Oliver Peters on Lumetri Color in Premiere Pro CC 2015

Oliver Peters at digitalfilms has a nice look into Lumetri Color in Premiere Pro CC 2015.

It is worth checking out, and actually pointed out some things I didn’t realize.

I didn’t realize that the grade in Premiere Pro is separate from a SpeedGrade grade, and none of the grading passes over. This is really too bad. I really like SpeedGrade is an awesome Grading program, and it could be amazing with just a little work from Adobe, but instead they are porting some of it’s functionality into Premiere, but dumbing it down to a much more Lightroom like interface, instead of a Pro Grading Suite as SpeedGrade is.

I would be much happier if the grade was in fact the same and passed from one to other so you could use the high end grading controls if you want or the lightroom like controls in Premiere.

It actually kind of scares me that they might just dump speedgrade (no upgrades this time around), when really all it needs are a few little tweaks like multi monitor support to make it really powerful.

A problem with Paste Atributes in Adobe Premiere Pro 2015

I don’t know if this was issue before 2015, but I really noticed it on an edit today.

When you are copying and pasting attributes of a file, it doesn’t paste size correctly if you have unselected uniform scale. I have clips that are a strange aspect ratio so I have to scale the height and width separately, and the only way to paste the attributes correctly is to first unselect uniform scale, and the paste works as you would think. this is frustrating with many clips, and uniform scale should be one of the attributes that Adobe copies when you copy and paste them, but it is not.

Can’t save Premiere Pro 2015 Projects to earlier version

The latest and greatest Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 came out, and you should be warned of some issues.

First off the new version requires OS X Yosemite on a Mac, the latest OS Version. This means if you have a computer that is going to be slow on Yosemite or doesn’t have enough memory you are SOL even with a subscription to Creative Cloud. And this makes 2 other major problems.

The first is that when you install the new version the default setting is to remove 2014 from your system. You can get around this if you know by going to advanced settings and not allowing this, or by re-installing the old versions, but this is an annoyance that was never hear before. Normally it kept all your old versions.

And the second and worse part is that projects saved in Premiere Pro 2015 cannot be opened in 2014, and even worse there is not a way to save down a version like Premiere used to have. In fact you could save down a version in each version then open in that version and save down again. Now you can only save projects to 2015.

The only workaround is to export a Final Cut Pro XML and import that in 2015, but that can be messy. On my first attempt at that, the clip size got messed up (making ever clip 33% wider, which was fine for clips that had not been resized, but for resized clips make for a lot of work). And even worse for projects with lots of text created in Premiere Pro, it all gets wiped out, and leaves a clip with some of the text (but not all) as a marker. This is nuts!

Adobe needs to put back in the ability to save down a version, as not everyone upgrades right away or at all!

I have of course reported this as a bug to Adobe (you can see the form right here) and you should to, because if they get enough complaints they will have to put this feature back in!

Problems Batch Relinking MXF files in After Effects that were sent from Premiere Pro using Adobe Dynamic Link

So I am working multiple projects right now, primarily on a single machine, but had to render out some 30 minute very complicated projects in Adobe Media Encorder, and I have found it is very unstable with the long complicated projects, so we copied the media to an alternate drive and I moved to another machine. Premiere Pro easily relinked my whole project in a few seconds, but with after effects it was not so easy.

I had quite a few After Effects compositions that I had sent from Premiere Pro, and the problem arose from the fact that the media are MXF files from a P2 card. Normally in after effects if you replace a single file with it’s original file, it looks and relinks all the files it can in that same structure, but this does not work with MXF files.

MXF files that were imported using Adobe Dynamic Link from Premiere pro show up without their extension in After Effects, while the actual files have the .mxf extension. If you import the same files normally in After Effects they show up fine with extension, so this is a Dynamic Link issue. And the problem is that when you replace a file with it’s correct original, it does not see the other files as the correct file because they don’t have the correct extension in After Effects.

These are the MXF files after relinking.

This means that you have to manually relink the files in After Effects one at a time, which is a major time waster. I am pretty sure that this is an Adobe Dynamic Link issue, so I have reported this to adobe and hope that someday they fix this bug (you can report bugs and features requests to Adobe here).

Of course this wasn’t my only issue, as when I brought the project back to the original system after using File Synchronization to bring the projects back to the original issue, the Premiere Pro project got messed up. The timeline is completely screwed up and doesn’t show correctly.

Here is the messed up version, and zooming, scrolling or anything doesn’t help.
Here is what the sequence should look like.

Now I was able to work around this, by opening the earlier project in Premiere and using the Media Browser to import the new sequence into Premiere Pro. The cool part is that it also imported all the new files that I had imported into the proper places within the project. They were offline, but it was easy enough to relink the files. Still not sure what happened here, but it is furstrating!

Adobe teases the next version of SpeedGrade and the new Project Candy

At it’s Moving Colors blog, adobe has teased the next version of Adobe SpeedGrade. Unfortunately it doesn’t really go into the program itself, just going into it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro. I was really hoping for multi-monitor support, as I find it the biggest problem of SpeedGrade. I want to be able to put my scopes huge on a second monitor so I can see them!

Anyway, here are the features that they list, and the videos which I have already shown in the Premiere Pro post.

•The Lumetri Panel in Premiere Pro.

•Curves, Hue and Saturation in Premiere Pro

•Lumetri 3 Way Color Corrector in Premiere Pro

•Taking it SpeedGrade, your Lumetri color correct in Premiere Pro shows as a single Lumetri Color Layer in SpeedGrade.

•Introducting Project Candy. This is a new app for your phone that lets you take a photo and color match it in 3D color space and save it to your Creative Cloud library and apply it in Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop or SpeedGrade. To me it doesn’t seem all new, but an update the existing iOS Adobe Color App that would let you take photos to make color swatches. The funny part is while I think it is a cool idea, I would rather have the tech built into After Effects or Premiere, so I could do this with a photo on the computer, as I am much more likely to find a reference image that I want to use instead of a photo I am going to take with my phone.

Adobe teases the next version of Adobe Audition

Adobe has teased the next version of Audition at it’s Adobe Audition blog.

Here is a quick breakdown of the new features revealed.

•Dynamic Link Streaming to play back Premiere Pro sequences directly.

•Full Screen Mirror Video Display on a second monitor.

•Relink Media

•Automatic Session File Backup

•Copy Imported Assets to Session Folder

•Schedule Recording

•Custom Level Meters Crossover Values

•Import/Export Markers

•Brazilian Portuguese Language Support

•Audio Driver Performance and Stability Updates

This is a program I need to delve into more, but really I hope to pass my audio on to a real mixer, so it has never been as important to me.

Adobe teases the next release of After Effects

Todd Kopriva at his AfterEffects blog has teased the next version of After Effects to be shown at NAB next week.

Here is a quick breakdown of the new features.

•Creative Cloud libraries to share graphics and looks between Premiere, Photoshop and Illustrator.

•Greater Interactive Performance thanks to a new architecture. Let’s hope it doesn’t break all current plug ins!

•Unified and Simplified previews.

•A preview of Adobe Character Animator.

•Face Tracker Effect.

Yes this all sounds pretty exciting, though the character animator seems pretty niche.