It is an interesting article, and it is true it is such an inexpensive program, that everyone should use it. I have personally used it extensively while doing an edit job on Final Cut and found it essential for using Final Cut Pro with some features that are much easier to use than After Effects with more power, but others I thought far inferior, harder and with huge bugs. And I was not at all impressed by it’s Motion Blur which After Effects does so much better.
Much like Final Cut I find it i a powerful program but with huge caveats. And while I do have it, I don’t find it as useful as other similar programs.
Paste To Same Track is the new default, which is the behavior that I want 90% of the time. I love this because I place things in specific tracks, having a very organized timeline, so I usually wants things to just go where they were in a different place in the timeline.
Old BehaviorNew Behavior
And you can also Paste Insert, as well as Paste to Target Track and Paste Insert to Target Track which can also be added to keyboard shortcuts.
In past Red Giant has also released in depth videos showing off how to use the new features, but unfortunately it looks like they haven’t done that this year. Hopefully this isn’t how things will always be with the now Maxon owned company, bug I have the feeling it is. I guess will just have to play around.
The video for Real Lens Flares looks good, but will have to see if it is better than optical flares from Video Copilot.
And constrained shapes, where you can create perfect squares and circles by holding down the shift key when you double click the rectangle or ellipse tool.
Excitingly it includes Frame.io Integration and thus Camera to Cloud support, you just login with your creative cloud ID and you get a 100GB account, of course it isn’t free as creative cloud has gone up $2 a month, but still cheaper than buying your own account.
I was at a company that was trying to test using Creative Cloud for offline edit workflows, and it was an interesting experience. Not quite there, especially how it creates it’s own h264 previews and you can download low and high, but it isn’t really a remote editing solution yet, but still a powerful review software.
And the biggest feature isn’t the redesign of the Import and Export panels and the new preset manager, and the new header bar, which have been being tested in beta for a while now.
ImportExportExport Preset Mananger
I still think there is too much twirling down to be done in the presets for export, which is more clicks, which I am never for.
At least the new Header Bar has been listened about and you can now show 3 workspaces as well as Import, Edit and Export. In their original implementation the workspaces were all in another menu, which is slower, when only real beginners need Import, Export all the time.
Auto Color powered by Adobe Sensei should help beginners get a quick starting place for color correction, unlike the old version. This was cvalled Auto Tone in the beta, and is a powerful start to color correction, if only Adobe would bring back a full Lemtri color suite like SpeedGrade.
And the new show hide Marker colors very cool for those who use a lot of markers, like me, when I log footage I use makers instead of subclips.
Other new features include Speeech to Text for Cantonese, Trim Playback Looping from Playhead instead of nearest edit, a Remix Progress indicator, Support for Sony Venice 2, Change est Size in text Panel, and customized clip name in EDL exports.
I have been trying these out in the beta since release, but I still think there are some issues with too many twirl downs for settings especially in exports. I am of the school of less button clicks is always better than more. Also I find Import and Export much less important on a daily basis than the Edit modes, of which you can only show 3 at all times, in the huge bay, which has so much wasted space. Oh well it is in release now, and at least you can show the 3 edit spaces (originally they hid them under the menu only).
The Frame.io for all is now integrated into Premiere and After Effects, with 100GB of space, which is great, though I don’t like that they are also raising the creative cloud rate by $2 a month, but it is still cheaper than a frame subscription.
And Auto Color, formerly known as Auto Tone in the public beta is much improved over the useless feature in previous versions. The AI makes for a great starting point.
And After Effects has moved it’s M1 Compatibility to the full version.
And built in AI powered scene detection is also huge. I use a script for it, so will certainly give this a try.
This is a huge one honestly. Looking forward to when I can take a look later today.
