Making TV With Adobe Premiere
People ask us all the time how we edit our TV shows. Until recently, it was a complicated, rambling answer filled with a mish-mosh of pseudo best practices. Not anymore. We’ve just taken our entire company in a brand new direction. We’re now making TV with Adobe Premiere and the Creative Cloud suite, and the results will be on national television in just about a week. Can Adobe Compete in the Reality TV Industry? Five years ago, like many, our production company Joke Productions would’ve shrugged off the idea of cutting our TV shows on Adobe Premiere. Our entire industry was run on Avid and Final Cut Pro (the pre X version) and no one thought about using anything else. Then…Final Cut Pro was reborn as Final Cut X — and production companies everywhere freaked. Many had chosen Final Cut Pro for its ability to composite in the timeline, have loads of audio tracks, and in certain situations, do more in less time. We were one of those companies. While we still did occasional projects on Avid, so much of what we cut relied on heavy compositing, last minute changes, and numerous tracks of audio packed with sound design that it was less hassle to edit the shows in Final Cut Pro. However, suddenly Final Cut Pro, as we knew it, was gone. So What Do We Do Now? One thing that makes our company a little different is that while we are the owners and executive producers, we’ve also both spent years personally working at edit bays. Biagio is still lead (and often only) editor on all of our pilots and pitch tapes, and often edits on our series as well. Joke has spent many years stringing out story in edit bays. Together we’d already both spent a great deal of time in Avid and Final Cut Pro over the years. Now we were getting up to speed in Final Cut X and Premiere so we could get our heads around the changing post landscape. Basing our post decisions on hands-on experience has always been important to us. We don’t want to be executive producers waving our wands and saying “do it this way” without really understanding what we’re asking of our post team. Since we knew what we really, really wanted out of an NLE (non-linear editor) we decided to try something crazy. The Long Shot We attempted to reach out directly to Apple, Avid, and Adobe, in hopes of telling them about our company, the wide variety of shows we make, and asking them to workshop with us to make their software work even better than what we were doing in FCP 7. (We didn’t actually know anyone at any of these companies.) Both Avid and Premiere came to our offices to talk to us (hear the full story in the podcast ep above.) Premiere had been doing some really interesting things for a while — integrating well with the outstanding Adobe After Effects and Photoshop (which we already used) and adding quirky new features that were unique to Premiere. Adobe offered to work with us to tweak Premiere for the composite-heavy, resource-demanding brand of TV we were making. But…no one had really battle-tested Premiere for the rigors of unscripted television. Well, we’ve now battle tested it for a very, very long time. Two Years Later Everyone now knows Fincher cut Gone Girl on Adobe Premiere, but no one knew that during that time our (much smaller) company was investing countless hours into testing Premiere, or that Adobe was visiting our offices, listening to our concerns, and tweaking the software to work better for reality television.