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.