Best way to prep and work with Epic's multiple aspects in a an HD world?

[Paul J Steinberg]

Currently with Epic footage I start a new sequence (Typically BlackMagic/8-bit YUV/Progressive/23.976p), load all the footage into bins, when I start laying clips down on the timeline I'm clicking the clip, right clicking SCALE TO FRAME SIZE, then clicking the clip in the program monitor and manually scaling it up to match the height of the frame.

There has gotta be a better way to do that.

With Scratch I can start an HD project, load the Epic footage, tell it to conform everything to 'match height' and VIOLA! I'm working in 1920x1080 and can still resize/reframe if needed as the Rocket card is doing the resizing and cropping. Is there a similar way to load in Epic footage to Premiere so it automatically resized and center crops for HD?

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

Ok I found the "scale to frame size" in the global preferences so that skips one step but is there anyway to have Premiere center punch the clips to 'match height' in a 16:9 project?

 

[Steve Marshall]

Scale to frame size is not a good way to use 4k/5k footage in Premiere. When you select this option Premiere will not downsample the image upon export - it will just extract the portion of the image it needs. (i.e. 4k to HD will extract every 4th pixel) (at least this is the way I understand it works)

I personally scale down a clip and then copy the attributtes and paste into each new clip. I wish there was a better option but at the moment I don't think there it.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

Thanks for the tip Steve. I'll uncheck scale to fit.

Boy that is really clumsy. Also a giant pain in the arse if you have 5K/4K/3K/2K footage all on the timeline.

Scratch seems to have the most elegant workflow. You set the project resolution/frame rate, load your media and at that point chose to scale (match to height/width/etc) and from what it looks like, the Rocket card takes care of the work. If I want to resize or reframe a shot in Scratch I can blow it up/move it around a lot without any quality loss while working in HD res. I'll go look for that Adobe suggestion box now...

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

I disagree. I have used scale to frame size for years now with RED footage, and the output of Scale to frame size does not lose quality over scaling the footage yourself. Premiere does a great job of down sampling red footage.
Paul, in order to have the clips all brought in to match your frame size you need to check the global option in the preferences menu, and then import your footage into premiere. Any footage already imported will not automatically scale.
If you want to make sure on output that you are getting a full debayer render, check the box "use maximum render quality" and premiere will debayer the footage at 4 or 5k and then scale to 1080P. This takes a lot longer in the final render, and produces arguably better results, but personally I prefer to use global scale to frame size for all my 1080P projects.
One exception would be re framing an image, which I will uncheck scale to frame size and scale manually.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

Paul, in order to have the clips all brought in to match your frame size you need to check the global option in the preferences menu, and then import your footage into premiere. Any footage already imported will not automatically scale.
If you want to make sure on output that you are getting a full debayer render, check the box "use maximum render quality" and premiere will debayer the footage at 4 or 5k and then scale to 1080P. This takes a lot longer in the final render, and produces arguably better results, but personally I prefer to use global scale to frame size for all my 1080P projects.
One exception would be re framing an image, which I will uncheck scale to frame size and scale manually.

Thanks for the reply Stefan. Where is this global option? Do you mean the 'scale to frame size' option?

I'm just looking to bring 5K 2:1 into 1080p 16:9 with a center punch.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

Go to Edit/Preferences/General, and there is a box that says "default scale to frame size". Restart Premiere and re import footage into premiere, now all footage will automatically scale to frame size, and fit 16:9 with a center punch.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

Hmmm...that's exactly what I've been doing but when I import with 'default scale to frame size' the 5K 2:1 still imports with black bars on top and bottom (fit width) and not full frame (fit height). Is there another setting that has to be clicked to do this?

 

[jimhare]

Another thing is the ability to zoom in later. I found that SCALE TO FRAME appears to create a subclip rather than simply inserting a scale value.

In other words a 5K clip's scale size becomes 100% at 1080, not 42% or whatever.

This was most evident when I opened the Premiere project in AE. There was a new composition for every single clip in the timeline and to make any scale changes I had to go into that composition.

To avoid this I started making the scale change manually so I didn't have to make changes in two places.

With this in mind, is the best way to make the manual change and apply it to all the other clips?

I'm still crossing over from FCP so I may have just done something stupid.