The McClure Sessions

Yep, it's finally here!  We spent quite a while mixing and mastering and editing everything for this 5 song EP and still keep the "Raw" sound the artist wanted.






Troy and I had a lot of fun.  The stress was minimal but it also included more things than just the EP project.  I've been working around the clock on several little things.  This video was one of them, as well as starting our website and getting our services and a pricing map for our business...  Fun times ahead.

I'd love to share more of my business plans with you, but there's some production things I'd like to cut to the chase on.

If one notices carefully in the video, there are the "driving" scenes which is us going to and from our studio location to grab all the gear so that we could set everything up at my place to track drums.  I wanted to 'motion stabilize' those shots but the clips are long.  So, in Premier my first step was rough blocking to get the content on the screen i wanted, and then how i wanted it to fit in the mosaic of video that would be constantly shifting.

My first problem I ran into (probably just lack of experience and not taking the time to hunt around on the web for people's solutions / suggestions / workarounds) was when I would replace the cut I wanted with an After Effects link and go in and motion stabilize it.  If you pay more attention to the opening sequence you'll notice some of the driving shots are super steady and others are not.



In After Effects after creating the After Effects Project File, the footage clips I used are segments of the same video file and they show up in After Effects exactly at the times I have them in Premier.  I only wanted to motion stabilize that clip I wanted to use seeing as how that would cut down render times and playback issues.

However, once you create an AE Linked project, whichever one was newer in the link replaced the older one.  If I were to exit out of Premier Pro and only open the After Effects project, it would show the correct clip.

My next step was trying to render out the motion-stabilized footage using Adobe's Media Encoder tool.  The same problem occurred because it still uses the dynamic link manager as well; which apparently has permanently replaced the link to the original clip segment and only does the latest one.

What gives, Adobe?  Is there a way to create multiple After Effects compositions working on the same video file but still retain their clip-based references from Premier?


The other (and not nearly as perplexing) problem is dealing with OMF Export to work in a DAW with.  I've noticed for a long while now that stereo tracks in Premier Pro, upon importing into a DAW will come in as independent mono left and right tracks.  Note, I've been working exclusively in Sonar for doing my picture audio work, however I have tried the same OMF imports in Pro Tools and the same thing occurs.

Both DAW's are perfectly capable of working with stereo interleaved files, and creating stereo tracks.  I just find it a bit funny this information gets parsed in the export process (or translated as such on import) this way.  Has anyone else noticed or perhaps figured out a fix for this?

If anyone reading this has had similar experiences and even possibly solutions they've found for these things, I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Likewise, I'd love to hear any comments, questions, suggestions, anything at all; about the video, the questions I posed regarding After Effects and Premier Pro; or OMF Exporting.

Keep an eye out for our website launch, and if you don't already; follow me on Twitter, or facebook.  as well as our studio page on Facebook.

Aces and Trains!

Wow, where to begin...  The last couple weeks concluded the production phase of the McClure sessions:  an upcoming EP project Troy and I are just now starting post production on.

Just finished drum setup

Chris Gettin' down on some drum-tracking.

Drums, drums, drums.

I captured as much as I could of the sessions and plan on building a new video update for our studio channel by the time the mixes are done so keep an eye out for a brand-spankin' new video soon!

Left: Chris McClure, Center: Troy Reed

During these past couple weeks I've also had to wipe my main workstation clean and reinstall windows Fresh, as I just acquired Pro Tools to add to my studio DAW list.

Pro Tools 9+10, so awesome!  and yes, my shirt does say "Talk nerdy to me"

I have QUITE a bit of stuff to reinstall and I'm just barely finishing up all that, but while I have I managed to restring both my guitars, major issues with my BC Rich as usual (I highly dislike Floyd Rose Tremolo bridges).  If that isn't enough, this week alone has been very busy as I help Nick with pre-production for a commercial shoot this coming Monday and Tuesday for ACE train!

On Wednesday we arrived at the Ace station in Lathrop at about 6:30 am to shoot some pre-viz shots and plan out everything for the production.

It was a super tight schedule to figure out how to shoot arrival and departure shots, so we hurried onboard.  The rest of the day was the "hurry up and wait" as it usually is for production trying to get the timing just right for shots and then waiting patiently in between.

Thanks to Troy's T2i I was able to get plenty of test footage as well as these wonderful stills.  These just underwent some SUPER quick post correction for visual reference.

I'm hoping these are good enough to help Nick establish some groundwork for his D.P. Yuki to have a solid, all-encompassing reference for production.  All in all there's easily 2 gigs of photos and over 12 gigs of temp footage.  I believe on production days Yuki will be shooting with a Red Scarlett and I'll be helping with data management as best I can.  I'll try to keep posting more frequently as the days get busier!

As always, I enjoy any and all feedback!  Please feel free to leave comments of your thoughts on the subjects, opinions, suggestions, even flaming rants!