The new features are limited to Performance enhancements and format support including Hardware Accelerated H.264 and HEVC decoding on the new MacBook Pro and iMac Pro, and Accelerated Encoding on Windows 10 with seventh generation and later processors, as well as improved RED Decoding and Sony RAW/X-OCN formats. They have also added export to 8K H.264 and a few other formats, but mostly it is about bug fixes.
Already I have seen the Recent warnings about incompatible fonts having gone away.
This release did not fix the really f***ing annoying Multicam Audio bug, where to see the waveform in your multicam clips, you need to render the audio. This would be OK if it kept the render between restarts of the program (or crashes), but every damn time you have to re-render the audio to see the waveforms! COME ON ADOBE, THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN AROUND FOR WAY TOO LONG FOR YOU TO HAVE NOT FIXED IT!
So I am using Adobe Premiere Pro 2018 with multicam sequences of UHD ProRES clips and separate 24 bit audio. And to see the waveform in Premiere the Audio needs to be rendered. The bug is that Premiere Pro loses this render each time I open Premiere, so I once again need to render the audio to see the waveform.
And this has been going on for a long time, as you can see from this post at the Adobe Forums, they were going to fix this ASAP as of February 2017, but is July 2018, and the bug still persists.
So I am running Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.1 and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018 12.1.1.12 on a macOS Sierra 10.12.6 with a MacPro 5,1 dual 6 core 3.06 GHZ with 32 GB of RAM and and a GTX 97- 4096 MB mac flashed. I am running the latest CUDA 387.178 with NVIDIA Web Driver 378.06.25f03 and am using CUDA renderer. I am using UHD 29.97 footage from a Canon C300 in MXF format and converting it to ProRES on Ingest from Media Browser.
I am importing the footage from within Media Browser in premiere and it sends the footage to Media Encoder to convert it. The problem I am having is that Media Encoder keeps freezing and giving me the app “not responding” message. And if you force quit media encoder all the encodes are gone, and I have to delete the footage I imported and re-import all the footage into premiere to get the ingest going again. This is super frustrating. At least if I bring clips into media encoder myself and I have to force quit it, when I come back all the encodes are still in Media Encoder (sure some may have all compressed but that is an easy fix, just delete the encodes that already happened), it seems that Ingest can’t deal with any component breaking down, and it keeps breaking down for me.
It seems that the ingest only works if everything is working correctly, and it has not been working right, so as soon as you force media encoder to quit the Ingest is finished.
Honestly there should be a way to restart the conversions from within Premiere (not just creating proxys, but an actual ingest conversion). And it would be great if the ingest survived crashes, by leaving all the convertions within media encoder even after a crash so you could continue it later if something fails.
I know I can just do the conversion straight in Media Encoder (which I am doing now, but still getting not responding, but at least I can force quit and the conversions are still there and I can just delete the completed ones), but I was hoping to do the Ingest Process, but it does not seem to be working at all well for me.
And yes I know that Premiere can play back the MXF footage, but I have much better playback of the 4K footage once it is converted to ProRES.
I also posted this on the adobe forums, but don’t expect to get an answer that will fix the issue other than doing what I am doing and doing the conversions in Media Encoder directly. I just can’t believe how broken the ingest feature is that it can’t handle errors within Creative Cloud. It just expects that it will work, and it is not doing that for me.
One thing it does not mention is the OMF and AAF export which was totally messed up in the last version of Premiere. It did not stay in sync, and the solution was to export the sequence and open it in an earlier version of premiere and export from there.
Adobe Lumetri Color has been updated, and you can now compare your shots while color correcting either side by side or split screen.
They have also added an FX Bypass option to temporarily turn an effect on and off, and reset an effect.
There is also a new Match Color across shots with a single button click using Adobe Sensei technology.
They have added a new Lumetri Color Custom LUT Directory and they will show up in Creative Looks dropdown or the Input and Output LUT’s come from the Technical directory. Thee are both local user and all user directories.
Premiere Pro now has the Essential Sound Panel within Premiere Pro and it has Auto-Duck for Music.
And you can now directly open a premiere pro sequence in Adobe Audition to save steps.
For Graphics, you can search for Motion Graphics Templates across local folders, creative cloud libraries and Adobe Stock.
You can now create Gradients and Shapes in the Essential Graphics Panel with editable opacity.
You can replace Motion Graphics Templates with new versions by alt/option dragging an updated template onto one in your sequence, and you can chose to replace one instance or all in the sequence.
You can now toggle animation for each property of graphics layers in the essential graphics panel.
There is an improved interface and new controls for Motion Graphics Templates including 2D position, rotation and scale.
There are VR enhancements for immersive monitor support, and Windows Mixed Reality as well as improved VR Plane to Sphere.
Team Support has updated, with improved tracking of online collaborators. There is also better project management, and view read only versions of your project.
The Timecode panel has been improved with more options for viewing.
The Video Limiter has been improved and it can be added per shot or as an output effect.
You can now Copy and Paste sequence markers.
There has been H.264 Hardware acceleration in Windows 10 with 6h generation or later intel core processors.
File formats have been added for Canon C200, Sony Venice, and Red Image Processing Pipeline. Also Quicktime 7 era formats and codes have been dropped.
Tutorials have been added within the app from the new project as well as the learn workspace.
Adobe is mostly focusing on it’s new VR abilities which are extensive, though something I likely will never use. And then it’s shared projects features, which will be awesome. Much more AVID like abilities in sharing projects and locking aspects of projects. And the Responsive Design tools sounds great with more ability to edit graphics without having to open premiere.
And in their they mention that you can finally open multiple projects at the same time, much like Final Cut Pro could do! That is awesome!
What the Premiere Bro Blog mentions is being able to preview fonts in the Essential Graphics Panel and set favorite fonts (hopefully also a different default font), and an additional 8 label colors for a total of 16, which is small but awesome addition!
Many people know that LUTS or look up tables are a feature in Adobe Premiere’s Lumetri controls that you can use different settings to make camera RAW footage look good for rec 709 or whatever format you are editing in. And Premiere has some technical and various Creative LUTs to quickly fix or change footage. And you can use your own LUT, but you have to select that LUT individually every time from your hard drive, as there is no way to add it to the menus in Premiere or After Effects.
Well a quick Google search has various links to sites that explain how you can add your own LUTs to Premiere Pro. Here is one at Premium Beat. The thing is there is a problem with this method.
In this method you open the application package contents, go into the Contents/Lumetri/LUTs/Technical folder and add your LUT and restart the program. Obviously this is something that is changing the actual application so it should be done at your own risk, and any update will likely wipe out your LUTs, but if you are going to do it, YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!
If you want the LUTs to work in Premiere and to be able to export them with Adobe Media Encoder or use them in Adobe After Effects you need to also install your LUTs into those programs as well. There is no central repository for these LUTs!
Now I have requested with Adobe that they add the ability to add your own LUTs to the menus in a central repository, but that doesn’t mean the feature will be added ever.
For quite some time I have been wanting a new Whale of a Tale Productions logo, and I have need for one in 4K as I have been posting some of my DJI Osmo Test Footage on YouTube.
I had recently upgraded a really old logo that had been NTSC to 4K, but wasn’t too impressed with the results, so I decided to create a new one that more closely resembled my new Business card.
So I went to trusty After Effects CC 2017 14.2, as well as Element 3D and Red Giant Tsunami and created the following logo bumper for Whale of a Tale Productions.
Someday I will tackle one in full 3D where the logo can interact with the water, but not right now. For now I am pretty happy with this one.
Since Adobe has gotten rid of it’s professional Color Grading software SpeedGrade to instead just use the less powerful Lumetri Color within Premiere Pro (and now After Effects) it is missing powerful color correction tools. And it could really use some.
So I made a Adobe Creative Cloud feature request on adding support for X-Rite ColorChecker for Video to Lumetri. This would add a very powerful color matching tool, and alleviate me from having to go out to DaVinci Resolve as often.
Here is my feature request text:
Since removing SpeedGrade from Adobe Creative Cloud, there is only the less powerful Lumetri controls within Premiere Pro and After Effects there are not full pro color correction features within the creative Cloud. Now i have gone back to using DaVinci Resolve for complex grades and a tool that I use all the time is color matching using X-Rite ColorChecker for Video as well as the Passport model. It is an extremely powerful tool for color correction and really helps with color matching between various cameras. The addition of X-Rite color matching would greatly increase the power of Lumetri color tools. And it would alleviate me having to go out to DaVinci for a full grade as often.
