The Adobe Support Community is a huge resource for those who are having issues with their Adobe software. While Adobe isn’t on the forums that often (they are sometimes), other users are very helpful and will do what they can to help you.
Separately from the forums you should also know about the Feature Request / Bug Report form which is where you should post specific requests or reproducible bugs to Adobe.
You can also try Adobe’s Help page, though I find you get more results from the community.
As an editor, colorist and motion graphics artist, I of course use dual monitors. And they are 2 very different displays, but even if they were the exact same type of display you need to try and balance them as mush as you can, and that is why I own and us a datacolor Spyder X (and yes the printing is smudged and coming off on mine).
This is the menu bar launcher.
And where you calibrate the displayers, you will then put the device on the spot on the display and turn up the brightness and it will measure your displays.
It measures both displays, has you set matching brightness, and then lets you adjust based on perception. It can be difficult if you have very different displays but is certainly worth it so your 2 displays are as close to each other as can be.
My only complaint is that having bought the device, the software is linked to my computer. And I would love to be able to take it with my to match monitors at work, especially with rental computers, but obviously they want them to buy there own, unfortunately most companies won’t bother.
Since Adobe Creative Cloud only supports the latest 2 versions of your apps, if you need an earlier version what do you do? Well the first thing you can do as an active creative cloud subscriber is contact support and ask for an earlier version.
The other thing you can do is go to ProDesignTools and check and see if he has the direct download links for the version you need. He has the links from 2019 to 2021, so you can still get 2019 if you need them (and if you are using them for a job, maybe it is a good idea to download their direct installers just in case as they are no longer available from the Creative Cloud app).
So I was seeing some posts on various Premiere forums on Facebook about having a version of Premiere not work at all, not launching or not installing and I want to post about a possible solution and one that has worked for me in the past. Now this is a last resort, after you have removed your plug ins and reset your preferences and cache files, and if stuff still ins’t working.
The absolute last resort tool to try is the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner tool. This will wipe out everything Adobe on your system, and you can completely re-install form scratch. It will sometimes solve problems that a standard uninstall won’t touch.
Now if you are using older versions of your programs, you might want to check in the Creative Cloud app to see if the version you are running can still be re-installed, as it seems that Adobe has killed most earlier versions at this point and currently only supports Premiere Pro 15.0 and 14.9, with version 13.1.5 (2019) unable to be re-installed, so take caution before doing an uninstall at this point!
So the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner tool will literally scrub your system of all things Adobe, and this blank slate could help solve some serious issues, so it is something you should know in case of major issues.
So another plug-in that you don’t need until you do, and when you do it is great to know it is there.
Now the main use for this plug-in is for work with 3D imagery. If instead of rendering Motion blur in a 3D image, you have the 3D artist render you a motion vectors pass, then with this plug-in you can add motion blur after the fact and have full control over it, which is a huge thing, and absolutely necessary, but that is only scratching the surface of what this can do.
This plug in can automatically track every pixel in an image and add realistic motion blur, and you can control the amount. Blur can also be removed. This doesn’t sound like much but it really is. Especially if you are given say footage that is high speed which then has very little motion blur, and you are running at normal speed. The footage just won’t look right because of the lack of motion blur, and adding in motion blur can make the footage look normal and correct.
Now once again there are 2 versions, the normal for $109.95 and the pro for $269.95, the pro lets you do object separation using matts, track points, alphas and simple splines and the aforementioned 3D motion Vector Input.
Once installed it shows up in your Re:Vision Plug-ins folder
If you have a good GPU turn on GPU to speed things up and you can control the amount of blur by using the blur amount control. This Goes up to 10, or can down to -2 to remove motion blur.
I have made a quick little video using the same footage of my Shar Pei Boba Fetch as the last video on Re:Vision Effects Twixtor. This time I show the 59.94 footage playing at normal speed in a 23.976 timeline and then adding in more motion blur, we have it at the default .50 at 1.0 and at 2.0.
Once again not the ideal footage or a demo, but some of my own footage, so I can use it, and you can certainly see the effects.
While Premiere has the ability to slow down your footage, and it has a newer higher quality version called Optical Flow (called Pixel Motion in After Effects). It is certainly better than plain frame blending, but it is not the highest quality slow motion you can get. For the highest quality post slow motion the answer has always been the expensive but worth it TWIXTOR from Re:Vision Effects.
Clip speed in Premiere Pro is in the Clip Menu.
This brings up the Speed Panel, and for best results select Optical Flow from the drop down menu.
Twixtor comes in 2 versions, Standard and Pro and is available for a variety of platforms. The version I use is the After Effects/Premiere Pro version. The standard version is $329.95 and the Pro version is $595.00, both fairly expensive, but as I have said quite worth it.
The Pro version gives you the ability to really tweak what the auto track does, lets you use matte’s and alphas to enhance your tracks, as well as splines, and the ability to work with motion vectors from a 3D system. If you have a really important shot to slow down the Pro version is certainly worth the extra money, though you may get away with the normal version. And they have video based tutorials for their effects on their sites, and they are really worth going into to learn the ins and outs.
Twixtor shows up in your Video Effects RE:Vision Plugs-Ins (RSMB is ReelSmart Motion Blur which I plan on talking about in a later post).
The first thing to realize when working with twixtor is it works based on the whole clip as it can see it, so to specify the in points you need to Nest (in Premiere or Pre-Compose in After Effects) and in the sequence the sequence needs to be longer to work on the extent of the clip, so you might want to double or triple your clip in that nest/pre-comp.
This is the clip in the sequence with playhead parked on first frame
First frame of clip I want to slow.
Twixtor Effect Added
Speed Changed to 20%
First frame becomes first frame of clip.
So nest your clip in timeline
If you want clip longer as slow, you need to lengthen it, so double clip next to open. Since I want 20% speed, I duplicate clip 5 times.
Put twixtor on Nest in original sequence.
Here are the settings I am using. I always use GPU as I have a decent one and that speeds things up, but it is much slower within Premiere than within After Effects. Different settings will give you different results, so play around for sure. I ususally got for Motion Weighted and Smart Blend, and add a little Motion blur Compensation though it really slows things down. I have also set my Image Prep to Delinearize.
I did a video to demonstrate, it is UHD and shot 59.94 but is in a 23.976 Sequence, I have shown the footage as if 23.967, then slowed down, then slowed down to 20% using Premiere Pro’s time interpolation with Frame Sampling then Frame Blending, then optical flow and with Twixtor. This isn’t ideal footage, but Twixtor still looks the best. Of course this is recompressed by YouTube, but you should get the idea.
So recently I wrote about the awesome Mac keyboard based launcher LaunchBar from Obdev, and now I am writing about something Andrew Karamer wrote from Video Copilot wrote for After Effects called FX Console, which is the same type of thing for After Effects, he calls it a Work Flow Plug In, and it is free.
It blows away that this is listed in their Products, but must be searched for. They really need a free section for his awesome free products, to go along with his amazing paid products, that I will write about later.
This plug in just adds a quick new way to use a keyboard to add effects & presets, and create FX Shortcuts, and export Snapshots as PNG. This is a must use plug-in that will always speed you up, and once again when I get on a machine that doesn’t have it installed, I feel stunted.
Anything that speeds up your workflow is always a good thing, and this can speed up your workflow each and every day. And because of this I would easily pay for it, but it is free. So there is no reason to not download and install it.
So I have written about LaunchBar in the past, but now I am writing about it as something to speed up your workflow when using editing or graphics software. I have been using the amazing LaunchBar from Objective Development for years, and whenever I am in an office using a computer there I feel stunted by not having it.
Now LaunchBar is a tool that does so many things, but my favorite is to the ability to launch application using keyboard shortcuts, and it will learn your shorcuts quickly to speed things up. You hit a quick keyboard shortcut, which brings up LaunchBar and then you type your keys and if the application shows up hit return or push to the down arrow and select what you want to launch. After selecting the thing a few time LaunchBar learns and moves your choice to the top of list.
So to launch I hit Command-Space and the last app I launch shows up, if I want to launch it, just hit enter and it launches.
Or more powerfully you type the initials of an app, and LaunchBar will give you a list, and you select what app you want.
If I want Word, I try Wo or MW.
Then select the App and return and it will learn your initials and move the app up the list and eventually to the top.
This way I can launch any application without ever touching the mouse, and this is HUGE! IT WILL SPEED UP EVERYTHING YOU DO ON THE COMPUTER OUTSIDE OF YOU EDITING OR GRAPHICS APPLICATION!
And Launchbar does so much more. You can do calculator functions, instant web searches, go to web sites, create e-mails from contacts, merge files, check your ClipBoard History, and it is all customizable.
LaunchBar is the so worth $29 or $49 for a family license. It speeds up everything I do on the computer and it can speed things up for you as well.
Super Resolution helps create an enhanced image with 2x the width and 2x the height of the original image, or 4x the total pixel count. Most file types such as JPEG and TIFF are supported. You can especially use Super Resolution when you have to make large prints or increase the resolution of a cropped image.
This could be a huge feature for video editors, as I am always getting images that are way too small for what I need.
Now from what I see this need to be either activated through Adobe Bridge 2021 for non RAW images, or by opening a RAW image in Photoshop, activating the RAW panel form within Photoshop doesn’t seem to allow this happen.
So open the image from within Camera RAW.
Now if the Open in Camera Raw doesn’t show up for JPEG or HVEC files, you can go to the Camera Raw Preferences.
And select File Handing.
And under JPEG, HEIC, and TIFF Handing you should select Automatically open JPEGs and HEICs with settings.
Once you get the image in Camera RAW, you right click on it (or control click if you don’t have a right mouse button on Mac) and chose Enhance or hit Shift+Command+D.
This will bring up the Super Resolution Dialogue box.
And when you hit Enhance, it will a little time and double the size of the image, quadrupling the resolution and amaz�ingly it looks damn good. Way better than previous scaling. The image will be an Adobe DNG file.
I wish they would put this in as a feature in Photoshop itself to do it easier, and let you chose format, but the results can’t be argued with.
I have a feeling I will be using this quite a bit!
Stu Maschwitz, author of the DV Rebel’s Guide and designer of the Magic Bullet color grading system for Red Giant and now Chief Creative Office of Maxon has updated his Prolost EDC Presets for Adobe After Effects. You can pay what you want, though they default is $4.
EDC, as in “everyday carry” — the stuff you don’t leave the house without. Whenever I install a new version of After Effects, these are the handy little timesaving presets that I drop in first.
Most of the EDC presets are simple. Shortcuts to common settings, better defaults for often-used effects, or better interfaces for my favorite expressions.
But hey, Prolost EDC has been around since 2015, and some of these tools have gotten quite powerful. Check out Prolost Array, or Prolost Levels, both new in v2.5.
I update this set from time to time, and you’ll receive a fresh download link every time I do. It’s like subscribing to my personal After Effects toolbox.
And these include 2 new powerful filters, Prolost Levels and Prolost Array, for a total of 48 presets. Well worth picking up for any price.
