Undone Trailer #1

Check out the trailer for Paul Docherty & Ron Moreno's web film series "Undone," now online!

Fixing A little “Got-cha!” in the LightWorks to Premiere Finishing Workflow

On a recent music video I experimented with taking a project out of LightWorks and into Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 for finishing and conform.   The project was only scheduled for 14 hours of total production (yes, that’s right, 14 hours to shoot, edit and deliver!) so Premiere’s native integration with After Effects, Photoshop and Audition were extremely attractive for our schedule.

The process is outlined in a previous blog post and in retrospect was amazing successful.  In fact, due to it’s success we’re currently working on a LightWorks to FCP workflow for people who wish to use Motion, Color and Sound Track Pro.

I’m currently cutting a feature documentary in EditShare’s latest Pro version of LightWorks, and we’re very interested in revisiting this workflow for finishing.  We were running some tests yesterday and noticed a interesting little bug in the workflow we hadn’t noticed before. 

After a successful import of the AAF sequence into Premiere, the media relinking kept returning an error for files we knew matched.  It didn’t seem to be an issue with the AAF, as some of the media seemed to relink just fine. 

We found our answer inside our LightWorks edit.  When trimming in LWKS you can extend a clip beyond it’s content region.  LWKS treats this as slug or filler, but we found when exporting the AAF that the extra filler space is treated as an extension of the clip.  When you try to relink to media files Premiere will reject the linking - believing that the empty clip and media you have selected do not match due to the fact the clip is longer than the media file.

Solution: I had to manually go through my LightWorks Edit and remove all the extraneous trims.  After making sure I hadn’t left any sloppy trims in the edit, we exported the AAF again, and all the media easily relinked in Premiere.

Is anyone out there interested in an FCP7 version of this finishing workflow? We’re considering it right now, as FCP7 is still one of the best ways to manage HDSLR footage.

Questions, comments, war stories?