PVC on How to move your Adobe Premiere Pro keyboard shortcuts and user settings, most all of them

How to move your Adobe Premiere Pro keyboard shortcuts and user settings, most all of them

I didn’t realize that your premiere pro settings were no longer going to sync after Adobe Discontinued Creative Cloud Synced Files. Now I have always had issues with it, because they seem to get fucked up more often than they should, but it is kind of huge that this is going away.

This is going to make Digital Rebellion’s Preference Manager to be back to being a very important part of my workflow, and it should be considered the same for all editors.

Film Editing Pro on Multicams or Merge Clips in Premiere Pro

Film Editing Pro has an good article on using Multicams vs Merge Clips in Premiere Pro.

Now like Sofi Marshall I do like Merge clips, but just wish Adobe would fix them, getting rid of meta data and not being able to go back to original clips without exporting an xml and re-importing (and the fact that this works shows that Merge clips still has the data somewhere). And I don’t like single angle clips to be multicam, but they are right that as it is now Multi-cam is slightly superior.

Still might just switch back to using Red Giant (or should I say Maxon) Plural eyes and sequences unless Adobe does something about Merge clips.

Should graphics with transparency use Straight or Premultiplied Alphas

I was rendering some graphics in After Effects for use in Premiere Pro and started thinking about Alpha interpretation. I have been doing graphics professionally since I started editing the behind the scenes footage for Lord of the Rings , The Fellowship of the Ring and over the years I worked out that Straight alphas almost always worked out better for me, with better edges. Now I have read that Final Cut Pro prefers a premultiplied alpha, but I have certainly had better luck with with a straight alpha. I wanted to dive into what the differences really are, and a great definition is in Help for After Effects.

Image files with alpha channels store transparency information in one of two ways: straight or premultiplied. Although the alpha channels are the same, the color channels differ.

With straight (or unmatted) channels, transparency information is stored only in the alpha channel, not in any of the visible color channels. With straight channels, the results of transparency aren’t visible until the image is displayed in an application that supports straight channels.

With premultiplied (or matted) channels, transparency information is stored in the alpha channel and also in the visible RGB channels, which are multiplied with a background color. Premultiplied channels are sometimes said to be matted with color. The colors of semitransparent areas, such as feathered edges, are shifted toward the background color in proportion to their degree of transparency.

Some software lets you specify the background color with which the channels are premultiplied; otherwise, the background color is usually black or white.

Straight channels retain more accurate color information than premultiplied channels. Premultiplied channels are compatible with a wider range of programs, such as Apple QuickTime Player. Often, the choice of whether to use images with straight or premultiplied channels has been made before you receive the assets to edit and composite. Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects recognize both straight and premultiplied channels, but only the first alpha channel they encounter in a file containing multiple alpha channels.

Setting the alpha channel interpretation correctly can prevent problems when you import a file, such as undesirable colors at the edge of an image or a loss of image quality at the edges of the alpha channel. For example, if channels are interpreted as straight when they are actually premultiplied, semitransparent areas retain some of the background color. If a color inaccuracy, such as a halo, appears along the semitransparent edges in a composition, try changing the interpretation method.

And that explains it, since with premultiplies the edges can get some of the background color leaking into them in some cases, which is not the case with straight alphas.

And while quicktime and Apple may prefer premultiplied alphas that does not make them better or desirable, Apple already has it’s whole gamma shift issue with quicktime that is a disaster, so adhering to what they want isn’t always the best idea.

Adobe announces Substance 3D Collection, but it is in addition to Creative Cloud Subscription!

Adobe just announced the new Adobe Substance 3D Tools, though for those excited to try them out, they are not included in Creative Cloud, and are instead a separate subscription. Can you say, WTF!

You get Substance 3D Stager to put models together, material and light a 3D scene to produce virtual photographs and renderings, which sounds like a high end version of Adobe Dimension (which is in Creative Cloud).

You get Substance 3D Painter to paint textures and materials on a 3D Object.

Substance 3D Sampler to create materials and textures with a photo.

And Substance 3D Designer to create your own textures, materials and models.

There is also a Substance 3D Asset Library and a private Beta of Substance 3D Modeler.

I know companies love there subscriptions, and that 3D programs are getting really high subscription prices, but this should have been included in Creative Cloud. Of course I also think it should be more than creating stills as 3D motion product shots would be amazing to be able to make quickly and well.

ProVideo Coalition article on Adobe and AVID needing iXML metadata in the Timeline

I have posted how this is needed in Premiere immediately, but i ran across this article by Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition. I hadn’t realized that Final Cut Pro X had added it, and didn’t realize you can read the metadata in Premiere, just not easily, and it should be appended to the tracks in the timeline just like it is DaVinci Resolve.

This is a feature that Adobe needs to add immediately.

Jarle Leirpoll has a must read article on Premiere Pro’s Render Quality and Bit Depth at Frame.io

Jarle Leirpoll, the author of the book Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro and who runs the awesome site Premiere Pro.net, has written an absolute must read article at Frame.io on Premiere Pro’s Render and Bit Depth settings.

Honestly after all these years of using Premiere Pro I didn’t know exactly how all these settings work and when they are affecting things, and Jarle really goes into depth and he ran extensive tests on everything to prove it.

This really should be essential reading for any Premiere Pro user, and his open letter to Adobe is so true, and I just hope they listen. The whole thing should be simplified, which would quickly solve so many users issues with banding on exports.

Sofi Marshall’s must read Ultimate Guide to Productions in Premiere Pro

 After my last post on Productions I also had to post this great guide from editor, writer and workflow expert Sofi Marshall, who I posted about her work from home streaming setup previously, THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PRODUCTIONS: PREMIERE PRO’S MOST UNDERRATED NEW FEATURE.

This is a great read from someone who obviously has used this extensively and will really get you up and going with a feature that you should be using if you have a project of any size.

Just started using Productions in Premiere on a project that I was given to update an existing project, and I can’t believe just how good it

So I was just given a huge direct response, and the 300 MB project barely functioned, just beachballing when I tried to do anything. In fact I couldn’t even get it to copy and paste the contents into a new project, it just would beachball and nothing would happen. It was basically a disaster of a project and with a 28 minute and 30 second infomercial I really needed it to be sprightly since I am new jumping into it.

I considered just getting the sequence I was working on out, and did that, but it was a mess, and I would need to search through footage to cover different things, so I really the whole project.

So I tried Productions. You can read it about it here in the Adobe Premiere Pro Manual.

Basically I started a new Production and imported my existing project, which took a while to work, as the project was so messed up. I then broke the project up into smaller little projects as bins, and now a project that was taking 10+ minutes to open, opens in 15 seconds and works better than I could have ever expected!

This basically turns Premiere Pro into AVID, where each Bin is it’s own little project file. So if you are well organized you can break up a project and make little manageable pieces that you only need to open when you need to, to save memory. And you can use folders and break things up even more granularly, so multiple footage bins if you need it.

This is also for multi-user workflows as you can have some bins that open read only and others that you have read write, so you can find footage and not even own a bin, but it works just as well for a single user on a big project.

Honestly should be very scared of Productions, because it fixes one of the longstanding complaints about Premiere Pro where it is a single project that can get messed up. Instead it is a folder of projects all working together. WOW!

Honestly if you are doing a large project in Premiere I would consider using Productions because it speeds everything up and really just works.

This is easily the biggest improvement I have seen in years in Premiere Pro, and really pushes it to new professional heights.

Awesome.