Will Adobe add X-Rite ColorChecker support into Premiere Pro CC?

So for years DaVinci Resolve has had support for X-Rite’s ColorChecker products. These are color cards that you can use to shoot video (they also have Photo versions) and you can use them to balance different cameras to the same color correction. I personally use a ColorChecker Passport Video. Sure I have had some difficulty on shoots where the script supervisor did not give me enough notes on shot Color Temp, but this is still usable.

For years I have hoped Adobe would implement this in Lumetri in Premiere, as it would be quick and fast for certain projects that don’t need the full color correction of DaVinci. And it seems they are listening as they have commented on User Voice.

Of course they do comment that it won’t happen as soon as they are working on stability and performance, though that never seems the case with Premiere. The whole Adobe suite gets more and more unstable and gets features that aren’t needed, when features many professionals could use right now are bypassed.

Why is there no Motion Blur for moving objects in Adobe Premiere Pro?

This is an oldy but a huge annoyance for me. Why is there way to activate Motion Blur on moving objects in Premiere Pro? This was a feature in Apple Final Cut Pro 7, sure it had a slow render, but the machines are faster now. And so many places I work at just do their graphics within Premiere Pro because it is faster and easier (and so many people can’t or won’t use After Effects) and when moving graphics it just looks awful without Motion Blur.
Don’t premiere and After Effects share at least some of the engine? Premiere Pro needs damn Motion Blur and has for a long time!

Red Giant Updates VFX Suite to 1.5 a paid upgrade

Red Giant has released a paid upgrade to it’s VFX Suite to version 1.5. It is a $199 upgrade unless you are subscriber to Red Giant Complete (feels like a 1.5 should have been a free upgrade).
It includes a new Lens Distortion tool to easily figure out lens distortion to help composite and even track.
And they have updated Supercomp with an automatic color matching, color space options, optical glow and layer glow tools, though I am mostly pissed that they have not figured out how to include motion blur which has been my main objection to supercomp.
Optical Glow has been updated with the ability to control radiate which gives directionality, control per channel size and size xy. This certainly makes for an impressive update over the built in glow.
And Shadow and Reflection has added the ability to show shadows only as well as distort based on the image.
I am glad for the update, though as I said I would like them to put motion blur into supercomp to really make it usefull.

Adobe introduced Creative Cloud Public Beta

So Adobe is releasing Public Beta from within creative cloud.

If you look in your creative cloud application you will see the Beta Apps on the left, which I have highlighted with red. Currently it is for the Video Suite, though they will add all apps eventually. The apps use the same plug ins as the current version.

And when you open the app you get 2 new buttons.

The will be blue every time their are new features and you can read about them.

And the second lets you report bugs and go the forum for the beta.

Already there have been almost daily updates.

And they fixed the issue I was having with After Effects 2020 and Alexa footage, though I wish you could remove the damn forced AMIRA LUT entirely from the workflow.

Adobe needs to stop with new features in their video suite and speed up what already exists. Things like Roto-Brush is way too slow!

I have been an editor for almost 20 years now, and though it has it’s issues I do still love the Adobe suite, but it has so many issues, and Adobe needs to stop updating with new features and work on their old features, making them faster and streamlining, and work on stability.

I have already recently the fact that After Effects 2020 does not work with Footage that has the damn AMIRA Lut attached to it. Adobe needs to fix this shit right now, and they need to remove the automatic AMIRA lut. You shouldn’t be forced to have it clogging up your project. Adding any lut should be voluntary and should be able to be removed! WTF!

The thing is this is not the only problem with adobe today. Stability is a huge issue that many people have.  Of course their are ways to make the program more stable. Personally I ignore the fact that Adobe can basically play back any footage and treat it like AVID, compressing everything to a finishing format. Being on a Mac I use ProRES. And I don’t import any footage that isn’t some flavor of ProRES, even temp stock footage I recompress. Also don’t let any JPEG images into the project, converting everything to at least a PNG. And that does help with stability.

Then there are things that are just plain slow. I have a 3Gz 10-Core iMac Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega 64x and 64GB of RAM, so it is a fairly fast machine. I have a short for a short that needs to be slowed down, but the normal tools look bad, and even twixtor is having issues because of all the motion blur. So to let Twixtor work better I need to pull the subject out of the background and decided to try out the Roto-Brush tool to pull the subject out of the background, but it is interminably slow. I am having to go frame by frame and fix the roto, each brush stroke, if it even works can take 5-15 minutes to get results. And this is with 3.5 K ProRES HQ footage. And a good portion of the time, the stroke stops working a beachball appears and the stroke ends up randomly going across half the image, and it can take a good 10-20 minutes to get to where I can undo it and go back to the previous undo state! I know this is a complicated tool, but if anything it feels slower than when it was released!

Here is a screenshot, the little green at the top was what I was trying to make, but then the beachball started and everntually the line appears, and a good 10 minutes later I can under this reandom line that it has added to what I drew. And this happens more than 1 in 10 strokes! 

Adobe Updates Creative Cloud Video and Audio Apps

At Adobe Max Adobe updated it’s video and Audio Apps, as well as 2 new mobile apps (though Photoshop Camera is only in a beta).

Premiere Pro includes the sensei AI powered auto reframe feature. Improved Layers, Faster ProRes HDR, Time Remapping to 20,000%, Audio Gain to +15db, and HDR 10 metadata export controls.

After Effects is a core engine update (woohoo), with Real-time playback of cached previews, EXR productivity and performance, Faster Shape Layers, Enhanced Expressions including speed improvements, Faster Content-Aware Fill, better controls for Motion Graphics, and updated C4D Lite.

Audition has improved multichannel audio effects workflows.

Character Animator and Premiere Rush also have updates.

Adobe has released the app Aero for building AR without coding.

And they announced the AI powered app Photoshop Camera that is currently in beta.

Red Giant releases new awesome VFX Suite, but in doing so have killed the Keying Suite and the Effects Suite

So Red Giant has released the new VFX Suite for Keying, Tracking, Cleanup and Visual Effects Compositing. They have a full blog post with many YouTube videos on features and how to use the new tools.

The only bummer is that they have killed their Keying and Effects suits to do so. I say bummer, not because the new tools don’t look awesome, but because you have to owned the previous to get a special offer upgrade (it isn’t just available on the site) and you get no discount for owning both previous suits.

Supercomp looks impressive though, basically it makes compositing much easier, and allows all layers to effect your comp, so you don’t have to do a bunch of pre-composing to make your comps looks the best they can, and it is all GPU accelerated.

And Primatte has reached version 6. Many people just go with Keylight, but I have always found that Primatte is faster and easier to reach a good key, so I am excited about this.

Key Pin tracker seems to supercharge corner pin tracking (though the demo does show some features they need to add, like copying the from and to points automatically by a single button).

Spot Clone Tracker looks super easy and powerful.

Optical Glow also looks amazing, and should negate the need to every use the built in After Effects glow which never was very good.

I already have some ideas for the new Chromatic Displacement plug in.

Will have to see how the new Knoll Light Factory 3.1 is. I used to use it all the time, but have completely given up on it, because of Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug in, which I think surpassed it years ago.

And Shadow and Refection looks cool when needed.

Adobe Creative Cloud Video Production Suite updates for NAB 2019

So Adobe has updated it’s video suite in time for NAB 2019 with some exciting new features, and hopefully some stability improvements.

Obviously the most exciting new features is the content-aware fill for video in After Effects.

I am pretty excited to try this one out, as the results from the demos look impressive, but I think it will work best with moving footage so the pixels exist somewhere.

And the new expression engine in After Effects looks amazing.

I can’t wait to try that out.

For Premiere we get the Freeform view as a kind of visual storyboard.

This is pretty neat, though not a mind blower for me.

And the new rules and guides will make placing things much easier.

Pretty neat. And Faster Mask tracking will always be helpful.

Overall some cool new features, though I am hoping for more stability overall.

Adobe has released Premiere Rush for the iPad

The formerly only available through an invited beta, Adobe Rush has been released for the iPad and iPhone. It is an online editing system that converts everything to H.264 and can do simple edits, and they can even be exported to Premiere Pro though he desktop version requires 10.13 on the mac.

It seems to be a simple and quick editing program to upload web videos, and has to be better than the previous adobe clip, which was pretty basic.

I have downloaded to my ipad, but have not played with it yet.