So adobe very quickly denied my feature request to add the year to the product icon, saying since they have removed the year form the product name. Though they have not. They removed the CC for Creative Cloud for the name.
And as they have always done the updates for the year stay at 2020, until the next version will be 2021.
And they should have differentiated icons, WTF!
So these are the application icons for Premiere Pro and After Effects 2019 and 2020 in my dock. Why do they have the exact same icon? Yes if I hover my cursor over each one it will tell me the whole application name, but why don’t you just put the version number in the icon?
And yes I need to have both versions. I am a professional commercial video editor, and very often I have to match a companies version so that the project files will open in the version that they are using. And then there was the whole Arri files not working in 2020 After Effects, but that is another story.
Now I used to customize the icons on my own, but that is a pain in the ass, and they get replaced every update, so if I am paying over $600 a year for a subscription to Creative Cloud can’t they update the icons for each yearly version? And I don’t mean just change the Icon, like they did for Photoshop with 2020.
That is 2019 on the left and 2020 on the right. And sure it helps, but I still have to think, oh yea the rounded icon is the new one.
So I made a couple of examples of what I used to do and what they could do. Here is a Premiere pro with the 2020 included.
Now this totally works for me, but I have fairly large monitors set a 2560 by 1440, so the 2020 so can get small on small monitors, so how about just the last 2 numbers?
This is easier to read on any screen. I used the same PR that came from the original icon and just added a large 20, not it is Arial black and not whatever font Adobe is using, but at least it quickly tells you the version!
And yes I have posted this at Adobe User Voice, and I didn’t see any other posts about it, so if you care about this like I do, please vote.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
This is an awesome article with some great tips I didn’t know and that will certainly speed up my editing. This should be read by all Premiere Pro editors. A must read!