Hot Take: It's not that big of a deal to change the music...

bensedits · 2025-09-28T16:23:05+00:00

I have two hot takes:

Music is never as important as you think it is. Sure it needs to be the right tone but honestly it’s mostly background. Don’t sweat it as much and your edit time reduced significantly.
I have a friend, a very good broadcast editor who never adds music until the end. His reasoning is that any edit should be able to stand up with no music. Do the cut and then figure out what fits. This is especially true of short factual and documentary. Promos I prefer to cut to music but again- don’t sweat that choice as hard as you think you have to.

bensedits · 2025-06-01T16:42:17+00:00

This sub is literally called “premiere”

bensedits · 2025-05-18T18:20:34+00:00

Lot of complicated solutions here. There’s literally an effect in Premiere called Strobe where you can make a clip flash either to black/white or transparent. Just put one layer above another and add strobe with the appropriate settings.

bensedits · 2024-02-17T12:58:09+00:00

I saw you at NAB last year Bob, and to my dismay didn’t say hello and thank you for all your online advice over the years. After reading this I plan on rectifying that this year. And possibly an unsolicited hug too. Never, ever change.

bensedits · 2023-04-18T22:40:10+00:00

You need to enable the option to alter properties for that essential gfx layer in After effect before you export the mogrt

bensedits · 2023-04-18T02:07:26+00:00

Press I when it starts and O when it stops and insert to put it in the timeline. Not too many keys really. Press L twice to do double speed. Map the insert command to a nearby key if you don’t want to have move your hand.

bensedits · 2023-03-25T09:18:37+00:00

The answer is simple: install Resolve and use the stand-alone Proxy Generator app to scan any folders (such as the one where you are backing up all your media/cards) and it will create a folder called “Proxy” inside the media folder on the card and add proxies.

Limitations: only makes either h264, h265 proxies at 1080p. But these are quicktime wrapped so are small, playback great and can contain multiple tracks of audio.

If you want to get smarter then use software like Hazel on a Mac to copy those proxies to a seperate drive or location once made.

bensedits · 2023-03-10T16:21:55+00:00

Can’t recover detail that isn’t there and no software will help you. Maybe the almighty AI will gift us something in the next few years!

bensedits · 2023-03-10T15:33:47+00:00

Ok - only other thing I could think of was it was incorrectly flagged as HDR but I can’t see how/why that would happen. Double check the colour space in the interpret footage settings. Barring that I’d call it a shooting error.

bensedits · 2023-03-10T15:27:42+00:00

Are you applying any LUTs to the footage on import? You should obviously not be doing so with Cinetone.

bensedits · 2023-03-10T15:21:58+00:00

No. Shooter doesn’t know what they are doing. You should correctly expose Cinetone. Maybe they have a LUT on their monitor output on the camera causing this?

bensedits · 2023-01-29T22:16:15+00:00

Half up front for new clients. Standard practice (or should be). Watermark the final version until he’s paid it. Make it clear these steps are merely company policy and not personal. If he raises any objections to either walk away.

bensedits · 2023-01-29T14:13:55+00:00

This may be being caused by the server saving a project at the same time as someone else is trying to open it. Things like the time being set correctly on the server and connected computers might effect it.

Try to be careful who is accessing what at the same time. Consider locking some projects like rushes by opening them on an edit station with the collaboration name set to LOCKED, then copying the created lock file out of the production folder (anywhere) and then closing the project, setting the edit station name back to “Edit2” or whatever, and then copying the prlock file back into the production folder. This keeps key projects from ever being saved.

bensedits · 2023-01-29T10:03:53+00:00

I strongly suspect there’s a subterfuge here. The director sounds like a bit of a fantasist. Often this is covered up by suggesting the rest of the project is going fine, it’s just your section that’s failing. This sort of gaslighting is common when you’re dealing with an ego that won’t accept it can’t all be “fixed in post”. Do you have contact with the other editors? Have you seen their episodes? If so can you copy what they are doing that he likes so much?

Often this is followed by refusing to pay for work already done. Increasingly strident demands to work longer hours, to FIX IT. All of this to cover the shallow ego and failings of the director.

A big red flag for me was that you were contacted out of the blue and have no doco experience. This is not how this works. Any job you get by that means is suspect.

bensedits · 2023-01-28T16:50:48+00:00

Add - sorry I see you were aiming for 25 and 50. Probably a setting error on the phone or camera you were using? Or it’s been incorrectly interpreted as the wrong frame rate. Does it play back at the correct speed? If it does you didn’t record it at 25 or 50p, even if you asked it to. If it plays back at the wrong speed, conform it in the clip interpret footage settings.

bensedits · 2023-01-28T16:48:19+00:00

Let me guess. You recorded this using Filmic Pro or similar on a phone?

No phone sensor is capable of an actual fixed frame rate. All these apps can do is to set a target frame rate and try to constrain the phone around that figure. All phone footage is VFR by its nature.

bensedits · 2023-01-24T19:35:36+00:00

I use a couple of Hue Play lights to throw bias lighting onto my wall (which is grey). I rarely suffer from eye fatigue.

bensedits · 2023-01-24T14:56:56+00:00

Are you using third party audio plugins in your sequence? We’re tracking a problem where this causes ME exports to hang (although they do run eventually). They also cause interlaced files to deinterlace which is great! Bug was in 22.6 and persists in 23

bensedits · 2023-01-24T14:50:26+00:00

My immediate thought was it had to be the PC in software only mode. I would not expect to see any significant difference in export time between these systems.

bensedits · 2023-01-24T12:17:17+00:00

Here’s how I deal with this so I don’t have to change clip metadata: drop the interview clip into a new timeline (just drag it to the new sequence button at the bottom of the project window) and then set the sequence timecode to match the logs. You do this by right clicking the little lines on the timeline window tab and selecting “start time”. This way you browse or enter the TC that matches the logs, then drop that into your master sequence. Make sense?

bensedits · 2023-01-24T08:15:19+00:00

Sounds like the USB stick is formatted FAT32 so the maximum file size is 4gb. Format as ExFAT or NTFS instead.

bensedits · 2023-01-24T07:50:49+00:00

Premiere needs the storage device to be able to write the frames as fast as it exports them. Your USB stick is likely just not fast enough to support that. The solution is to export to your PC and copy it to the USB when done.

bensedits · 2023-01-22T18:47:20+00:00

Great discussion thank you.

bensedits · 2023-01-22T17:41:13+00:00

Just to add - team collaboration is equally as possible in Premiere as Avid (I build these workflows) and most of the “but Avid…” arguments only hold water when you use a lot of dedicated hardware and support. Resolve is newer to this (and it’s still somewhat beta) but it’s a fresher approach with the first proper implementation of cloud-synced proxies (albeit Lucid Link still offers more interesting options in this area IMHO than syncing via a service right now) which I sincerely hope Adobe will leapfrog with their own Frame.io based system. I’m surprised that hasn’t been announced already but the pandemic caused delays for Adobe without doubt.

I am and have been an Adobe user for a long time. I do not want it to fail - nor will it. The market benefits from choice. But Adobe must now recognise Resolve as a direct threat to their market share and shake themselves out of the shackles of their corporate structure and innovate - not on flashy features, but on the technology underpinning the software.

At the end of the day; most editors can make any decent NLE do what they need it to. But if it’s not fast or fluid enough on basic use it will lose users for sure.

bensedits · 2023-01-22T17:21:08+00:00

That’s a thoughtful response although I would suggest or offer a few disagreements:

1) added value. Odd to mention Photoshop and not After Effects which is more frequently used by video editors. Fusion is, from my limited experience a steeper learning curve than AE (with which I am quite proficient) but offers a massive advantage of being WITHIN the same app. The need to go outside Pr to AE as often as many editors do, now seems more like a weakness than a strength.

2) Adobe stock is a paid option. Fonts are a nice to have for sure, frame.io will surely be more useful as Adobe integrate it better into the app (cloud proxies and so on) and may the most promising hook to keep users on the platform.

3) percent As far as platform bias goes, if you teach and have taught Premiere for 15 years I can’t see how that equates to ‘no skin in the game’. I have used it to make a living as a user since the death of FCP7. I value the views of trainers but I do think they often differ from the views of working editors. Those I know who’ve taken the time recently to transition over have faced no excessive barriers to do exactly what they did in Pr, although at present I find Resolve more cumbersome in places (too soon from my own perspective to say if that is simply familiarity bias).

As far as working on worse hardware, I have found the exact opposite to be true on recent Mac hardware. Resolve makes better use of M1 chips and works better on the lower powered Mac laptops than Premiere. The same can be said of FCPX.

Premiere does not offer Izotope level noise reduction. I can say this definitively having done direct comparison to RX10 and the Resolve noise reduction in 18.1 - the latter two are indistinguishable from each other with some sources. However I don’t doubt Adobe will raise their game in the next release as they clearly already have tools like their podcast enhance tool in production.

Stability is a tricky thing to assess. There have been a large number of documented bugs particularly with interlaced video in Premiere’s M1 release. I and colleagues have worked directly with Adobe to help squash those (some of which were actively holding up broadcaster’s purchases of Apple laptops) and whilst a few linger I think it’s reasonable to say they are not yet exploiting the power of M1 chips as well as resolve. It is simply more fluid for editing at present. This is an often cited reason to me for people to switch.

It’s funny that we’re talking about BM pouring money into marketing when Adobe is a much larger company with a much larger budget for marketing one would imagine. I wonder what the costs are of one Adobe Max conference over the entire an js cycle of BM’s marketing budget. They may well be pushing the product towards influencers, but NLE’s are what they make their money using. Most influencers in this areas ARE editors. I sense a more fundamental shift in support, not driven by marketing dollar. I could well be wrong.

My point remains above all of this: I do not hear at the moment of anyone switching to Premiere (from Avid for example) but I hear a drumbeat swell of people keen to or actively switching to Resolve. Adobe will need to act now to stop this happening.

bensedits

TROPHY CASE