Toolfarm, the plug-in seller has posted it’s top 5 plug-ins for under $99 for various software. For Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, AVID, Final Cut Pro X, Audio and various 3D packages.
Always good to see lists of inexpensive plug ins.
So I woke up way too early today because the air conditioner is not working too well, and I was too hot to keep sleeping and low and behold Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to Version 15.4!
This update brings the amazing Speech to Text out of Beta and into the normal version and out of the Beta program which I have been running for a bit. This quickly became my favorite feature when cutting testimonials, and I am so happy that i is available to all. It also includes new Transcript Editing Tools and the ability to Generate Captions Automatically.
And adds native support for Apple M1 Computers which was previously only available in the beta.
Other new features of Note:
New Titling and Caption Styling Tools.
You can now upgrade Legacy Titles to Essential Graphics. ARE YOU LISTENING AVID?
Color improvements with Tetahedral LUT interpolation. And the beta now includes a colorized vectorscope for more detail in grading.
The Speed of Saving of Team Projects has improved thanks to a new file structure. And in the Public Beta is progressive project loading to work faster, and improved media relinking.
You can now also label colors and clip names and have the option of limiting changes to the current sequence or applying changes to your source media.
On Windows you get automatic Audio Device Switching.
And CUDA and OpenCL have been discontinued completely in favor of Metal on the Mac.
Looking forward to running it through it’s paces, this is huge news.
Knights of the Editing Table have updated their awesome keyboard launcher Excaliubur for Adobe Premiere Pro to 1.1.3.
Here is the Change Log for this app that you will quickly find to be indispensable. For current users you download the update from the Excalibur settings app within Premiere Pro.
Sequence module:
– Add Marker to Clip
– Target Video/Audio Tracks
– Mute Video/Audio Tracks
– Lock Video/Audio Tracks
– Sync Lock Video/Audio Tracks
Selection module:
– Select Clip Above/Below
– Extend Selection
– Select All Clips after/before Playhead
– Invert Selection
– Select All Disabled Clips
Preferences module:
– Display Color Management
– Snap playhead in Timeline
– Selection Follows Playhead
– Linked Selection
– Transparency Grid
– Show Rulers
– Show Guides
– Snap in Program Monitor
Other:
– Multiply, divide, percent operations are added for Position/Scale/Rotation and etc
– Excalibur Settings could be open from a search bar
– “Copy Frame to Clipboard” didn’t work on some macOS machines
– “Export Media/Selected Clips” in a search bar used project location as an export path. Now it defaults to Premeire Pro last used export path (which could be controlled with Compass)
– Unnecessary undo step was performed for Duration/Speed command if duration/speed couldn’t be changed or was the same for an affected clip
– Effect presets that used “Vector Motion” (part of Essential Graphics) added additional “Vector Motion” effect instead of changing values of an existing one
– Optimized “Nest Clips” command
– Optimized “Paste Clip on Same track” command
– Optimized preloading of a search bar
– Enter pressed multiple times in a search bar caused Excalibur to execute command multiple times
—–
This app really is amazing and will guaranteed speed you up within Premiere. My biggest problem is working on other machines where it is not installed! Honestly I might be buying multiple licenses when I eventually have to go back to working in an office instead of working from home.
The software for the Elgato Stream Deck has been updated to version 5.0 with the addition of a store. Jose Antunes at ProVideoCoalition has a great article on it.
Now it is great for them to have a store, but the store is pretty useless to me if it doesn’t have SideShowFX in it, because they make the profiles for pro video users. Now you can find software for streaming in the store, but the Stream Deck really works for Pro Video users, and to not have that software represented seems like a huge mistake.
I still plan on doing an article on Steam Deck and SideshowFX, but have been so busy I haven’t had the time.
Film Editing Pro has an good article on using Multicams vs Merge Clips in Premiere Pro.
Now like Sofi Marshall I do like Merge clips, but just wish Adobe would fix them, getting rid of meta data and not being able to go back to original clips without exporting an xml and re-importing (and the fact that this works shows that Merge clips still has the data somewhere). And I don’t like single angle clips to be multicam, but they are right that as it is now Multi-cam is slightly superior.
Still might just switch back to using Red Giant (or should I say Maxon) Plural eyes and sequences unless Adobe does something about Merge clips.
Blackmagic Design has upgraded it’s BlackMagic RAW plugin to version 2.1 with M1 support and improved Premiere Pro Performance.
Improvements to performance are always welcome and M1 support is as well.
Adobe has added Speech to Text to the Public Beta, you no longer need to sign up to use it. Of course if you you are already signed up you can also use it in the release version.
Speech to Text is so good for doing testimonials I don’t know how i ever lived without it. It is fast and works so incredibly well. And having the script helps with comprehension so my edits just go faster. This is the most impressive feature in years, and it has quickly become essential to my workflow.
Now I was a huge fan of SpeedGrade when it existed, and greatly lamented it’s passing when it went away. For those of you who don’t know, SpeedGrade was a professional color correction software much like DaVinci Resolve that Adobe purchased and added to their creative suite for a while, and then gutted it and that is where the Lumetri color panel came from. What I miss the most was that unlike with DaVinci where you render out movies with the grade baked in, the grade from SpeedGrade could be exported a single movie or movies of each shot, but you could also roundtrip to premiere and the entire grade came back to Premiere as the Lumetri plug in on your clips! Not only was this much faster, especially since most Lumetri grades would play back in real time without rendering in Premiere, but it saved hard drive space too and made the whole round-tripping thing a real pleasure.
Sure it wasn’t quite as powerful as DaVinci Resolve at the time, but it was plenty powerful and at the time even beat DaVinci on a couple of things.
Of course by this point DaVinci has vastly moved on from SpeedGrade, but this is Adobe we are talking about, and they could certainly update it (and give it multi-monitor support). And maybe bake in some After Effects tools for masks and tracking and the like.
Now Premiere Pro has the Lumetri Color Panel, but it isn’t near what SpeedGrade was and no where near what Premiere can do. So the Adobe Creative Suit really needs a high end color correction package and it could be the evolution of SpeedGrade or as Randi Altman called it Lumetri Pro (I wish I could take credit for the name).
Maxon has updated Universe (formerly Red Giant Universe) to 4.0. Universe is a set of Transition and effects plugs ins for editors and motion graphics artists, and is red giants fast rendering transitions.
The suite has 3 new plug ins, Electrify to add electrical effects, Analog to add the look of Analog video, and Texturize Motion which adds animated textures to your footage for a sketchy stop motion look. They have also included 100+ presets for the new effects and 140 new presets for Array Gun and Typographic.
Universe is available as a subscription for $199 a year, or as part of Red Giant Complete for $599.99 annually or Maxon one with all their products for $1199 a year or you can pay a monthly for $30, $79 or $149.
Personally I have used the Red Giant plug ins for many many years, and they have many of my go to effects. They are also fast and work across editing software for the most part. It is a big expense every year, but I find it very worth it for the suite of tools. And honestly if I could afford it would love to add Cinema 4D to the mix.
Randi Altman from PostPerspective has a post about the Input, Output and Home tab in Premiere Pro that I just posted about.
I like his thoughts on import which is a simplified version of DaVinci’s cut page (since you can quickly assemble a sequence) are interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but then the Cut page isn’t really for me or how I work, though I do like some of it, it just isn’t there for me.
And the fact that he asked adobe and they will eventually update everything including the timeline (just don’t learn anything from Final Cut Pro X please) is pretty huge news.
And he is right they need to make Lumetri Pro, which would be a new version of SpeedGrade and bring back the grade just being the lumetri plug in premiere. OMG I WOULD LOVE THAT, I have missed SpeedGrade since it went, and it is really the one thing Adobe is seriously missing a powerful finishing program.