So I am a commercial editor and lately have really moved to Premiere Pro after the death of Final Cut Pro 7 (as you will know if you regularly read this blog). I do much of my work in Commercials and direct response and many of the houses I work at have moved over to Premiere Pro for it’s speed and integration with After Effects.

We have been using DaVinci Resolve for color correction, but with the upgrades to Adobe SpeedGrade with CC 2014 I learned it and have been wanting to give it a try. Mainly because of it’s integration with the adobe suite, and the fact that it puts the grade onto the clips as a plug in that can be easily removed, instead of having to render out a new sequence with clips with handles, which makes major changes to the sequence much harder. And with the addition of working with Black Magic Cards it was time to try it out.

So on the current 28:30 Direct Response show I have been editing I am doing the grade in SpeedGrade, and while some it has some very good features, it has some very glaring issues that adobe needs to fix immediately!

• First and foremost if the fact that SpeedGrade is made to work on one monitor, with a second monitor being your view monitor. And if you use an AJA or Black Magic card, it still forces the whole interface into a single monitor. You can’t peel off any of the segments and move them to a separate monitor. This is especially troublesome with a complicated timeline! I have 14 video tracks in my current show, so my timeline needs to be fairly large, but you still need the controls to be big enough to use, so what suffers are the scopes, which have shrunk to a minuscule size and are very hard to use! PLEASE ADOBE FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY! We need to be able to re-arrange the window and move things to a second monitor as we see fit. It really makes this program hard to use!

• Number 2 is certainly the issues with Insufficient Resources dialogue which kicks out the video card, so you are only using the CPU to render. And sometimes it makes your images get a crazy clue cast. Now I am using an NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition, which isn’t the newest or greatest video card, but is pretty decent, but I don’t think it is the cards issue, but instead is with effects and the Mercury Render Engine. The problem always happens on clips with effects on them, but it transitions other than dissolves or even Warp Stabilizer or speed effects on clips. SpeedGrade just can’t handle them, and turns off your GPU and you have to at the least restart Speedgrade to get the GPU back on. The thing is that the problem will instantly occur if another filtered clips is hit when you restart. If the Mercury Playback Engine can’t handle this in SpeedGrade, Adobe should figure out a way to turn off these FX when they come into SpeedGrade and turn them back on when you go back to Premiere. You can do it manually by turning them off or removing them in Premiere, but then you have to remember to put them all back when you return your grade to Premiere, but that is a workaround and may cause you to miss important FX or transitions.
• Number 3 is issues with Multi-Cam clips in Premiere Pro. If you have multi-cam clips in your sequence you can grade them in SpeedGrade, but they do not show up as a plug in in Premiere, neither on the multi-cam clip or within it’s sequence, though the grade does show up. To get around this I duplicate my multicam clips on another layer, and then flatten them. This creates another problem, which it makes each clip a separate instance instead of going back to the master clips, so for these clips you cannot do a single grade on a master clip. Now admittedly this is a Premiere Pro issue, but on that needs to be fixed to make SpeedGrade work better. As being able to user the Master Clip Grade is so much quicker and easier.
• Number 4 for is the timeline. It needs to have better zoom controls instead on showing the whole timeline, 6 seconds or from your in to out. I want to be able to zoom in or out to where I desire.
• Number 5 is a keyboard navigation issue. When I use the numerical controls for a grade and I type a number into a box, hitting the tab should move to the next box and activate the grade I have entered. Instead I have to click out of the box with the mouse, which is slow and not efficient. So Adobe, you need to let us navigate with the keyboard. This is faster and more efficient, especially for those of us without a dedicated color control board.
• Number 6 is faster opening of Premiere Pro sequences. I am sure this has to do with converting the sequence to work, but it takes a long time, many minutes at times, and is especially painful if you keep getting hit with the insufficient resources bug from above.

I recently spent the time to get decent at DaVinci Resolve, and really enjoyed it. It is a powerful and impressive grading program, and I will certainly be making extensive use of it in the future. I of course have Adobe SpeedGrade though, as it is part of the Adobe Suite, and with the latest version of Creative Cloud 2014 it has not only allowed for your whole timeline to translate over to SpeedGrade (it used to only take on track at a time), but it also applies the looks that you create almost instantly back into Premiere Pro and puts them on the clips as Lumetri Filter FX that play back in reel time on most clips, and mean you don’t have to render out the clips as new clips, you can have your Color correct attached to the original clips! Not only that you can always go back and edit the effects in SpeedGrade at any time! THIS IS AWESOME!

And it works great, at least in initial testing! I was able to quickly come up with a pretty good grade, and quickly send it back to Premiere Pro where it was put back onto the original clips in the sequence! Wow! And I love the new Master Clips setting, which lets you set a grade for every instance of a source in the timeline, what a time saver!

I have to admit SpeedGrade is a little quirky though. It doesn’t handle dual monitors well, not letting you split parts of it’s interface off at all (which meant my scopes were too small). And it basically has no menus everything being in the interface, which seems very un-Adobe like. Not too hard to use once you learn the basics, but certainly confusing for a beginner.

And I hate the lack of Curves. Sure you can go in and you have 9 levels of control over individual luminance levels of an image and can do different color effects to each, and that is certainly powerful and has it’s place, but curves such a quick and easy way of control the look of a whole image at once, that it would be a very powerful addition to SpeedGrade.

The other would be support for more than just AJA Video Output. They need to get BlackMagic support in their as more places have the less expensive alternative to AJA. And you really need video output to get a great grade.

Still, even with these issues I would consider using SpeedGrade for grading with Premiere Pro because it is so easy to do, and just have the grade within Premiere Pro, easily changeable and easily removable. For now I will still go with DaVinci for things that need reel precision, as it works with Black Magic (and that is what most machines I work on use) and has curves, and even some editing functionality, but the integration with Premiere Pro means that I will be turning to Adobe SpeedGrade for much of my color grading needs!