Re: From FCP to PP - Questions from an editor ready for the jump!

My $.02 -

As Alex pointed out, there is a problem with the way that Premiere handles multiple versions of the same media in a project that mucks up collaborative editing. As he said, when used assembly-line style, this isn't a problem (everyone makes one part of the project, unique timelines / media are all imported at the end. Everyone's happy). However, if people are constantly "checking out" and returning timelines with media from the same project, re-importing these timelines creates duplicates, which is a problem. Again, assembly-line style is the way to go here.

I would like to talk briefly about another small workflow thing you need to be aware of. Premiere creates waveform .pek files (the visualization of the waveforms) and .cfa files from every media file you import. You can specify where these are created. I find it most convenient for these to be placed "next to the source media" (an available option) so that then I take a project media offline, I don't have all of the conformed sound files hanging around. However, the location of these conformed media files is written into the project, not the actual media file. This means that (at least in 5.5) if you had user 1 import a file on their computer, it would conform it. However, even if that conformed media file is placed next to the original file, when user B imports this file, Premiere will re-conform this file and place another conformed media file next to it.

Now, I will say that CS6 changed something about the way .cfa files work. However, I don't know what. It was not in any of the documentation. This may be different, but I am not sure. Also, if you just need to nuke all .cfa files on your drive, it's not a big deal, Premiere will re-generate all of them in the background - but it's annoying as hell.

To get around this problem, my shop wound up just ONLY "ingesting" files once (through a couple of assistant editors). Then, when editors needed the files, they would pull them by importing projects, not the individual files. This worked fine, but it's not ideal.

The lack of premiere effects has led me to make heavy use of AE, which is more powerful than FCP. I have had no complaints here - I love this workflow.

Lastly, I must jump in and say that Premiere DOES have relative path relinking... it's just finicky sometimes. I'd say it works like 70% of the time, but is a nightmare if you are working with Canon or Zoom files that have identical names. Adobe knows this is a problem and is working on it, though.