Oliver Peters at Digitalfilms has a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color and my thoughts

Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.

Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.

The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.

Adobe has announced an upgrade to the Creative Cloud Video Suite for NAB

Rich Young a the ProVideo Coalition has the news on this exciting next release of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Video Suite.

Looks like Adobe is taking aim at the finishing power of AVID with the ability to add effects to Master Clips in Premiere, as well as edit Text from After Effects Projects within Premiere.

Scott Simmons has a more extensive look at Premiere.

And as for After Effects, the effects on a per mask basis is pretty exciting, as it will change the use of layers and adjustment layers within After Effects.

Chris and Trish Meyer look deeper at After Effects.

Looking forward to it. The fast update cycle is pretty awesome. I would like to see AVID come close.

Over 150 New Features being added to Adobe Creative Cloud Video

Yes, just 4 months after their last upgrade, Adobe is good to it’s word and is turning around much faster upgrades with creative cloud, and in October are upgrading Premiere Pro, After Effects, Speed Grade, Prelude, Media Encoder, Story and are adding the iOS app Prelude Live Logger. Awesome! You can check out the upgrades at Adobe.

Steve Forde at the Adobe After Effects Blog has a post on the new After Effects Features.

The Adobe Premiere Pro Work area Blog has more on Premiere Pro, Media Encoder (which now has GPU enabled rendering!) and Prelude and Prelude Live Logger.

The Adobe Moving Colors blog has more on the SpeedGrade Upgrade which includes direct link (an improvement over Dynamic Linking which you can see more about here) and GPU acceleration.

Thank you Adobe, looking forward to it! And here’s to hoping that Adobe permanently keeps up this rapid pace of development, except it will certainly keep us editors on our toes, as I have just scratched the surface of CC by now! Ha!

Adobe releases NAB Sneak Peaks of it’s video apps! UPDATED

AdobeNAB

Check it out over at Adobe where they have a bunch of videos of new features being shown at NAB! Woohoo, wish I was there!

Premiere is really getting controllable paste attributes! WOOHOO!!! I am so excited about Premiere Pro, it finally looks like it really is Final Cut Pro 8, but with so much more. And the Link & Locate was so necessary. And really powerful audio, and the integration with speedgrade and realtime looks very exciting. And it looks so much better working with audio, and I am hoping that it’s control surfaces works with any MIDI controlled surface. I love that Adobe listens to it’s users!!!

After Effects just looks amazing. And the Warp Stabilizer VFX seems unbelievably powerful. And the 3D pipeline looks awesome, though it makes me wish I had Cinema and knew Cinema 4D!

And is it just me or is it cool to see Wes Plate from Automatic Duck running Prelude? And the script integration just seems amazing! Especially with transcripts! That will speed things up so much, and be useful across the industry! Wow! And being able to edit using the script is insane. You can make a paper cut so fast it is a joke!

Speedgrade gets a more of an adobe makeover, and lets you rename grades in layers and add snapshots and save them so you can easily make different grades, and work better on portable machines, and even have 2 playheads in the timeline to easily pick frames you want to grade to and from, or have 3 up as well! Sounds much improved!!!

Adobe Story has really grown up and looks incredibly powerful!

Really need to spend time with Speedgrade as the new color match looks powerful and it’s engine integration in Premiere Pro looks especially impressive. And being able to use Targa files from Photoshop or Lightroom (has to be exported from Photoshop not Lightroom) to drive shot matching looks very very cool.

And the Audition Loudness radar seems very interesting.

Adobe shows off Production Premium CS6 and it looks Amazing!

Macworld has an in depth article on the new Production Premium CS6 showing off it’s new features, and it does sound exciting.

Premier Pro CS6 is getting unlimited dynamic Multi-cam, built in Image Stabilization with Warp Stabilizer from AE CS5.5 and an enhanced Mercury Playback engine that will even work with some AMD video cards instead of just NVIDIA CUDA cards. It ha s anew Default Workspace, and is more customizable. It has more Audio Mixing controls. Trimming controls have been added and more customizing. A rolling Shutter repair. And of course the addition of Automatic Duck for interoperability between Final Cut Pro 7 and AVID and Premiere Pro. And it will edit 5K for RED compatibility.

Yes! Adobe has been listening and it looks like Premiere Pro CS6 is going to be a power house editing tool!

After Effects CS6 has enhancements to it’s render cache, were renders can be saved with projects, a full 3D camera Tracker, a Ray Trace 3D rendering engine (that looks to give Zaxwerks a run for it’s money), variable mask feathering, and built in Automatic Duck, so it will work with Avid Media Composer and Final Cut 7 files! Nice! Mocha will also be better integrated so you can launch Mocha from within AE (and Mocha is set to get updates at NAB as well).

A new edition to the suite is Prelude CS6 for ingest, logging and organization as well as transcoding of files.

Audition CS6 also gets updated and has smooth project exchange between Premiere Pro and third party nonlinear editors. Has real time clip stretching, automatic speech alignment and pitch correction. Better control surface control with automation.

And an exciting new addition is this suits version of Color, the recently purchases SpeedGrade. A 64 Bit GPU accelerated Color Correction tool. This is really necessary especially with DaVinci software basically being made free from Black Magic.

It really sounds like Adobe has been listening, and is making their editing suite a powerhouse that can really replace Final Cut Pro 7 and easily go head to head with AVID with even more powerful tools. I can’t wait to try this suite out!