I loved the film Apollo 13. The claustrophobic, never sure if they gonna make it suspense was brilliant. But what struck me the most was that they had to basically construct a duplicate version of the space module and recreate the problem on earth so they could figure out how to fix it in space and get the astronauts home. Simple and very inspiring.

And so that brings us to today’s topic of fixing something by using something else so I can deliver what I said I would. And by that I mean, I fucking finished that fucking episode while working in Adobe Premiere Pox by not working in Premiere. I cheated.

Here’s the thing, the post house in South Africa run Adobe Premiere (V2019 blah fucking blah old blah bollox) and the programme requires a large amount of subtitles. That is a problem for me because subs do not translate to FCPX (my besty) at all. I mean nothing, just a giant black hole. I’ve spoken to the guys at XtoCC and there’s fuck all to be done. The Adobe essential graphics panel is diabolically stupid when trying to get it to talk outside of itself and impossible to translate apparently. And the post house are insisting on a premiere project at the end and also refuse to teach someone there how to use X. So what to do as the workflow is as such…

1. I receive footage

2, Sync and do a very ruff assemble. It’s a telenovela and I’m pretty much only getting 2 camera tick ticks in cu and a Mid and wide tick tick so it’s mostly a matter of deciding how I want to start and end the scene and where I want to put the wide and the mid. Simple I know but it’s a timesaver as I don’t really speak the language the show is set in so the subs help me when I do the fine cut for approval.

3. Export scene and send to subs.

4. Get an xml back from subs and place them into timeline. Now that I can only do when I’m in Premiere obvs. And this is where the issues arrive as I want to fine cut in FCPX cos it’s so much easier.

So I cheated. I get the subs back bring them into premiere, export the scene with the subs and move on over to X. See, cheating.

Now I can fine cut my episode and know exactly what’s going on without any issues. I can copy paste attributes without stopping playback, I don’t have to wait for the fucking thing to save before I can hit play, or wait for it to stop saving because you can’t do that in real-time either. I can move audio in samples and see the waveform at all times, so no more hit and miss. There’s no lag in the middle of the episode. It’s a thing of beauty. But it is not without it’s problems.

When I’m done in X I obviously have to go back into premiere and rework the subs on dialogue, it is a fine cut now and so timings have changed considerably as well as dialogue excisions. Well that took an hour. There are issues around where premiere places the audio. In X with the roles function the mix guys love me because they get an ordered by character and effects and music track listing, Bring that XML into premiere and the audio is all over the fucking place. The work around is to actually bring in the audio separately, so create a dialogue XML, an effects XML and a music XML That way I can make adjustments to its various tracks in premiere and copy paste into my main programme when it’s good to go. Of course I had to figure that out after spending another hour or so sorting out the tracks so the mix guys don’t start to hate me.

And that’s it, I cut 4 minutes in one day on premiere, switched to FCPX and cut 27 minutes in the same time.

And everyone is none the wiser, they get a Premiere Pox Project from me, the subtitles don’t need redoing and all is good with the world. I am back to being a happy camper and my wife and kids are very thankful.

And as I love to be subversive, it’s just the way I am drawn, the name of the show I’m working on is called Gomora so I have now renamed my work drive Sod ‘em. Oh how I laugh.

Peace, love and vomit. But mostly peace.

Jayce