Netflix’s MANK is leading 2021 Oscars nominations with 10 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Earlier this week, Adobe hosted a panel with editor Kirk Baxter, ACE, first assistant editor Ben Insler, and assistant editor Jennifer Chung to discuss their remote workflow on Premiere Pro and After Effects.
The team has also talked about the creative choices they made alongside director David Fincher, and their experience being among the first to battle test Premiere Pro’s Productions feature, to great success.
Panel Participants:
- Moderator: Meagan Keane, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Professional Film & Video at Adobe
Panelists - Kirk Baxter, ACE, MANK Editor
- Ben Insler, MANK First Assistant Editor
- Jennifer Chung, MANK Assistant Editor
Kirk Baxter, Editor
On how Premiere Pro has evolved since he first used it on Gone Girl in 2014: “The main thing that I notice is that it’s just easier to work amongst multiple projects and it’s faster to open, and upload, everything has become much faster and much simpler in terms of accessing things. In that [Adobe] has really perfected what they’re doing.”
On why his team continues to use Premiere Pro: “It’s effective and it’s working and Adobe and the guys on [the Premiere Pro team] have gone out of their way to be helpful partners with us. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
On the keystrokes he uses in Premiere Pro: “It speaks to the way [Premiere Pro] is set up, to be able to work in whatever your method is. Everybody seems to have their own method.”
On editing remotely in Premiere Pro: “Because I live in a somewhat naive world, or perhaps selfish world, I wasn’t aware of the complexities of what was set up. Therefore, I never fully appreciated how seamlessly [Premiere Pro] worked, because from my perspective and Fincher’s perspective it was seamless.”
Ben Insler, First Assistant Editor
“We can address [technical hiccups or set breakdowns] so quickly because of these tools that essentially let us automate what is the very tedious process of getting all the dailies in and aligning them with multicams and getting them all organized…Premiere lets us be very fast with that too, because it will just take this XML and let us shuffle things around quickly.”
“This was our first time using Productions [in Premiere Pro]…that was really powerful for us. It let us work a lot more efficiently when it came to things like project size and the number of items in a project and the way that we stayed organized.”
Jennifer Chung, Assistant Editor
“One of the things that gives us the flexibility and efficiency within visual effects is using Dynamic Link [between Premiere Pro and After Effects] and that’s a huge part of our workflow because of the volume of the temp work that we’re doing.
That allows us to seamlessly go into After Effects and do whatever work we need to do, whether that’s splits or stabilization or rotoscoping or removing any equipment, and then we can jump right back into Premiere and render that and have that in the timeline.”
Make sure to check out the entire 1-hour discussion for more insights on the particular creative process of Kirk Baxter and his team.
[source: Adobe]
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