Adobe Speech To Text Early Access is absolutely amazing for editing testimonials

#SpeachtoText @AdobeVideo

So I applied to the Adobe Speech To Text Early Access program and was granted access, you can read about it and apply here.

I am editing testimonials and an assistant already cut down sequences so just the best bits are in a sequence.

All you have to do is go to the captions workspace and hit the Transcribe Sequence and it renders and uploads the audio track, and very quickly transcribes. I have had it take 3-7 minutes depending on length.

It then very quickly auto transcribes. And yes it has some errors, that are easily fixable. Basically I duplicate the sequence after transcription and make a cut version that I can cut out the pieces I want and cut them into another timeline. You can immediately jump around or search in the transcription, and just having the transcription follow along on the sequence helps my comprehension of what is being said.

This is truly life-changing! This is the most amazing new feature I have run across in an editing program.

And you can also export a txt file with the transcription though it doesn’t contain the timecode or the speakers, and I would love to see the ability to add in the timecode and to add the speakers for more than single speaker transcriptions. Currently the export txt is grayed out in Premiere Pro 2021, but works in the beta.

Transcriptions have always been helpful to find specific things in a long testimonial, but having them connected to the sequence where you can literally jump to an individual word is beyond amazing!

Adobe Updates Audition with M1 in version 14.2 Support and Premiere Pro with Text Gradients and Improved Captions in 15.2

 

Adobe updated Audition to version 14.2 with added M1 Support, the ability to Strip Silence and a new Loudness meter. 

Adobe also updated Premiere Pro to 15.2 with Text Gradients in Essential Graphics, Label Color for Captions and Improved Caption Trimming, the same new Loudness Meter as Audition, improved Canon XF HEVC performance improvements and Direct X12 Display support on Windows.

Remote File Sync for Editing workflows on Remote Systems

 Since I have been looking at work from home solutions for remote video editing, I have been looking at some solutions for file syncing. This would require media and files at remote and local to start, so that you aren’t eating all of your bandwidth copying files, and would of course be easiest with a large single storage solution that you have set to fully sync.

With Premiere Pro I would also recommend using Digital Rebellions Post Haste to set up a file structure that you follow for all projects that so that it is the same on all systems.

Once you have the project setup on a single system, you should duplicate that onto remote hard drives and then you can use a program to sync the files. Now I wouldn’t expect collaboration with the same project files, but this could mean that you sync to a remote file share, and keep your graphics and project files updating not only for backup, but for remote access if necessary.

For Mac Backup there is ChronoSync for $49.99 per license. For Mac or Windows (or FreeBSD) you can use Resilio for $59.90 for a single license, $99.90 for a 5 family member license or $30 a month for Business. Or for Windows you could use ViceVersa for $59.95 for one license, going down for 2 or more licenses.

Now this would be basic solutions, without file remote project management, and if you made changes to projects on both systems it would cause issues, but could easily help for simple setup and even work with assistants using different project files to transfer things back and forth.

Frame.io’s Lisa McNamara and Zack Arnold ACE on Adopting a Post-Production Workflow from March 2020 is well worth a read

Lisa McNamara has written an article with the help of Zack Arnold ACE on the Best practices for Adopting a Remote Post-Production Workflow at Frame.io, and it is well worth a read. It goes into the challenges and security concerns, managing media, communication, collaboration, and even morale, well being and sanity. It is of course also selling Frame.io, but it is an article by them, and the article is great and very in depth including other companies solutions.

Every post supervisor or producer overseeing a team working from home should read this article.

Adobe Support Community post on Premiere Pro Project Manager Consolidate and Transcode Problems

 

So I have been seeing a lot of people complaining about Adobe Premiere Pro’s Project Manger and it’s issues. And I have run into quite a few myself where it just doesn’t work for various reasons.

Well I ran into this post about it from 2017 and CC 2017, and it lists many of the things that will break a consolidate and transcode. This lists some things to know that can be an issue, and may be causing you problems when using Project Manager. Now I don’t know if any of these have been solved, but the Merged clips thing has likely bounced Project Manger for me.

And this makes me want to try out PlumePack from Autokroma even more. I know it is for r3d, BRAW or ProREES and can actually trim without recompressing, but the thing that gets me is that it will bring your organized final folder structure with it, instead of just putting everything into a single folder which has always really pissed off.

Premiere Pro Project Downgrader from Elements

If you make your living as an editor using Premiere Pro you will eventually run into the issue of needing to open a project in an earlier version of Premiere, and Adobe does not want you to be able to do this. This is insanity, especially for anyone who comes from the AVID side of things, but at least there is something you can try.

ELEMENTS, a German Editing workflow specialist company has put up an online tool for downgrading your Premiere Pro Projects, check it out here. Obviously make a copy of your project file before you try it.

I know Adobe now lets you open current projects in beta at least and go back and forth, but there really should be some way to save as a previous version if necessary. And I know they don’t want you to since they only support the 2 most recent versions, but honestly who doesn’t know places that stick on earlier versions. The lead editor at the place I am working at now insists on staying with 2019 currently.

Motion Blur on text or motion graphics in Premiere Pro with the Transform Effect

 I have to admit I didn’t know about this until fairly recently. I have always been disturbed by the lack of Motion Blur in Premiere Pro, when it was in Final Cut Pro 7 and so easy to turn on (though the render time was brutal). And likely that is why I missed it here, because I always just used the standard Transform effects within every object.

And the standard Transform effect does not have a motion blur, to get a motion blur on text or a shape in Premiere you need to use the Transform Effect in Video Effects, Distort Category.

The Transform effects add these controls.

If you use the Transform effect to move objects you can turn off Use Compositions’s Shutter Angle and change the Shutter Angle to get a motion blur.

0 is no motion blur and 360 is max motion blur, but 180 is normal motion blur (a 180 degree shutter on a film camera).

I am in a 23.976 sequence and created a simple Essential Graphics text object.

I created as simple animation with it coming from the top and moving to this position over 12 frames within the Transform Effect.

This is half way through the move with 180 degree shutter.

This is with 360 as the shutter angle.

And this is with a 90 degree shutter:

So it is very easy to have motion blur on a moving object in Premiere Pro using the Transform Effect.

Now if this effect is in here, I don’t see why Adobe can’t just add the same controls into the normal move controls, so you can get motion blur without using this effect, and make it as easy as it was in Final Cut Pro 7, you just switched it on in the timeline window.

I am assuming they would have to rewrite all the normal transform controls, but hell it would be worthwhile, as it should just function like this.

Still at least Motion blur is here and is able to be used within Premiere without having to go to After Effects.

Adobe Announced Creative Cloud pro with unlimited access to Adobe Stock

 

Adobe has announced Adobe Creative Cloud Pro Edition at it’s Adobe Blog. This is just like the normal version of Creative Cloud but the with the addition of unlimited access to over 200 million assets from Adobe Stock.

The price is the same as Creative Cloud for teams at $79.99 a month for a year and $89.99 a month after that.

For individual users this only makes sense if you use a lot of stock and templates, but for businesses this could end up being a huge money saver, and well worth it.

The Hidden cost of Apple changing it’s hardware architecture for editors and motion graphics artist is plug-ins

 

So of course Apple is moving to the M1 processor for all of it’s computers, moving away from intel. This is the 3rd hardware switch Apple has made, from it’s initial motorola processors, to power pc, to the ARM based M1 processors. And while the current M1 is very fast, but not a pro processor, especially with shared graphics and normal ram and a limit of 16 GB of total RAM. 

For everyone sticking with Apple this will eventually mean new hardware to move to M1 from Intel, though for a few years at least Apple will continue to support Intel hardware.

The hidden cost though, that is something different, and for a professional editor or motion graphics artist the hidden cost is plugs-ins.

Plug-ins can be an expensive investment, but can really help your workflow and speed things up and let you do things that couldn’t do without them. And the move to M1 will certainly be a paid upgrade, even for those still on Intel hardware. And those plugs in upgrades can cost hundreds, and over the upcoming period there are going to be a lot of upgrades to M1.

And while DaVinci and Final Cut Pro X already run on M1’s and the Premiere Pro Beta runs on M1, to get your old plug-ins to run you have to run them via Rosetta 2, which means running the Intel based versions of the host software to get the plug-ins working. And that is going to mean running the software slower through emulation, and could cause many issues and add more stability issues.

Now of course subscription based plug-ins will have the price included in the subscription, but the lack of more money for the upgrade might mean a lot longer before they upgrade to M1, even if it should mean they should upgrade sooner since you are already paying monthly or yearly for the software.

And yes the fact that our Intel Hardware will last a few more years with upgrades means that the upgrades will happen over a few years, so we can pay it, but for me it is a lot of plug-in upgrades, that will be followed by an expensive hardware upgrade to whatever form Pro M1 Macs take.

And of course their will be the exceptions, companies that treat their customers correctly and will upgrade to the new architecture without charging anything. One such company is RE:Vision Effects, which I got an e-mail from and they are developing M1 versions of the current versions of all their plugs ins. And have already released OpenFx and Twixtor M1 betas for FXPlug versions and RSMB for FXPlug is next.

The Adobe Support community is an important tool for finding answers to your questions and issues

 

The Adobe Support Community is a huge resource for those who are having issues with their Adobe software. While Adobe isn’t on the forums that often (they are sometimes), other users are very helpful and will do what they can to help you.

And the Premiere Pro and After Effects forums are very useful.

Separately from the forums you should also know about the Feature Request / Bug Report form which is where you should post specific requests or reproducible bugs to Adobe.

You can also try Adobe’s Help page, though I find you get more results from the community.