Premiere Pro

Timeline Preparation

To ensure a smooth XML export from Adobe Premiere Pro for color grading, follow these steps to clean up your picture locked timeline:

  1. Create a duplicate of the picture locked timeline with a suffix like "_XML"

  2. Collapse multiple video tracks by moving clips to the minimum number of tracks necessary and removing disabled clips. Preserve a seperate video track for visual effects renders.

  3. Usually graphic layers get removed from the timeline. If wished to keep them included for readability check, leave them on a separate track.

  4. Remove all audio clips and tracks.

  5. (optional) It is a good practice to add timeline markers, where effects were used, such as Warp Stabilizer or speed ramps to prevent any confusion while conforming in DaVinci Resolve.

Here an example of how usually a cleaned up timeline looks like, if there is only one video track needed.

And here an example of a timeline with two split screen effects, where the second shot lays on track V2. Additionally, there are two markers added for clarification of a speed ramp effect.

Export XML

  1. Go to the File menu at the top of the screen and select Export > Final Cut Pro XML...

  2. Choose a location on your computer to save the XML file. Click Save to export the XML.

Export Reference Video

Export a reference video, preferably in Apple ProRes Proxy codec, of the picture locked timeline. Its important, that it is not the XML timeline, to ensure that the conform gets checked against the approved version, in case any mistakes happened during the clean up of the timeline.

Media Management

This section only applies, if the edit was done with the original camera files.

To collect all the necessary raw files for the XML, go to File > Project Manager...

Consolidate the files with these Settings and specify your desired destination path:

Upload the consolidated files to the FTP server. If you need help with this, check here.

If a proxy workflow was used, there are three options:

  1. Conform the project in DaVinci already on your side, you can find a guide for that here.

  2. Manually search for the raw files and deliver these, if its a small project.

  3. Deliver all the raw footage, either via FTP upload or SSD. Let's talk about this, if it should come to this case.

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