Adobe Reveals the next release of Premiere Pro

Adobe has revealed some features from it’s next version of Creative Cloud at it’s PremierePro blog.

Here is a quick breakdown.

•Lumetri Color Panel. Adobe has integrated more of the color engine of SpeedGrade directly in Premiere Pro, but with simpler to use controls for editors, but all grades will easily pass over to SpeedGrade. Now you get SpeedGrades videoscopes, and controls simplified to work like Lightroom as well as a new Lumetri 3 Way Color Corrector.

 The Lumetri Control Panel

New Curve and Hue/Saturation Controls
New Lumetri 3 Way Color Corrector

•Morph Cut allows you to seamlessly morph between to edits in a talking head interview to make it look like a single cut (kind of scary, but also an incredible tool if it works as described).

•CC Libraries have been integrated into Premiere Pro and After Effects so you can save looks and graphics wherever you are logged into Creative Cloud.

•Premiere Clip, Adobe’s portable editing solution has an upgraded workflow.

•Task Oriented Workspaces for editing, coloring, audio work or other needs (much like AVID’s similar functions).

•New formats including ProRes 4444XQ Avid DNxHR, Canon XF-AVC and Panasonic 4K_HS.

•Closed Caption Support

•Composite Previews during trim

•Simpler Keyboard numerical import

•Source Settings as Master Clip Effects

•Improved AAF Exports

•Improved Audio Routing

•Improved Audition workflow, where audition will play the video directly from your media instead of rendering a video of your video.

•Improved Mercury Transmit Performance

•Time Tuner in Premiere and Media Encoder to allow you to retime a show up to 5% easily and possibly up to 10% in either direction without losing quality.

Sounds impressive. I am looking forward to getting my hands on it!

Adobe has given us a peak at the new video features in Creative Cloud

Next Week at NAB Adobe will be showing off the next release of Adobe Creative Cloud’s video suite with updates to apps. We knew this was coming as Adobe announced on March 18th that the next version of Creative Cloud will only work with Mac Os X 10.9 Yosemite and higher.

Check out this video that shows the most exciting new features!

Used Premiere Pro’s Capture for the first time yesterday

I was handed a DVCAM tape yesterday and work was going to rent a DVCAM deck to capture. I said I would do it myself since I have a Sony DS-20 in my office. I used to use it all the time, but it mostly gathers dust now, so it was good to give it a run, and I decided to try it out with Premiere Pro.

Now I knew that Premiere had a very simple capture engine that would work with HDV or DV, so I decided to give it a try. It has very few settings, just which capture setting, then you can set in’s and outs, change clip and tape names and capture a clip or a tape. The problem is that the tape was old, and it kept failing on the capture, and it doesn’t seem to have a setting to automatically break up clips when there is a break in timecode. After many many attempts that failed, I gave up and switched to Final Cut Pro 7.

Final Cut Pro 7 still has a much more powerful capture engine, and will in fact break up a capture if you set it to, so you get clips around the breaks, but surprisingly it managed to capture the whole 1 hour and 50 minutes in one go, not making any breaks.

So honestly I am glad Final Cut Pro 7 still runs on Yosemite, as it does still have some uses. Looks like I will need to keep a backup of this system state before the next OS which will likely break Final Cut Pro 7 completely so I can still capture DV easily if need be.

An additional issue with Adobe Premiere Pro sequences in SpeedGrade CC 2014

So I have been working more with Speedgrade, finishing the grade on this twenty eight and a half minute long show, and I realized another issue.

Actually it is very like the issue with the multicam clips, where you can grade them, and the grade shows up in Premiere, but the Lumetri Effect does not on clips with an Alpha or that or Premiere Pro Text layers.

This is an issue when replacing graphics with textless versions and you can’t just take the same grade from existing clips, because the while the grade shows up, it is does not show up as an effect that you can edit or copy or do anything with in Premiere Pro.

This gives me memories of precomputes and AVID! The horror!

I really hope Adobe fixes this and the the other issues I previously posted with a new update of Creative Cloud at NAB this year, as I really do love how the grade ends up on your original sequence (for the most part). I do really like the program, but some of the issues really do make DaVinci seem more viable for the moment.

Issues with Adobe SpeedGrade CC 2014

So I am a commercial editor and lately have really moved to Premiere Pro after the death of Final Cut Pro 7 (as you will know if you regularly read this blog). I do much of my work in Commercials and direct response and many of the houses I work at have moved over to Premiere Pro for it’s speed and integration with After Effects.

We have been using DaVinci Resolve for color correction, but with the upgrades to Adobe SpeedGrade with CC 2014 I learned it and have been wanting to give it a try. Mainly because of it’s integration with the adobe suite, and the fact that it puts the grade onto the clips as a plug in that can be easily removed, instead of having to render out a new sequence with clips with handles, which makes major changes to the sequence much harder. And with the addition of working with Black Magic Cards it was time to try it out.

So on the current 28:30 Direct Response show I have been editing I am doing the grade in SpeedGrade, and while some it has some very good features, it has some very glaring issues that adobe needs to fix immediately!

  • First and foremost if the fact that SpeedGrade is made to work on one monitor, with a second monitor being your view monitor. And if you use an AJA or Black Magic card, it still forces the whole interface into a single monitor. You can’t peel off any of the segments and move them to a separate monitor. This is especially troublesome with a complicated timeline! I have 14 video tracks in my current show, so my timeline needs to be fairly large, but you still need the controls to be big enough to use, so what suffers are the scopes, which have shrunk to a minuscule size and are very hard to use! PLEASE ADOBE FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY! We need to be able to re-arrange the window and move things to a second monitor as we see fit. It really makes this program hard to use!
  • Number 2 is certainly the issues with Insufficient Resources dialogue which kicks out the video card, so you are only using the CPU to render. And sometimes it makes your images get a crazy clue cast. Now I am using an NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition, which isn’t the newest or greatest video card, but is pretty decent, but I don’t think it is the cards issue, but instead is with effects and the Mercury Render Engine. The problem always happens on clips with effects on them, but it transitions other than dissolves or even Warp Stabilizer or speed effects on clips. SpeedGrade just can’t handle them, and turns off your GPU and you have to at the least restart Speedgrade to get the GPU back on. The thing is that the problem will instantly occur if another filtered clips is hit when you restart. If the Mercury Playback Engine can’t handle this in SpeedGrade, Adobe should figure out a way to turn off these FX when they come into SpeedGrade and turn them back on when you go back to Premiere. You can do it manually by turning them off or removing them in Premiere, but then you have to remember to put them all back when you return your grade to Premiere, but that is a workaround and may cause you to miss important FX or transitions.
  • Number 3 is issues with Multi-Cam clips in Premiere Pro. If you have multi-cam clips in your sequence you can grade them in SpeedGrade, but they do not show up as a plug in in Premiere, neither on the multi-cam clip or within it’s sequence, though the grade does show up. To get around this I duplicate my multicam clips on another layer, and then flatten them. This creates another problem, which it makes each clip a separate instance instead of going back to the master clips, so for these clips you cannot do a single grade on a master clip. Now admittedly this is a Premiere Pro issue, but on that needs to be fixed to make SpeedGrade work better. As being able to user the Master Clip Grade is so much quicker and easier.
  • Number 4 for is the timeline. It needs to have better zoom controls instead on showing the whole timeline, 6 seconds or from your in to out. I want to be able to zoom in or out to where I desire.
  • Number 5 is a keyboard navigation issue. When I use the numerical controls for a grade and I type a number into a box, hitting the tab should move to the next box and activate the grade I have entered. Instead I have to click out of the box with the mouse, which is slow and not efficient. So Adobe, you need to let us navigate with the keyboard. This is faster and more efficient, especially for those of us without a dedicated color control board.
  • Number 6 is faster opening of Premiere Pro sequences. I am sure this has to do with converting the sequence to work, but it takes a long time, many minutes at times, and is especially painful if you keep getting hit with the insufficient resources bug from above.
That is it for now. The single monitor and Insufficient Resources could be deal breakers for many, but for now I love the conveniece, and love that it leaves my original sequence intact in Premiere Pro, but lets hope Adobe makes this program more adobe like in the near future (NAB please Adobe), so that the ease of going back and forth is complimented by a program that is easier to use and doesn’t have some glaring issues.
Honestly if Adobe makes this better, I see no reason to use DaVinci Resolve with Premiere even if it is a superior program, just because of the ease of use of SpeedGrade.

Adobe releases After Effects CC 2014.2 (13.2)

Adobe has updated Adobe After Effects to CC 2014.2 (13.2). Tim Kikoski’s adobe blog has the list of features and bug fixes.

New Features include scripting improvements for text layers and expression access to dynamic layer bounds, as well as new keyframe icons which should stand out more against the dark background. And the bug fixes are all welcome, especially any speed improvements for Dynamic Link.