Workflow - .R3D to 422 Proxie and back

[Tom Van]

Hoping to get some insight on best workflow practices. I've always edited native R3Ds natively on Premiere timeline for short spots and hadn't had any major issues. But I've recently shot a good amount of 5K footage and that might not be the best solution.

The intent is to transcode all footage to 422 proxies, edit the proxies on a 5k timeline in Premiere CC2014, and finally reconnect them back to the original .R3D's for a Davinci grade.

My understanding of this workflow gets a bit fuzzy on reconnecting the proxies back to R3Ds. Can this be easily done? I've searched the forums but could not find a definitive method on this. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Conforms are usually very smooth these days...

 

[Tom Van]

I've only been able to relink each file one by one. Have not had much success batch relinking though.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

There are a lot of factors in conforming; some programs care primarily about filename, others about metadata (reel name, clip ID, etc.), some look first at timecode . . . in general, as long as your timecode and name match between the source and the proxy, you should be fine.

In Final Cut 7 (unlike Avid), if you were to change the name of the clip in your bin, it could (and usually did) cause all sorts of conforming issues. Because the XML file that gets generated is referencing a clip name that doesn't have a filename that corresponds to it. Premiere, I believe, is similar, so the rule of thumb is leave the clip name the same as the filename.

The workflow, in brief, is as follows:

1. Create proxies in RCX, Resolve, ScratchLab, or another similar program. Filenames should be the same, even though the file extension (.r3d versus .mov) will not be the same.
2. Ingest proxies into the editing program of choice.
3. Edit. Picture lock.
4. Export XML file of the timeline.
5. Import the XML into your grading program. In this case, in Da Vinci Resolve, I find it easiest to first add all the raw media to the media pool, then import the XML file. The timeline that is created should be referencing the Raw files, not the Proxies. Everything should match up.

That's the nutshell. Run some tests. Take a few clips, slap their proxies down into a Premiere timeline, export an XML, then import that into Da Vinci and see if the files link up right. Once you get that far, you can look at linking up a reference clip so that you can easily compare the timeline in Da Vinci to the sequence you had in Premiere.