Ingesting raw and log material in Premiere Pro

- So Rich, it's time to move into post-production and talk about some popular software tools. And the first tool that we're going to talk about is a very popular one, and that's Adobe Premier Pro. And Premier Pro, for quite some time-- one of its big selling points has been the ability to work with native camera formats, especially when it comes to RAW. It's had a lot of support very early on for pretty much every RAW format out there and gets updated quite often to support new RAW formats. But you know, the first step in any workflow and getting into post-production is properly after you've backed it up and you've done all that kind of stuff, you got to get it into your tool to start working with the footage and start editing. - Absolutely. So go ahead and launch Premier Pro. And if you've downloaded the exercise files, you'll be able to follow along. We're going to walk you through how to use the Media Browser to bring media into a project. You launch Premier. We're going to start by making a new project to hold all of our files. This is all pretty standard stuff, Rob. Click the new project, give it a name, and tell it where you want to store it. So we'll just call this Log_Raw_test, and I'll put it in a file, in this case the Desktop, where all files go to die. - [Rob] Sure. - [Rich] So when you have this here, you do have some choices when you make a new project. Most of them don't really matter. For example, I'm still always amused that DV is the default for Capture Format. But we're not going to be capturing anything. - [Rob] Well, you know, I like to live in 1997. - [Rich] Yeah, so we're going to be okay. And we are going to work with time code and audio samples, which is fine. If you're concerned for performance, you can change your Scratch Disk. So you can decide where this is going to get set. For example, we can store that on the project, or I'll set a custom path here. And I'm just going to browse and actually navigate to my hard drive that I've connected, but this is just going to improve performance, and we'll call that Cache, and I'll choose it. And I can set others to there as well, just for the same sort of performance. And you see that that works out well, so that if it haves to do any sort of conform files or preview files, it knows where to put those. Easy enough. Alright. So now we're all set. I'll click OK, and we've got a project. And Rob, one of the things that people get confused on when they try to import is sometimes, they do it the wrong way. We'll start here with a simple Assembly method, but we're going to bring projects in. And this is where it gets a little deadly, like import media to start. What would you logically go and look for? - [Rob] My video clips. - [Rich] Yeah, so we'd say, well File Import, except this is not how it's best to import video. - [Rob] Yeah, and it should be made clear that double-clicking or the File Import or Command-I or Control-I, that's the same dialog box that you're going to get. And the reason that this is a little dangerous, as I'm sure you're about to point out to everybody, is that this File Import dialog box can't parse camera folder structure. - [Rich] Yeah, it doesn't understand. So if we were to point that at some of the media that you put together or that we shot on set-- and so I'll just go in here and take a look at some of those raw formats-- well, okay, it sees that as a bunch of images. - [Rob] Right, doesn't see it as a single clip. And that's a pretty simple situation. If you went to an actual camera card that has multiple folders of clip and audio and dot this and dot that, this dialog is not going to be able to piece that together. So that's why we want to go to the next tab, which is labeled Media Browser. And same thing, you can see all of your attached hard drives. So I'm just going to go to go to where I put the exercise files, and what we're looking for here is the ability to just see that. So if we go into a folder here, for example, the log folder, it saw all of those clips. And in this case, easy enough, I can just select them all. And those log files are pretty simple, Rob, because they're essentially just video clips. - [Rob] Right, they're just video-- there's nothing special about them. They're just log encoded. As we said earlier, log is video. - [Rich] Now these have a couple of different extensions. The most common types of media that you might import are going to be mxf files, which is media wrapped into a container or the QuickTime movie format. - [Rob] Right. - [Rich] Both are fine. - [Rob] Yep. And it should be pointed out that Premier Pro has native support of the most popular codecs. So DNX, DNxHR, ProRes, et cetera. - [Rich] And you got a nice flavor here of DnXHD and ProRes. So if I say Import, those are added to my project. Now I'm going to go into the other folder, which is Raw, and you'll see here that things are just a little different. So let's start with this Sony one that's still an mxf file. So that's in a nice container. I can import that. And same thing, the RED, it sees the extension. And this is really-- there's stuff inside the file. We can explore it manually. - [Rob] Well, also this has been-- again, these files have been ripped out of a camera folder structure, right. So these are just R3Ds and mxf files, so it's very easy for them to detect. But go up to that ArriRaw folder, for example. And I know that this folder is actually a series -- contains a series of image sequences, but if you see it there, it's actually seeing it as one single clip. And that's where the Media Browser does a lot of nice work. Not only does it see as one single clip, it's automatically detected the format that it's in. You can see right there that little (mumbles) where it says yeah, I'm not seeing this as a regular file directory, I'm seeing this as an ArriRAW directory. - [Rich] Yeah, and if it sees the right type of files in a certain folder structure, it'll usually guess. Now if you think it guessed wrong, you can say, oh, you know, well, I want to change how we view this. So here, under the directory viewer, I can force that back to File Directory. - [Rob] Then it would show you all the individual files and the image (mumbles), yep. - [Rich] Yeah, but if we say, oh, no, no, I'm sure that's ArriRAW, now it treats it as one clip. And we can import it. So it's just important to note that as you go in, different types of structures-- here's the Black Magic, same thing. It recognized it as CinemaDNG and will import that. And then, here's another one that I put on there from the Odyssey. And if we step inside of there, even though that was the Odyssey recorder, they're using the CinemaDNG format as well. And I can import that clip. So now, if we go back into our project, they're all there. I'm just going to organize these real quick and make one bin called Log and another bin called RAW. And we'll just get those organized really quick. That's an Arri file, so that's going to be a RAW. I see the extension as well as some of the information. This is Log. - [Rob] Log. - [Rich] Yep. - [Rob] It's RAW. It's a DNG sequence. - [Rich] Yep, and looking at the file extensions up here is useful. If you don't see that information, you can come up here to the Preview Area. If that's turned off, you might find it helpful to bring it back on, because now you don't see as much information. So a lot of times I have that hidden, but if you're doing sort of manual media organization-- - [Rob] Yeah, it's great. And the other thing that you can actually do in there, you can actually play that clip, you can set a new poster frame for that clip. If the frame-- the first frame of the clip-- is not representative of the shot, you can scrub through that and give it a new poster frame, which is really nice. - [Rich] So let's just finish these out. And I could have been a little bit neater with these as I imported, and just told it to bring it in one way or other. But we can tell, usually from the extensions, what's what, and that's going to be a log file there. Right, Rob? CloserToTruth, that's log? - [Rob] Yep, that's right. - [Rich] Alright. So now we got things organized. And you see that the media came in. And you mentioned, Rob, I do like this, the ability to preview the clips up here, or this is the preview frame. If you're dealing with some of those more robust formats-- - [Rob] It's going to take you a second to parse it, right? - [Rich] Yeah, as you drag through, but this does help you with the getting organized process. Alright, now that things are organized, let's move on to talk about what happens if your system can't handle the RAW files, how you can go about creating proxy files.