certain size. You can have them bigger or smaller depending on space and how you want it to look. Let me go ahead and hit cancel on that. So that's one of the usual things. Oh I did want to show one other thing under proxy, because there were a couple of things that you may say well what is this for? Attached proxies and reconnect full media. Let's say you made proxies, or you had a full media and you moved it to a different folder, and now we can't find it. You can point to it. And once you create proxies, you need to go into preferences. We've looked at preferences before, but under file. File on Windows, Mac is underneath the name of the application. There's actually something called media and under the media option if we zoom in, and this is in the new build, the most recent build so if you're using an older version you won't see this, but you can enable proxies. So this will use the proxies if it has a proxy attached. You won't do that automatically, okay? You're good to go. And then you say okay, and then when you have the proxies it will use that and you can also switch between proxies once they're built. So proxies are new. But the important thing is copy. Check your copies. Back up your copies. Use Media Browser if you want to be able to see things. We'll look at the unique challenge, not challenge, but when you import time lapses, in the time lapse part. Because a couple of settings are different. If I go and I go to my applications folder or to my utilities folder, specifically, and I just magically went to my utilities folder without having to open anything. I hit command shift U for utilities, command shift A would open the applications, there is an import application, or at least there used to be. Let me make sure there still is. Image Capture, it's in the applications folder. So luckily Apple is a lot smarter than I am. But image capture I believe that will allow you when you plug in a card or plug in your phone, as an alternative, to bring things in that way. And one of the things in iPhoto when it launches, you'll see a little dialogue box in the upper left hand corner that says always open iPhoto when you see this item, such as your phone. If you uncheck it, it won't launch iPhoto, and you can have launch this importer and bypass the whole challenge of bringing things in from your iPhone to your computer, and having to go through iPhoto. So one of the other things, we talked a lot about ingesting existing media And there are times when you actually want to grab something from another Premiere Pro project you're working on, and this is kind of an important thing to realize is that you can only have one project open at a time in Premiere. You can have many, many sequences within that project, many timelines, but only one project at a time and some folks are kind of a little bit frightened by that concept, especially if they come from a non-linear application that lets you have multiple projects, or even you know in some things like Photoshop you can have, you know Photoshop's open, you can work on two different files. It's intentional. What they've done is instead of being able to open two projects to move things around and then get confused which project was I in, did I import this media, it can get very cluttery and actually slow down your system. It's designed that if I want to get something from another project, maybe I just want to copy the entire intro sequence or maybe I just want to grab a shot that I remember I used in a show last week, this week, you can actually open up a project from within the media browser, and literally open up any sequence within that project, grab what you need and the nice thing is it's non-destructive to that original project. Because when people would open up two projects they'd make some changes, and they'd accidentally change the original project, they'd quit it, and then go back to the original show from two weeks ago, and it's missing something or something is broken. So this is a more bullet-proof way of dealing with things so I want to show you how that works, and it's actually very elegant how it does it. I'm going to actually reference two sequences, or two projects that we've already used, both the first and second day. This is the sequence that I used when I showed you some examples of what Premiere can do. And let's say I wanted to grab something from the Mike Hagan stuff that I did following. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my media browser, you need to do this through the media browser, you can't do this through import, click on that and let me bring that full-screen so we can see what's going on. And I've cheated a little bit, but I taught you earlier on in this lesson that you can create favorites. And I actually made a favorite for my projects folder and I can see that. So there's the project file. I'm not double clicking on it in my finder, I'm actually looking at this in my media browser and I click on that project and what it will do is it launches the dynamic link and now I'm looking inside the actual project. Right now it's a list. I'm going to even switch this to icon view. This is what the project looked like when I had that project open. So I can do a couple of things. If I wanted to, I could say you know I just remembered there's a shot in the media folder I want to go ahead and grab that and I could say I'm going to grab this interview close up and if I hit import, all it does is it knows where that piece of media is and now it's pointing to it in my new project. I close the window and it's just as if I dug through 35 folders, because maybe I have no idea where I stored this. So I can bring in a single, or multiple elements. I could perhaps bring in an entire folder. Here's another example of why you may want to do this. I have a project with all my animations that I might use on a regular basis. So what I do is, I'll just open up that project, point to the folder with the animations hit import and now it's linked and pointing to those animations, and I have them, and I never accidentally modify that original project. So you can use it for a lot of reasons. I can also, in addition to just grabbing a clip or a folder, I can click on any sequence that was in that project, and it launches. And you notice that there's the sequence, there's my timeline. I want to point something out here. If I look closely it says interview pre-cut source monitor. It opened it up. It didn't import it. It didn't move it over. But what I can do now is I can actually play the sequence from the other project inside and if I want to grab any elements, animations or whatnot, I can go ahead, grab a chunk, copy it go into my current sequence, zoom out, let me go to the end, hit paste, and now I have all of those elements directly in my timeline if I want, because I might have built something and said oh there was that great chunk in that show and I want to use it. So this allows me the luxury of grabbing files, individual clips, folders of clips, or even entire existing sequences, and work with them in a new project without being destructive to the original one. After I'm done, all I need to do is close this panel, and everything is done and saved. So that's one great thing, and I think it's one of those things that a lot of people don't know about, but it's ridiculously powerful. Complementing that, because we're working with lots of media and pointing to different locations, what happens if you move files after it's closed or even while you're working or change the name of one? So I'm going to be do the simplest one which is change the name of a file. So I'm going to right click on this. I'm going to say let me actually go to something in the media browser, let me go into my show and I'm going to go into this, what we will cover. That's actual show I want to show a piece of media, there we go. Right click when they say reveal in finder shows me that clip. I'm going to go ahead and move it to my desktop. I love cluttering my desktop. So hopefully I just, I'm copying it. It was in a different drive. It won't move I have to do something else here. I'm going to rename it. It's the same thing as moving. So I have this, I'm going to change it to mono e mono. These just come into my head and I just let them go. Okay so hopefully, yes it went offline because it's looking for mono, not mono e mono. So it's trying to locate the media. Did it find it? No, it did not. So I come up with a warning dialogue box, it immediately says it's offline. If you have the application closed and when you launched it if media was offline, you would get the same dialogue box as soon as you open the application it says, I can't find something, you must have moved it. It will, when you click on this to locate it. So there's a lot of things that you might want to say okay I want to align this by a lot of parameters. File name, whatnot. I changed the file, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, let me locate this, and it's going to give me this search dialogue and I can search anywhere I want. And if I search at the top level, it will go through all the folders, which is nice, but it could take a while. So if you have an idea of where it is, you should try to point it in that direction. It will tell you where it last saw it. My last path. It was an interview clip 3 and it was called Mono Movie. So I could look for that, if I know where it is. I changed the name. I'm actually still in that folder so what I'm going to do, is I'm going to say, display only exact name matches and you see this folder's empty, because nothing is called Mono, it's now mono e mono. So I'm going to go back and uncheck that, and then I'm going to find that clip and select it. You have to click on it to select it, and then I'm going to say, connect, and it reconnects the clip. So there'll be two scenarios. One you rename something. That happens sometimes. You go through and you go oh you know what, I'm going to give this some more appropriate name than X5436J and now you realize oh, you can't find it. So in that case you will uncheck that, look for the exact name and point to it. If it's a situation where you just moved the folder and you hit search, and it finds the first clip, you'll check it and the nice thing is, is that as soon as you say okay, every clip that's offline that's in that location, it will reattach. So you don't have to do it one by one, by one. And that's very useful, because a lot of times you will move a folder, so if I go ahead and I'm going to once again, I'm going to go into that folder reveal in finder. There's my folder, interview clips. It's under Mike Hagan, and literally interview clips. I'm going to just accidentally move this into my B-Roll. C'mon, don't move. Go into B-Roll. Go into B-Roll. There we go. We go crazy offline. It's trying to find it. And so I have all of this media offline right now. Let's see how smart it is. Unfortunately it gets smarter and smarter, and sometimes it finds stuff, and I look silly. Okay, but luckily I'm still a little bit smarter. So, we're going to go ahead. We're going to attach this. It's very simple. I need to locate it. I'm going to sit there and I know I'll check what's offline. I'll click on locate. It will tell me the last path. I know where it was, but let's say I did not. I'm going to go ahead and just look at everything in that old folder interview clips. Mike Hagan Shapiro. Mike Hagan, so now I know it's in one of these folders, but I have no idea where. I'm going to click on search. In this case, because I did not change the name, I do want to have it display the actual make it match name to name if it finds the precise clip that I have. It now knows the new location, I hit okay. It re-links everything and it's all online. So that's really valuable when you're moving media. Sometimes you'll open up a project and you'll have to move the folder somewhere else. Re-linking it's easy as long as you know the trick. Basically hit select the first clip, hit locate. Search where you think it is. The closer you can get to the actual location, the less searching it's going to have to do through your hard drive. It will search an entire terabyte hard drive, 10 terabyte. It just might take a while. And once you do that, you saw that I clicked on the clip. Even though we found it we still have to select it, and then I hit okay, and it rippled down and connected everything else that was in that relative location. And linking works really well that way.