Dramatically updated Color Management in Premiere Pro Beta

Adobe Announced in their Beta Community, a dramatically updated Color Management in the latest Premiere Pro Beta. This one sounds absolutely huge and is something we have all been clamoring for for a long time!

Here is what has changed.

  • Each sequence’s color management is easily configurable in the Sequence controls of the Settings tab of the Lumetri panel. By default, color management works similarly to the Premiere Pro color workflows you’re already used to when using the default Direct Rec.709 (SDR) preset. Alternately, you can choose to use one of our wide-gamut color processing presets to maximize the image quality of all grading and timeline effects when using wide-gamut or wide-latitude source media. Regardless of how you choose to work, Lumetri and other effects have been made color space aware, so they work well in any preset.
  • Users who don’t want to use automated color management can now turn it off from within the same Color Setup menu. This is useful for pass-through workflows when you don’t want the color space of media being processed at all, or when engaging in traditional display-referred grading workflows using LUTs and manual adjustments.
  • Premiere Pro now automatically color manages camera raw media, including Apple, ARRI, Canon, RED, and Sony raw media formats. As long as color management is enabled, raw clips will be automatically processed.
  • The Override Media Color Space menu has been expanded to support even more color spaces for more cameras and formats, making it easier than ever to color manage media that were either recorded or transcoded to standard file formats such as QuickTime and MXF, without needing to track down the right input LUT.
  • For clips you don’t want to be automatically color managed, a new Preserve RGB setting in the Color tab of the Modify Clip dialog prevents input to working color space conversions, allowing you to manually convert clips either using LUTs or manual filter adjustments.
  • Program MonitorVideo ScopesTransmit, and Media Export all output the image as it appears after conversion to a new Output Color Space setting. While the working color space lets you choose how media is processed, the Output color space lets you choose the specific color space you want to monitor (SDR, HDR PQ, or HLG) and deliver your program to. This guarantees that the working color space never needs to be changed, while making it easy to change color spaces at any time to create multiple deliverables using the same grade (e.g., delivering both HDR and SDR versions of the same sequence).
  • Improved tone mapping algorithms and new gamut compression settings improve quality when automatically converting wide-gamut source media to standard dynamic range. Additionally, there are now two ways  of using tone mapping, on input or on output.
  • Premiere Pro color management has been improved to enable smoother interoperability and color consistency using Dynamic Link for round-tripping color managed sequence clips between Premiere Pro and After Effects whenever you use the Replace with After Effects composition command.
  • Last, but certainly not least, if you import projects and sequences created in older versions of Premiere Pro that have grading and effects already applied, these will automatically be configured to appear the same as before, while the color management will function exactly the same as before. If you decide you want to override these legacy settings and use the new color management, you can override the custom settings the sequence was set up with and choose a different color management preset (and you can use Undo if you find this was a mistake).

Now this could be huge and no matter what is going to be a big change so I look forward to playing with this. I hope they come up with something like DaVinci Resolve has to deal with the QuickTime color shift issue, but I doubt it.

Adobe Premiere Pro is getting Generative AI and it is exciting and a little scared

You can also read about it at the Adobe Blog from Ashley Still.

There is some amazing stuff there, but the generative AI certainly scares me a bit. I mean who will shoot stock footage when you can just generate new shots, and since adobe generative AI is trained off stock footage will we see diminishing returns and higher costs (at the least in electricity and processing power, but also in the subscriptions to various AI models that every editor will need access too).

I can see many DR spots wanting AI generated B-roll and wanting the editor to foot the subscription bill, so they will basically be getting free b-roll.

In some ways I am excited, but still, it is crazy what is going to be happening soon, and what if your internet goes down. And after seeing some on using Sora to make a short, just how badly it responded to film making terms, so it is not going to the panacea we think it is.

PVC on a new extension that makes iXML metadata work in Adobe Premiere Pro

OMG, why hasn’t Adobe added this functionality if it can be so well added as an extension (though it should automatically show up as it does in DaVinci). iXML Renamer is awesome and should literally not be necessary, but it is, so pay a little and install it now!

It will let you append the iXML data from your mixer into the track and clip names, which is what DaVinci does by default, and Adobe hides away in a panel that makes it all but useless.

Of course every editor would like to know what each track from the Audio Mixer is! WTF ADOBE!!!

PVC on How to move your Adobe Premiere Pro keyboard shortcuts and user settings, most all of them

I didn’t realize that your premiere pro settings were no longer going to sync after Adobe Discontinued Creative Cloud Synced Files. Now I have always had issues with it, because they seem to get fucked up more often than they should, but it is kind of huge that this is going away.

This is going to make Digital Rebellion’s Preference Manager to be back to being a very important part of my workflow, and it should be considered the same for all editors.

DIYPhotography on Adobe Premiere Pro Beta’s audio workflow with AI-Tagging

From Aldred at DIY Photography.

I find this interesting as I love the new fade controls in the timeline (I have been using the Beta as it has fixed the timeline issue with an M2 Ultra), though I have still found some issues with tagging short clips, that just refuse to be tagged as dialogue, which is annoying, because the new features are great, but just don’t always work.