Adobe Media Encoder Beta adds Rotate & Scaling Features

Adobe announced that they are adding Rotate & Scale to an upcoming beta of Media Encoder.

You asked and we listened! Coming to beta this week are two new features in Media Encoder: the ability to scale video and to rotate video. Related, we’ve also added a feature to flip the output width and height. This makes matching the output to a rotated clip a one-button-click. 

This is great, as the iPhone has been known to record in the wrong orientation and this will easily let you correct it when recompressing to a better format.

Not in the new features, but Adobe Media Encoder 22.5 June 20, 2022 allows for higher than 60FPS transcoding

This used to be a feature, but then was removed for some unknown reason. Luckily I followed this post at user voice, as the new features list doesn’t list this as being a new feature.

This has troublesome if you get high speed footage not in the format you want, or if you want to do proxies with footage that is higher than 60FPS.

For new features it lists Notification on Encoding or Queue Completion, Computer Shutdown on Queue Encoding Finish and Support for Red V-Raptor camera.

Adobe Updated Media Encoder to 2022, October 2021 Release version 22.0 at Adobe Max Today

So Adobe Updated Media Encoder to October 2021 release version 22 today, and unifed version numbers of the video apps, so you can tell the version it works with by the version number (if only each version number had it’s own icon or color to tell them apart).

It’s new features tie into the new features of After Effects and Premiere Pro, most excitingly with COLOR MANAGEMENT FOR H.264 and HEVC on Import and Export! WOOHOO FInally working around Apple’s fucked up color on the mac, and like DaVinci before it, letting you export compressed video with proper metadata tags so that it will display correctly whoever is looking at it! I literally have problems with this every single day, so I can’t wait to give it a try. This is game-changing if it works!

Also included is Color Management for Sony XAVC-L-HDR and Faster Rendering for After Effects with multi-frame rendering, should be 3x as fast! Woohoo!

Now I know why Adobe denied my request for years on apps, they have made all apps in the same category the same color, so they are harder to tell apart!

So I opened Adobe’s updates today and low and behold, they have updated a great swatch of apps, but even worse they have updated the icons so that applications in the same category are the same color. Sure it means you can tell this years apps from earlier versions, but now it is easier to confuse different apps for each other as all the video apps are now the same damn color, WTF! And this will get even worse when they release next years versions with the same damn app icon (why can’t they put some versioning in the icon?).

These are the swath of Adobe Apps I keep in my Dock, and without dragging over them with a cursor it is a pain in the ass to tell them apart (and yes I need the different versions as some companies I work with run older versions because of stability issues).

Hell even the beta icons are changing already, though at least they will let me keep breaking up the apps

I guess at least this year for individual apps it will be easier, but what about when the previous 2 versions have the same damn icon, and they are all the same color?

For a company that makes applications for designers they sure have a shitty sense of design!

Premiere Pro Ingest is broken, Media Encoder keeps freezing and breaking the process

So I am running Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.1 and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018 12.1.1.12 on a macOS Sierra 10.12.6 with a MacPro 5,1 dual 6 core 3.06 GHZ with 32 GB of RAM and and a GTX 97- 4096 MB mac flashed. I am running the latest CUDA 387.178 with NVIDIA Web Driver 378.06.25f03 and am using CUDA renderer. I am using UHD 29.97 footage from a Canon C300 in MXF format and converting it to ProRES on Ingest from Media Browser.

I am importing the footage from within Media Browser in premiere and it sends the footage to Media Encoder to convert it. The problem I am having is that Media Encoder keeps freezing and giving me the app “not responding” message. And if you force quit media encoder all the encodes are gone, and I have to delete the footage I imported and re-import all the footage into premiere to get the ingest going again. This is super frustrating. At least if I bring clips into media encoder myself and I have to force quit it, when I come back all the encodes are still in Media Encoder (sure some may have all compressed but that is an easy fix, just delete the encodes that already happened), it seems that Ingest can’t deal with any component breaking down, and it keeps breaking down for me.

It seems that the ingest only works if everything is working correctly, and it has not been working right, so as soon as you force media encoder to quit the Ingest is finished.

Honestly there should be a way to restart the conversions from within Premiere (not just creating proxys, but an actual ingest conversion). And it would be great if the ingest survived crashes, by leaving all the convertions within media encoder even after a crash so you could continue it later if something fails.

I know I can just do the conversion straight in Media Encoder (which I am doing now, but still getting not responding, but at least I can force quit and the conversions are still there and I can just delete the completed ones), but I was hoping to do the Ingest Process, but it does not seem to be working at all well for me.

And yes I know that Premiere can play back the MXF footage, but I have much better playback of the 4K footage once it is converted to ProRES.

I also posted this on the adobe forums, but don’t expect to get an answer that will fix the issue other than doing what I am doing and doing the conversions in Media Encoder directly. I just can’t believe how broken the ingest feature is that it can’t handle errors within Creative Cloud. It just expects that it will work, and it is not doing that for me.

Adding LUTs to Adobe Premiere Pro, A PROBLEM WITH IT THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW

Many people know that LUTS or look up tables are a feature in Adobe Premiere’s Lumetri controls that you can use different settings to make camera RAW footage look good for rec 709 or whatever format you are editing in. And Premiere has some technical and various Creative LUTs to quickly fix or change footage. And you can use your own LUT, but you have to select that LUT individually every time from your hard drive, as there is no way to add it to the menus in Premiere or After Effects.

Well a quick Google search has various links to sites that explain how you can add your own LUTs to Premiere Pro. Here is one at Premium Beat. The thing is there is a problem with this method.

In this method you open the application package contents, go into the Contents/Lumetri/LUTs/Technical folder and add your LUT and restart the program. Obviously this is something that is changing the actual application so it should be done at your own risk, and any update will likely wipe out your LUTs, but if you are going to do it, YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!

If you want the LUTs to work in Premiere and to be able to export them with Adobe Media Encoder or use them in Adobe After Effects you need to also install your LUTs into those programs as well. There is no central repository for these LUTs!

Now I have requested with Adobe that they add the ability to add your own LUTs to the menus in a central repository, but that doesn’t mean the feature will be added ever.

Adobe has updated Creative Cloud Video Apps in advance of NAB 2017

Adobe has beat NAB 2017 this year and updated all of it’s video tools.

You can check out the playlist of 23 videos about all the new features across the full suite.

Adobe Blogs also has info on all the updates.

I am most excited to see the Essential Sound Panel makes it way to Premiere Pro!

Having full Lumetri in After Effects is also very cool, and will be quite helpful, though as you know I still mourn the loss of SpeedGrade as Lumetri is not nearly as powerful. And that in many cases means I have to go to DaVinci instead of being able to finish within Creative Cloud.

I am also interested in the Essential Graphics Panel, which brings both direct graphics creation on the timelines as well as changes to templates made in After Effects.

I am also interested in seeing Camera Shake DeBlur and seeing how it does with Warp Stabilized Footage.

The new Multi-Channel tools in Audition are also intriguing, though I would be happier having them in Premiere (especially if I could automatically move multiracks to multiple tracks instead of a single track), as while I do finish some jobs using Audition and it’s Essential Sound Panel, but mostly I go to a mixer using ProTools.

And having Pond 5 in the Adobe Stock panel is a great addition.

Overall I always look forward to playing with the new features, and am glad they come out as often as they do.

Safari no longer supporting 4K videos on YouTube

AppleInsider has this article on what is going on. It seems that for all videos uploaded as of December 6, 2016 Adobe has moved from the paid to license H265 Codec to the free VP9 codec, and Safari does not support VP9. Previously the 4K videos had been encoded in H264, but both H265 and VP9 require much more power to playback and it will drain battery life, and use some serious processing power.

Obviously using a free encoder vs a paid license will help the bottom line for Google, as will videos that take up half the hard drive space, but users take a hit because people who don’t have the latest Machines will take a hit and be unable to playback 4K because it is so processor intensive. Seems a little soon, but Google has already made the switch.

If you want to encode VP9, Fnord has a free plug in for Adobe Premier Pro and Media Encoder.