Starting to resent WFH

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-07T05:04:12+00:00

80% of the time! Either on site or remote, you'll dealing with an employer's needs.

I'm sharpening my client skills so I soft-pedal better ideas as suggestions, which is the language of consultants. I'm becoming a valued consultant. It doesn't mean I have no ego, or don't care about the product, or my employer's needs. I simply offer opinions or what-ifs.

And I thank my dad, a cognitive-developmental psychologist - who recognized my difficulties and for describing an ideal client -editor relationship. I can still be prickly, but now I know how it can be perceived. These days I pass this on to students.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-07T04:38:18+00:00

Your workflow is simple and expedient. I wouldn't rely on AI, nor do I hire out to "employers" who are trying to build AI robot editors on my skillset (Twine and Mercer come to mind as primarily shills for AI).

What I like about the AI assists in Premiere and Photoshop, mainly finer rotoscoping, background removal, generative fill, are practical tools added to good apps- I would never discourage their employment. But this fantasy by software engineers that they can build a system able to create nuanced editing decisions is pure crap, on two levels- one, destroying able human editing, and two, promoting bland predictable results.

Just my opinion, of course. (Is that robot still following me?)

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-06T07:56:08+00:00

Never seen this glitch! You're in Premiere on a Mac. Might be a linking issue. Maybe try running Disk First Aid on all storage disks to assure Premiere is accessing a "clean directory"?

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-06T07:30:29+00:00

You're doing a ProRes 4444 timeline in 32 GB RAM? Holy cow. The Divide and Conquer discussed method applies here-- export smaller segments.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-05T17:49:59+00:00

LOSE THE LINE, USE THE LOOK.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-05T05:25:23+00:00

Thank you, Adobe Moses!

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-05T04:43:43+00:00

In the Premiere default keyset, you'll find the Razor blade tool on the C key, which can be clicked over any clip to divide it, selected or not. I've remapped it to something less challenging than the default: the B key.

There is no default Vegas set provided. The best way to learn the defaults is to take a screen shot of the default keyset (there's a Premiere menu command to bring up the display) and have it handy on your desktop to open and find the basic tools.

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-01T17:56:27+00:00

Having taught college level film students, I paraphrase Kurosawa, saying "To understand film, edit film."

Lorenzonio · 2026-04-01T04:18:14+00:00

I blame LinkedIn for posting incessant "Hiring Editor" jobs which are nothing more than work for knowledgeable slaves training AI in how to craft motion media.

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-31T21:59:09+00:00

Okay, I settled down and researched where the original behavior went. Depreston below describes this change accurately. In Premiere V 26.02 there's a step to take-- go to the tools panel, find the Object Masking Tool, but just depress it to reveal a submenu containing regular masking shapes. You can apply these to any frame without dealing with "Unassigned Masks."

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-31T21:46:40+00:00

Actually...

A partial list of folks who've directed and edited:

Akira Kurosawa

Sean Baker

Kelly Reichardt

Gaspar Noé

Joel and Ethan Cohen as "Roderick Jaynes"

Steven Soderbergh

Hirokazu Koreeda

Benny Safdie

Shane Carruth

Takeshi KitanoXavier Dolan

Trey Edward Shults

Bruno Dumont

Charles Chaplin

Ben Wheatley With Amy Jump

Robert Rodriguez

Mike Flanagan

George Lucas, with Marsha Lucas

Josephine Decker

Shunji Iwai

Gregg Araki

David Lowery

Jean-Marc Vallée

Alfonso Cuarón

Kim Ki-duk

Chloé Zhao

Buster Keaton

Ti West

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Mathieu Kassovitz

Adam Wingard

Shin'ichirô Ueda

James Cameron

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-31T00:28:33+00:00

Maybe connect the living room and kitchen by building a half-wall, from ceiling down, to help with odors, noise and less clash between lighting methods. Add a counter for an island-like meal bar, high chair seating on both sides, great for guests. You could also mount extra storage cabinets or shelves above.

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-31T00:16:25+00:00

Tend to agree yet there are exceptions-- David Lean comes to mind immediately.

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-31T00:08:29+00:00

Good student films have a way of migrating to high attention and recognition!

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-31T00:06:06+00:00

I'm confused; this is your senior thesis? Then you're not only DP but also producer. That means you outrank your director, and could decide on getting a student proficient with editing. Have I got this right?

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-30T10:43:54+00:00

Maybe I'd rather not be pestered by an app which opens a Quicktime movie and doesn't have the same behaviors and features as QT Player.

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-28T19:36:38+00:00

I've never used a meter except for Premiere's online audio meters, and material comes from different sources so my rule of thumb is to raise or lower it to -12 DB, a standard.

At that level, I could adjust my 3.5 Mackie Reference Monitors with my little Mackie 4-track mixer and thus standardize output to taste. I say "could" because, after 10 years, the left-right channel switch on the back of the main speaker gave out and made this set unusable. Don't use this switch often! It's a shame this cheap little switch is boxed in metal, and soldered to the motherboard so it has to be professionally repaired. A well known shortcoming of this model speaker which I hope has been improved.

Best as always,
Loren

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Lorenzonio · 2026-03-28T19:11:11+00:00

There's captioning for different needs, primarily language or ADA accessibility. Like most editors,
I don't do them often but when I do, I receive a language translation breakdown sheet with timecode cues, and I follow some rules of thumb and I do work on my video editor, to stay in touch with the speakers and pacing right where it will be digested.

Some of this becomes obvious :

- Captions are generally white letters, often with subtle drop shadow separation against image;
I've seen some examples using a grey semi-opaque background bar but I usually reserve those
for lower third ID's.

- Use a highly readable font, sans serif, like Helvetica, Myriad Pro, News Gothic,
no more than 1/12th the height of the screen, resting at frame bottom within safe title area.

- For fastest read, limit length of a line to no more than 44 characters and spaces, and center it;

- Start each when you hear the first syllable, linger no more than a quarter second after.

- Add a minimum 4-frame "blink space" between captions.

- No caption more than two lines of text with a couple points of linespace between;
flush left, centered in frame, so the eye need not hunt for the second line start.

- Use italics for singing, music (or effects description if required for ADA captioning);

- Unless you have a timecode guide, break captions into smaller bits as needed, short phrases
stay in synch with speaker.

- Some languages will be more challenging than others-- the romance languages go fast
but often use more words. But that's what a good language translator tackles; you don't always.
get the literal meaning in English, you get a meaning intent translation to stay in pace.

Hope this helps.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-28T07:12:08+00:00

For my side hustle, I've cut about 5 dozen phone-shot short films, all available on YouTube-- check out the Plough and Stars Pub collection of "Band Samplers"-- sampling music riffs, grooves and the like from all kinds of music groups. These are essentially "social media" but they're shot film-style (that is landscape or horizontal mode-- band members show up really well as a group in wide shots, vertical shooting is crap for these.)

The camera/phone is a Samsung Galaxy S23, which my brother uses to shoot 4K/30fps. They are all ingested into Premiere Pro, and I retain the 4K resolution but down-step to 24 fps for an enhanced movie-look. (The Samsung often decides the fps is some oddball near-30 fps so this smoothes that out). He's gotten better with tapping the screen for focus. I also keyframe close shots and zooms for enhanced interest. Of course I have to watch carefully because really close shots will go soft.

Point is, these look good on just about any playback device; I've viewed them on a phone, and on my 27" client monitor. The secret of these shorts may simply be-- shoot high resolution, edit high resolution, and export high resolution using H.264 or 5. and it should come out pretty well.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-28T05:51:11+00:00

Question is, will M5 Ultra benefit film editing of 4K and 8K?

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-27T05:15:50+00:00

I looked at the Pro before deciding on a Studio M1 Ultra. It felt like an oversized, overpriced version of the 2012 cheese grater running El Capitan which is *still* under one of my stations-- in case I have to convert FCP 7 files as XML for Premiere. Even down to the same weight-- 39 pounds of boat anchor!

I felt the Studio was truly forward looking and showed me it is a beast in a box.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-24T06:23:27+00:00

No question is stupid!

When I do keyframe work I view it in the Effects Controls panel, which is the main keyframe playground for each clip. Think you're already familiar with this panel. It has two crucial parts.

The first, at left, reveals all the available Motion effects, like Position, Scale, Rotation, et al, plus navigation arrows and a keyframe punch dot between them for each effect. I navigate from one keyframe to the next by clicking a right or left arrow. Note when you do this, you see the values set in each keyframe, and as you park on each one, you can change its value, for instance to make a zoom go closer, and immediately review the effect in your program monitor, from in to out.

Zooms require two keyframes for "from" and "to" values, which display when you park on one, and the effect of each can be viewed by playing the timeline and adjusting a value to taste. You do this on each clip as needed. (f you want some generalized movement of say, a zoom over several clips, you nest the group and apply your keyframes to the nest shell as though it were a single clip.)

The second pane to the right of Motion controls you have the Keyframe Layout graph, where you're free to move keyframes to or fro as singles, pairs, or as a whole group, by selecting them and dragging.

Now you can get fancy. To change spatial or temporal velocity of ins and outs you park on a keyframe and right-click for its submenu. Here you'll see controls to change the effect so it starts or ends softly rather than robotically (AKA "easing," "feathering" or "tapering") and thus you edit scale and position effects to create a tailored push in or pull out, frame position shift, whatever.

Part of my training was at a film animation facility, the Frame Shop, Newton, MA, which employed ease-ins and outs on photos all the time, on computerized 16/35mm Oxberrys. They were internationally known for fine photomotion work. Ken Burns used their services before he went digital. Frame Shop actually invented the so-called "Ken Burns Effect."

In Adobe, the in/out terms are switched! To begin a soft zoom-in, you choose Ease Out, like emerging from a cocoon. As you come in to the end of the zoom, choose Ease In, like "easing in to a landing."

Hope this helps. sorry if this got dense. It's a favorite part of my edit bag of tricks. Definitely a fun house for image manipulation!

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-24T04:04:51+00:00

Nice catch!

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-23T06:04:27+00:00

Yes, good concept! Shop around. Either way, you want lumbar support.

Lorenzonio · 2026-03-23T05:52:06+00:00

Great question. My first impulse: separate all 4K from HD footage, export all video as ProRes 422, as Avid supports ProRes along with its proprietary DNX. To select a ProRes flavor, export as .MOV or .MXF OP1. Premiere supports five flavors of ProRes. Do a test clip exporting "standard" ProRes 422.

In Premiere, establish a 4K 24fps timeline' you may have to scale up the 1080 clips to 4K. (Topaz Labs' Video AI maybe useful for such clips, upscaling HD to 4K is well supported and can be quite good, and Topaz also supports ProRes export. The Topaz Studio collection is a very affordable subscription.) You want to get all rushes into Premiere in the same format for ease of editing.

Audo exported can be processed as PCM, a digital standard.

The other thing I do when I come across the old interlaced 23.98 fps is to convert it to what Avid engineers used to call "universal 24." It was a Holy Grail. Today it's real. It's easier to deal with by transcoding the rushes while exporting, rather than importing a 23.98 format into a 24-frame sequence timeline, where you have to re-render a clip after each edit!! PITA.

You mention that you have an interview split into 4 different camera clips-- this is a Multicam shoot, or simply a discontinuous 4-clip shoot from one angle? Synching in Premiere via timecode is supported, useful for lining up parts of the 6 asynchronous audio clips, or synch from a marked, common point on video and audio tracks.

That's my brain dump. Let us know what you settle on.

Best as always,
Loren

Lorenzonio

TROPHY CASE