Adding LUTs to Adobe Premiere Pro, A PROBLEM WITH IT THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW

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.

AMD Officially announces the Vega 56 and 64, shedding light on the graphics of the iMac Pro

Apple Insider has a report on the newly announced AMD Vega 56, 64 and 64 Liquid Cooled video cards, which will be featured in the new iMac Pro.

They sound powerful, though still much of the stuff where they blow NVIDIA out of the water is software specifically designed for AMD, so we shall see. I would still rather have an NVIDIA option.

Intel launches new Xeon’s, likely what will be in new MacPro

Intel is launching a new series of scalable Xeon processors. They have a new mesh architecture which will make them more optimized. They all can run dual processor from Bronze  with 8 cores at 1.7 GHz, silver with 12 cores at 2.2 GHz, gold can run up to 4 processors with 14 cores at 3.6 GHz or 22 cores at 3.4 GHz and Platinum with 28 cores at 3.6 GHz and support for 8 CPU’s.

I bet the 1.7 is too slow, but we could see the 2.2 GHz and up in a new MacPro though I doubt they have more than dual CPU options. These are certainly not the processors in the iMac Pro though.

These Skylake Xeons should have a 1.65 times performance boost over the current Broadwell Xeon’s which likely will be in the iMac Pro.

Let’s hope the new Mac Pro really is a great machine. We all just want the cheese grater though and not some design wonder.

If Apple really wants to support Pros they should make High Sierra compatible with MacPro 4,1’s!

So Apple showed off their next OS High Sierra today at WWDC, with Metal 2 for more graphics acceleration.

Well if they want to prove that they are supporting Pro users as they make a new Mac Pro and work on their iMac Pro, they should re-open the os to 4,1 MacPro’s and continue to support 5,1’s until the new models come out. They killed 4,1 support with Sierra (though users can hack their 4,1’s to becone 5,1’s but it is not officially supported!

The new iMac Pro looks amazing, but I still don’t want an all in one, get that new Mac Pro out soon!

EDIT: So they will continue to support the 5,1 but they should expand their support back as a sign of goodwill to Pro Users!

iMac Pro had a sneak peek at WWDC

So at WWDC today not only did Apple upgrade it’s laptops and iMacs to Intel Kaby lake processors with more RAM, but they previewed the iMac Pro which will come out in December.

It is a serious pro iMac starting at $4999, with 8, 10 or 18 core XEON processors and AMD Radeon Vega graphics to drive it’s 4K display as well as up to 128GB of RAM. Damn!

Still I would change some things. Intel XEONS are literally generations behind in technology, and their best benefit of using dual processors is useless here. The upcoming i9 processors are much newer tech and also have 18 cores and should be cheaper than Xeons. Even without ICC memory support. And while the Vegas are impressive, I would much rather have an NVIDIA 1080ti for CUDA support.

The fact that Apple is supporting external video cards via Thunderbolt in High Sierra could negate this issue of course, though they only mentioned AMD support.

EDIT: And in a not very pro way, the RAM is not user upgradeable, so you are stuck with what you start ith (very expensive Apple RAM), though at least the 5 grand model starts with 32GB.

DJI Osmo+ Test Footage at Huntington Garden

I shot some more test footage with my DJI OSMO+ at Huntington Gardens in San Marino, CA. It was shot manually with Sharpness at 0, Saturation -2 and Contrast -2. It has a split screen as shot and color corrected on the other side. It was not shot with the Z-axis so you can certainly see the less stabilization, but I still think it works.

I created a new logo bumper for Whale of a Tale Productions in 4K

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.

Adobe Feature Request Add X-Rite Video ColorChecker color Matching to Lumetri Color

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.