StudioDaily has a great look at the now release $199 Ink and Slide by Adobe for iOS. The new Stylus’s look very powerful, though a bit on the pricy side, and they work with new Adobe Apps, Adobe Sketch for sketching, Adobe Line for drafting and the new Photoshop Mix. And these apps are free so you can use them without Adobe’s new physical tools.
Effects Masking and Tracking within Premiere Pro sounds like an awesome addition, as are Master Clip effects, which will make color correction a breeze.
As for SpeedGrade the direct link to Premiere Pro feature where you actually open your timeline in SpeedGrade would seem to answer about half of my issues with SpeedGrade. Now they just need to get some curves going in there.
The ability to apply filters per mask in a layer will greatly speed up effects, and simplify timelines. And the Live templates features is very very cool. Where you can set text lines in After Effects to be editable by an editor within Premiere to quickly make lower thirds and the like based on a graphical template.
All in all it sounds great, and I hope the download is available soon!
Video Copilot has released another new plug in, and free. Color Vibrance does one thing, but it does it well and easily. Download it from there site.
I love how they will do a tutorial and realize they could create a tool to make it easier, then release it free. Awesome company!
After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.
First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.
With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it’s only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.
You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.
And there there is the fact that it doesn’t export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!
And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.
I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.
I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don’t make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.
He does spend a little too much time on how many people he knows that weren’t affected, because it is the people that were that are really important. And honestly Creative Cloud kicks me out of my login way too often for me to be comfortable, and in fact was even worse for a job I was on.
I have been trying to get convince my boss that the Adobe Creative Cloud is the way to go for Direct Response commercials. Which are very graphics heavy and usually shot in multiple formats and even frame rates. Well we have been trying out creative cloud in it’s 30 day trial, and if it worked were going to get a month to month account for it on our machines, but unfortunately even time you open one of the demo version you must OK that you are using a trial and that did not work during the outage. And we couldn’t upgrade to full version to get that working either. Not a good selling point for creative cloud.
My personal versions at home kept working as I was logged in and they continued working, but any down time because of Cloud computer can be catastrophic when media has been bought so an airdate is set.
Adobe needs to make some sort of backup system that allows you to keep working for a day or two until Adobe can get their servers back together!
This really isn’t a good showing for subscription based software. Maybe there needs to be a way to keep it working for the whole period of the current subscription without checking in, and they need to keep Creative Cloud from accidentally logging your user out.
Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.
The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.
Red Giant has released version 1.0 of it’s new GPU accelerated Universe Plug ins. These include 31 free GPU accelerated plugs ins and currently 19 Pro plug ins that can be had for $10 a month, $99 a year or $399 for a lifetime subscription. And they promise dozens of new tools in 2014 alone. Already these protools include a version of Knoll Light Factory, Toonit and Holomatrix.
I love Red Giant’s stuff, so this is a great thing. Not sure about all these subscriptions though. So far the small businesses I work with have been very averse to a monthly fee, but the free plug ins are great to have.
Studio Daily reported the news from NAB.
A 30 Day Trial is available for download.
They will have various versions:
•ProRES 422 including LT and HQ in 1080p 30FPS for $68 with Single Core Encoding
•ProRES 4444, UHD, 4K and H.265 (v2) at up to 60FPS for $137 with Dual Core Encoding
•H.265 SQ and HQ and up to 6 Core Encoding for $551
ProRES is so ubiquitous that this is great news.
It all started with Adobe and Creative Cloud which is $49.99 a month with a yearly subscription, and $79.99 for a per month basis. And with no other versions available, it means you need it if you need the latest and greatest.
Now they have been great with rapid upgrades, and with the full suite so necessary for most video post work this is basically a necessity.
Not sure how it will work for Media Composer with the same pricing. Most places buy a version and keep them on non-upgraded machines so they can just stick with the same version. Not only that, with Creative Cloud you get the full suite of apps, including Premiere Pro, and with Media Composer you just get Media Composer. Sure you get more options, like Symphony, NewBlue Titler Pro 2, Sorenson Squeeze Lite, and Boris Continuum Complete Lite, but it is still basically just an editing and finishing system, so seems like buying it is a better idea (at least while they still offer the ability to purchase) at least unless you just need it on a month to month basis and can bill a client for it.
And now Smoke 2015 is getting it, though it is a $3500 program that is $195 a month or $1750 a year. Or $3500 every 2 years, which makes sense if they continue to do an upgrade every 2 years, which they have done once now.
Still it is depressing for us independent post guys, as more monthly expenses does not seem like a good thing overall.
Chris Hocking at Late Nite Films has an awesome article, where he goes into not only the best things about AVID and Premiere Pro, but also his first attempt at using FCP X. And his is the first article that makes me interested in taking a look again at FCP X, though maybe once they fix audio issues.
And I still say that for graphics heavy projects, even longform (at least 28:30 Direct Response), I think Premiere Pro with a proper video card can easily outdo AVID, which is still archaic in how it deals with Alphas (and importing them) even if it is the king of media management. And those same projects would be a mess in FCP X without the ability to have tracks for organization.
I mean my current sequence has 18 tracks of video going all organized into different layers.