What’s New in Premiere Pro (Beta)

And a little more depth on the updated context sensitive Properties Panel that lets you make some changes to multiple clips at once (which is so very exciting).

The color management system is very exciting, and I glad Premiere will take an active role in your color management much like DaVinci Resolve’s Color Managed or ACES workflows, though I do hope it works better than the ARRI AMIRA plug in that was forced on us so long ago.

You can actually read about the Color Management System in the user manual from the previous August 16th, 2024 update, though the manual does not seem to have been updated to the latest and new Properties panel.

And any ProRES acceleration is always welcome, always! I just want some Black Magic acceleration as well!

Dramatically updated Color Management in Premiere Pro Beta

Adobe Announced in their Beta Community, a dramatically updated Color Management in the latest Premiere Pro Beta. This one sounds absolutely huge and is something we have all been clamoring for for a long time!

Here is what has changed.

  • Each sequence’s color management is easily configurable in the Sequence controls of the Settings tab of the Lumetri panel. By default, color management works similarly to the Premiere Pro color workflows you’re already used to when using the default Direct Rec.709 (SDR) preset. Alternately, you can choose to use one of our wide-gamut color processing presets to maximize the image quality of all grading and timeline effects when using wide-gamut or wide-latitude source media. Regardless of how you choose to work, Lumetri and other effects have been made color space aware, so they work well in any preset.
  • Users who don’t want to use automated color management can now turn it off from within the same Color Setup menu. This is useful for pass-through workflows when you don’t want the color space of media being processed at all, or when engaging in traditional display-referred grading workflows using LUTs and manual adjustments.
  • Premiere Pro now automatically color manages camera raw media, including Apple, ARRI, Canon, RED, and Sony raw media formats. As long as color management is enabled, raw clips will be automatically processed.
  • The Override Media Color Space menu has been expanded to support even more color spaces for more cameras and formats, making it easier than ever to color manage media that were either recorded or transcoded to standard file formats such as QuickTime and MXF, without needing to track down the right input LUT.
  • For clips you don’t want to be automatically color managed, a new Preserve RGB setting in the Color tab of the Modify Clip dialog prevents input to working color space conversions, allowing you to manually convert clips either using LUTs or manual filter adjustments.
  • Program Monitor, Video Scopes, Transmit, and Media Export all output the image as it appears after conversion to a new Output Color Space setting. While the working color space lets you choose how media is processed, the Output color space lets you choose the specific color space you want to monitor (SDR, HDR PQ, or HLG) and deliver your program to. This guarantees that the working color space never needs to be changed, while making it easy to change color spaces at any time to create multiple deliverables using the same grade (e.g., delivering both HDR and SDR versions of the same sequence).
  • Improved tone mapping algorithms and new gamut compression settings improve quality when automatically converting wide-gamut source media to standard dynamic range. Additionally, there are now two ways  of using tone mapping, on input or on output.
  • Premiere Pro color management has been improved to enable smoother interoperability and color consistency using Dynamic Link for round-tripping color managed sequence clips between Premiere Pro and After Effects whenever you use the Replace with After Effects composition command.
  • Last, but certainly not least, if you import projects and sequences created in older versions of Premiere Pro that have grading and effects already applied, these will automatically be configured to appear the same as before, while the color management will function exactly the same as before. If you decide you want to override these legacy settings and use the new color management, you can override the custom settings the sequence was set up with and choose a different color management preset (and you can use Undo if you find this was a mistake).

Now this could be huge and no matter what is going to be a big change so I look forward to playing with this. I hope they come up with something like DaVinci Resolve has to deal with the QuickTime color shift issue, but I doubt it.

Adobe needs to bring back SpeedGrade as Lumetri Pro and have a proper finishing workflow

Now I was a huge fan of SpeedGrade when it existed, and greatly lamented it’s passing when it went away. For those of you who don’t know, SpeedGrade was a professional color correction software much like DaVinci Resolve that Adobe purchased and added to their creative suite for a while, and then gutted it and that is where the Lumetri color panel came from. What I miss the most was that unlike with DaVinci where you render out movies with the grade baked in, the grade from SpeedGrade could be exported a single movie or movies of each shot, but you could also roundtrip to premiere and the entire grade came back to Premiere as the Lumetri plug in on your clips! Not only was this much faster, especially since most Lumetri grades would play back in real time without rendering in Premiere, but it saved hard drive space too and made the whole round-tripping thing a real pleasure.

Sure it wasn’t quite as powerful as DaVinci Resolve at the time, but it was plenty powerful and at the time even beat DaVinci on a couple of things.

Of course by this point DaVinci has vastly moved on from SpeedGrade, but this is Adobe we are talking about, and they could certainly update it (and give it multi-monitor support). And maybe bake in some After Effects tools for masks and tracking and the like.

Now Premiere Pro has the Lumetri Color Panel, but it isn’t near what SpeedGrade was and no where near what Premiere can do. So the Adobe Creative Suit really needs a high end color correction package and it could be the evolution of SpeedGrade or as Randi Altman called it Lumetri Pro (I wish I could take credit for the name).

Adobe Creative Suite Video feature request, easily copy and paste a Lumetri color from Premiere Pro to After Effects without exporting a LUT

 

As someone who works extensively between After Effects and Premiere Pro, I do love Adobe Dynamic Link (though it could use an update for sure), there is one thing that I wish could come easily between the two programs, and that is Lumetri Color Effects.

Yes you can pass the Lumetri Effect them through via Dynamic Link, but that is better for sequences, than individual shots. And yes you can export a .cube effect from your Lumetri Color, which is a LUT. The LUT can then be added in Lumtri, but it isn’t just repeating the Lumetri Effect, it is a Lumtri with a LUT added to it (and since After Effects and Premiere Pro use different Color spaces since After Effects uses RGB vs YUV), it is easier to tweak a bit if it is the Lumetri Color effect.

Now the easiest for the user would be if you could copy and paste the effect.

The Lumetri Color panel is one thing, but it is also an effect.

And the Lumetri effect shows up in After Effects as an effect as well.

Now I am assuming copy and paste would be difficult as some program would need to be running to catch the copy and move it over (something in creative cloud), but this would be absolutely ideal.

Now the solution is to make all your selects in Premiere and send it over via Adobe Dynamic Link then use the lumetri off those. And this does work, but it isn’t as easy as copy and pasting from one to the other for sure.

Or you can send out individual LUTS from the Lumetri Color Tab.

And select Export Cube to export a LUT that you can then add onto a Lumetri basic correction or a look you can use in the Creative section of Lumetri (and this is good because you can control the strength of the effect).

Now they could put in a Creative Cloud sync like you can do with Essential Graphics templates, but most of the time I am using my own Adobe login so the sync is useless, and I have always thought it needed some more job specific settings, like they only show up if you select the job you are on, and would download the templates to the job folder so that when you back it up they are there for anyone using the job especially in the future.

Adobe released Premiere Pro 13 Today, also known as Premiere Pro 2019 October 15 Update

You can check out the full release notes at Adobe.

I am most excited about being able to access multiple lumetri effects from the Lumetri Panel, instead of only being able to access the last added one, and having to make changes in the effects panel.

Also looking forward to trying the Intelligent Audio Cleanup Tools.

I haven’t really played with Templates from After Effects, since I do my own graphics, and it just seems easier to make the graphics all the way in After Effects, but I will eventually play with it more.

No mention of having fixed the having to render audio to see audio in a multicam clip in the timeline. I am hoping that bug is fixed. I hate having to render every time I open the project, it is just frustrating and unnecessary.

An awesome Mockup for a new Adobe Professional Color Tool Lumetri CC

So Bilal Alsurri at Nine Productions has created an awesome mockup of an upgraded SpeedGrade, which would obviously then be Adobe Lumetri CC.

This is a dream of mine, because I so miss SpeedGrade. Sure it isn’t DaVinci, but it was very powerful (and I love being able to control the contrast in different regions so easily) and I loved being able to have a grade come back into premiere as plug ins on clips instead of having to render out movies with the grade as currently has to be done. Especially since Lumetri within premiere is good, but not great, and certainly not a professional level color correction program.

It is so unfornunate that Adobe seems to have given up on a professional color app for a very begginer implementation and something like this would certainly go a long way to making color pro again in Creative Cloud.

If you are like me and like this idea, please go to Adobe User Voice and give it an upvote! It only has 19 right now!

I made new feedback to Adobe to bring SpeedGrade back to Creative Cloud

Anyone who reads my blog (I know there are not many of you, but there are some) should know how much I miss SpeedGrade. Creative Cloud used to have a full professional Color Program, and it’s replacement Lumetri is not a full replacement, but a small feature set. The ability to have a full feature set in a color correction suite and have it come back via direct link as a plug in was a huge asset that Adobe thew away completely.

So I made this comment in the Adobe Feedback Form.

Lumetri is great and all, but it is still barely a small feature set of Creative Cloud. And the old ability to create a full grade and have it come back in as a Lumetri effect was essential, especially for new features in the future. Before SpeedGrade I had used DaVinci resolve to finish a project because of it’s great power, but with SpeedGrade I was able to do everything and leave the effect not pre-rendered into footage after a grade. On some small projects I am able to use Lumetri, but it is not powerful enough. The Creative Cloud suite needs a full professional color suite, and it had one, and it is a huge loss missing it.

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.