What’s new in Premiere Pro CC 2014

PremierePro

Adobe has released a full document on what is new of Premiere Pro CC 2014.

They have videos to demo the new major features, such as Masking and Tracking within Premiere Pro, Live Text Templates from After Effects for editable lower thirds and title cards, the awesome Master Clip effects which are added to master clips and show up everywhere the clips show up.

Other less publicized features are you can set up automatic project backup to creative cloud. Reverse Frame Matching! Set clips to Frame Size from a drop down menu, and they don’t rasterize, so you are always going to the original to get the best image! AWESOME!

You now have some choice when importing projects, and can import just sequences and create folders and have the choice of duplicating media or automatically using media already in your project.

You can also browse after effects projects in the Media Browser, so you can preview compositions before importing.

A feature that should have always been there in every program is to Maintain Audio Pitch while scrubbing and playback either slow or fast! YES!!

There are Voice Over enhancements. All effects are now cross platform, which means we have lost many effects (though none were that great anyway).

And the most awesome for speed is Cross Dissolve transitions can be saved as Presets! So you can have multiple length effects set up already, and you can change multiple transitions at once!

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Premiere is really improving, and at this rate will easily be the best editor choice around. AVID is going to have to learn that they need to upgrade quickly now that they are also doing the subscription model or they will fall behind really fast!

Adobe needs to do something about 3rd party Plug Ins to make it easier to upgrade

With the release of Adobe Creative Cloud 2014, we have yet another set of programs installed in our computers, which is nice, as the last version will keep working for old jobs (and when plug ins have not been rewritten yet), but it makes for a pain in the ass in getting plug ins working again.

After Effects has so many places plug ins can be installed. In your Library folder and in the Plug ins folder in it’s application. So you have to painstakingly either re-install all your plugs in or go through and copy plug ins over between versions.

Photoshop used to do this well, with a 3rd Party plug-ins folder. So when you installed a new version you could just point Photoshop to this folder, and all your 3rd Party Plug-Ins would be there. Of course in true idiotic fashion they removed this feature.

And sure, some old plug ins will not work, but they could do a browser style plug in checker, which checks if your version works, and you could have a way to force them to work (or at least try to work) if it doesn’t know (as is possible in browsers like Mozilla Firefox).

This would just make everything so much easier and smoother with every upgrade! And since all CC users are in Creative Cloud, they will getting all the new updates, and likely implementing them!

Please Adobe do something about Plug-In Management and do it soon!

VideoCopilot with Adobe Creative Cloud CC 2014, Element 3D not working yet

Update on VideoCopilot Software and Adobe Creative Cloud CC 2014. Looking over at the Forums, it seems that everything except Element 3D is working with Creative Cloud 2014. And according to Andrew Kramer’s Twitter Feed, they are working on it.

With Red Giant working, and everything but Element 3D working, most of my plug ins are good. Now time to check on Re:Vision plug ins!

Having a ton of issues installing Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 on my home computer, SugarSync again looks to be involved

Am having a ton of issues with installation of the latest and greatest update of Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 on my home computer. No problem at work. And I love how the new versions install as new Apps (though this of course creates plug in issues, and having to re-install plug ins to make them work), but it leaves the old version untouched, so you can keep working with old version on current projects.

Well first off I am still having issues with CS6 updates. I have 8 CS6 updates that just will not install. They error out every time, and I have even tried downloading the individual installers and running them, but they just won’t update, and I am not sure why.

As for CC 2014, well first I have been getting a ShellExtLoader error message, and to quit the program to continue, but quitting the app using Activity Monitor kept the error coming. I think this is the fault of SugarSync, which I had forgotten to turn off. So after quitting SugarSync, I tried the installs again, but have kept getting failures on many apps, though not all of them. Really wish those two companies would get together and fix this issue, though I have been considering dropping SugarSync anyway, since it does not have the iOS interactivity of DropBox, and with iCloud looking to be improved with iOS8 and Yosemite, I might be able to replace a lot of it’s functionality that way.

My final solution has been to quit Creative Cloud, then use XtraFinder to launch it as Root, and run the installs. This has mostly worked (had to do it a few times to get the installs working) and I think I am all installed except for the aforementioned CS6 apps.

And unfortunately Red Giant has not yet updated it’s plugs ins for CC 2014 yet, so…

StudioDaily has a first look at the new Adobe Creative Cloud Video Suite Features

StudioDaily has a great first look at the new features being released with the latest Creative Cloud release.

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!

After learning DaVinci Resolve, I decided to delve into Adobe SpeedGrade, so far I will be sticking with Resolve

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.