The pressures of social media

[Bamboopictures]

Instant turnarounds, Live streaming, same day edits, these used to be burden of news cameramen, but thanks or no thanks to social media, today's event videographers are increasingly asked to deliver high quality production immediately after an event wraps up. Not only must there be a semblance of quality, the file must be small enough to upload in a jiffy. I have a feeling, the usual NLEs like Premiere or FCPX are not as adept at handling this kind of time demand expecially when running off laptops on location.

So how are the wedding folks doing it?
Care to share your favorite codec/NLEs for instant turnaround?

 

[pettypoh]

maybe use 2 laptops? the 2nd laptop just to do a couple of short 15-30secs videos for social media?

 

[Bamboopictures]

Good Idea! Wondering if NAS speeds can support 2 laptops these days. If really desperate, can just throw a few clips into Muvee and auto-generate an MTV in 5 minutes. Great way to beat the clock for live stream events. Any GH4 users here can share their experience editing all-intra? Any time-saving there or is it even slower?
How about using prores straight out of BMPCC? Is there a profile that will produce usable footage without color-grading?
Been using Clipwrap to rewrap AVCHD for emergencies but footage doesn't play smoothly once effects are applied.
iFrame use to be a very easy codec to edit but very few cameras use that now.

 

[pettypoh]

my guess is NAS can support, but isn't it troublesome to bring out a NAS?
should be able to use network cable to connect 1 laptop to another, and direct transfer from one to another, so transfer-flow is card >> laptop#1(main) >> laptop#2(sub)

 

[Bamboopictures]

Brilliant! Thanks for the tip!

 

[alternus]

Hmm... dun take on customers who demands unreasonable turn around times. For wedding videographers, 3-6 hrs is the norm to push out a nice 4 mins summary clip. No special tips/tricks. Just transfer and edit and render to whatever format the client needs. And of course, avoid NLEs that transcoding of your footage.

 

[pettypoh]

Hmm... dun take on customers who demands unreasonable turn around times. For wedding videographers, 3-6 hrs is the norm to push out a nice 4 mins summary clip. No special tips/tricks. Just transfer and edit and render to whatever format the client needs. And of course, avoid NLEs that transcoding of your footage.

i agree - unreasonable is always big no-no, but if we look at it another way, such requirements may actually be opportunities for the company / main photographer to hire / test an additional assistant that is interested to learn about wedding / event photography (by shadowing the main photographer), and also allowing the assistant a chance to have some hands-on experience editing some simple clips (that are less critical, for the social media component)

but, of course, price for additional assistant needs to be factored in as well =D

 

[Bamboopictures]

The definition of what is 'reasonable' is fast changing due to technology. Now it is reasonable to be reachable by phone, email, whatapp, sms. Vine, instagram, facebook, youtube is making it reasonable to upload videos from handphone and even do live streaming to social media. I have a feeling in the next 12-24 months, it might become reasonable to upload to youtube from camcorders. Just got to keep doing catch-up with consumer expectations.

 

[kandinsky]

I have a feeling, the usual NLEs like Premiere or FCPX are not as adept at handling this kind of time demand expecially when running off laptops on location.

Lol, I had the same feeling too not too long ago. What laptop are you using at the moment? Asking cos I was using a 2010 i5 mbp for the longest time, and it gave me the impression that Ppro was sluggish. But after upgrading to a new desktop system, I've realized that the bottleneck for me (esp in the past 1-2 years) had been the hardware/laptop, not the software.

If you have a laptop running the newer haswell i7 quad-core processors, SSDs and sufficient RAM, Ppro (CS5 and above) & FCPX should be able to handle most codecs fairly smoothly without transcoding, as they do take advantage of multi-threaded processing. Even better if it has a discrete GPU.

Don't see why you would need to run two laptops unless you need to work on different edits. With Adobe Media Encoder, you can queue and export the same sequence with different output settings, and you can still continue working in Ppro while AME handles the export.

 

[Bamboopictures]

Currently still chugging along with FCP7 on mid 2011 MBP with AMD graphics. You're probably right about the hardware. Time for a major overhaul. But also looking at what's interesting on Windoze. Heard there's plenty of live streaming software there.

 

[kandinsky]

Currently still chugging along with FCP7 on mid 2011 MBP with AMD graphics. You're probably right about the hardware. Time for a major overhaul. But also looking at what's interesting on Windoze.

Ah, I see. FCP7 is still single-threaded I think, so in that case the software may also be a factor. Haha, be careful. Cos I looked around and ended up with a Windoze desktop ;p

Update: Read that FCPX and Vegas don't have native support yet for newer XAVC-L (different from XAVC-S) files from XDCAM cameras like PXW-X70.

 

[Jeremy Kieran Ng]

I think that the fastest workflow for me will be to use DaVinci Resolve 12. It is free and user-friendly, great for colour grading and does almost everything that FCP or PP can.

My preferred codec to work with is ProRes because very little transcoding/compression is involved so editing and exporting is very quick compared to working with H.264 - the only issue is file size.